The content of the euro 7, the new norm that regulates emission standards in the European Union, is still quite vague. A new report, and a continuing lack of information, has manufacturers concerned that they need to know what to expect for programs your electrification plans. After the first postponement, now we will have to wait until autumn 2022 for adoption (at the earliest) 2025/2026 for its entry into force.
For heat engines, the ban on new sales planned for 2035 is not the biggest threat. Or at least not the most imminent. About ten years before this deadline must comply with the new Euro 7 anti-pollution. However, its approval and subsequent entry into force continue to be delayed. At the moment, nobody knows precisely what its content will be, although one thing is certain: the thresholds to be respected will be much lower than those set by the current Euro 6d standard.
Already in the latter, compliance was not a formality, especially for diesels. With sales of this propulsion technology in sharp decline, some manufacturers have come to consider that the investments necessary to adopt this standard were not economically viable, and have preferred to reduce their offer of diesel vehicles or directly eliminate it from their catalogue, replacing it with vehicles plug-in hybrids. With this panorama, Euro 7 sounds like something like the end of diesel, which does not mean that gasoline will have an easier life. In your case, the biggest difficulty lies in the cold start which will require a heating system to reduce emissions.
But so far this is all speculation because the regulations do not finish having a clear and definitive text. The European Commission did not adopt this new standard in the fourth quarter of 2021, as initially planned. A first postponement delayed it until July 20, 2022 after commissioning a preliminary study as an information base for future evaluations, with the aim of establishing stricter emission limits and at the same time not harming the industry.
Logically, manufacturers need to know where the limits are to direct your investments both for the electrification of your fleet and to maintain combustion vehicles in your offer. Initially, ACEA, the association that brings together European car manufacturers, expected the signing of an agreement on this issue “quickly in 2022” and promised to accept a calendar that it considered ambitious.
The entry into force of Euro 7 was expected on December 31, 2025 for newly approved private vehicles, and on December 31, 2026 for the rest. It also agreed to a reduction in nitrogen oxides of up to 50% for diesel and 40% for gasoline and a reduction in other pollutants. But the ACEA expressed some reservations regarding fine particles in particular, which “would no longer be a problem with current filters, even if a lower limit were imposed.”
But after this postponement, the speech of the car manufacturers is no longer the same. The association also asks the Commission to take into account the huge investments in electrification that the car industry has already made to try to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The idea of including brake particles in this standard, which could become, together with those from tires, the main source of pollution from cars by 2035 according to an OECD report, does not convince the ACEA. In this sense, she suggests that “a separate regulation would be a much better way”, although she is not the one who will have the last word on this file.
