Brussels has flattened the emissions trajectory for truck manufacturers through 2029 and allowed surplus credits to offset 2030 targets. Industry warns the move removes urgency from electric development while doing nothing to solve the infrastructure crisis constraining uptake.

jamie sands

The headlines say the EU relaxed its HGV CO2 targets. That’s true. It’s also not the story.

The 15% reduction target for 2025 now runs through to 2029. The interim trajectory is gone. Industry’s calling it “the staircase.” There’s a credit mechanism buried in the detail: manufacturers who beat that static 15% target between now and 2029 can bank the surplus against the 45% reduction required in 2030. Those credits don’t expire.

ICCT’s modelling puts it at roughly 200,000 fewer electric trucks across the EU over the next decade. Market share by 2030 drops from a projected 32% to around 16%.

The manufacturer defence is worth engaging with honestly. The 2030 target itself hasn’t moved. And it’s true that OEMs can’t decarbonise road freight alone. Vehicles are available, billions have been invested, and uptake is being constrained by infrastructure, grid capacity, energy costs, and a TCO calculation that in the UK doesn’t fully stack up. Why should manufacturers face penalties for conditions they don’t control?

That’s not a bad-faith argument. It’s a reasonable defence.

But the credit mechanism doesn’t just give manufacturers breathing room. It softens the investment signal across the whole ecosystem. If OEMs know surplus credits can offset future shortfalls, the urgency to develop and push electric models doesn’t plateau for five years and then snap back. It carries a cushion right into 2030.

And none of it builds a charger.

The infrastructure problem is real and the complexity is genuinely underestimated. It’s not one barrier, it’s a string of them. Can you get a grid connection? When, and at what cost? Does the TCO work at depot level, on the route, or only under a specific off-take agreement? Can you secure energy at a price that doesn’t unravel the business case? Is a private wire viable? Are the legal agreements with the landlord, the DNO, the client actually in place? Operators are navigating all of that with almost no working examples to copy and no prior experience of getting any of it right.

That’s the actual constraint. Softening manufacturer targets doesn’t reduce any of it.

In the UK the picture is worse. High electricity prices, thin operator margins, payload limitations at the heavy end, and multi-year grid connection delays compound everything. The EU’s motorway charging justification maps imperfectly onto what UK operators are dealing with. But we buy trucks from the same OEMs. If their electric programmes lose urgency because regulatory pressure just eased, our options narrow with theirs.

The bus carve-out is the most revealing part of this. Urban buses stay on the strict regime: 90% zero-emission by 2030, 100% by 2035. The EU’s own logic is written into that decision. Where infrastructure exists, hold the line. Where it’s missing, soften it.

So the answer to a missing charging network is to reduce pressure on the manufacturers who need that network to sell into.

There’s a separate conversation worth having about mechanisms that reward operators who go first. Early movers are carrying systemic risk that benefits everyone once infrastructure matures. A well-designed mechanism that monetises that position changes the investment case. But it needs to be designed right, otherwise shippers buy a paper claim, deployment stalls, and the operators who actually invested get undercut by the ones who never had to.

That conversation is worth having. It’s just not this one.

Right now, we’ve removed urgency from the one part of the system that was feeling it. That’s not solving the infrastructure problem. It’s deciding not to be bothered by it for four more years.

James Sands, head of solutions, Welch Group