A German company wants to file a lawsuit against the combustion engine ban

There is resistance to the decision to end combustion engines in the European Union. Germany’s Lohmann Group announced it would take legal action against parts of the EU regulation: the EU plan is “driven by ideology, not by facts”.

According to a report published by the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”, a German company wants to file a lawsuit for the first time against the ban on internal combustion engines scheduled at the European Union level. The Le Mans Group, which is active in the trade of synthetic fuels, wants to scrap parts of an EU regulation passed in March, under which newly registered cars must be zero-emissions from 2035.

Lorenz Keane, president of the Lohmann Group, told WAMZ that it seemed “good to only allow zero-emission cars.” However, the EU plan is “driven by ideology, not facts.”

In particular, the company criticizes the fact that the European Union considers only cars that do not emit any exhaust gases to be zero-emission. But Kane said it “doesn’t make sense to measure exhaust emissions only.” Instead, CO2 emissions must be “recorded throughout the entire life cycle of the vehicle.”

All new cars in the European Union must be zero emissions from 2035

An EU-wide regulation was passed in March stating that newly registered cars must be emissions-free from 2035. Combustion engines that run on synthetic fuels, or so-called e-fuels, are not. However, since the CO2 emitted during fuel production is taken from industrial facilities or from the air, it is considered climate neutral on the balance sheet if the electricity used in production is produced using renewable energies.

Above all, the FDP, rallying around Federal Transport Minister Volker Vissing, wants to rely on e-fuel to make combustion-engined cars climate neutral.

However, synthetic fuels have so far been considered expensive and very inefficient in terms of efficiency – especially compared to electric cars, which can use electricity directly to drive them. Wessing has long opposed the EU regulation and called for “legally binding” commitments to the possibility of registering new e-fuel vehicles after 2035.

The EU Commission is currently working on implementing these requirements. The technical difficulty here is that it must be ensured that the relevant vehicles actually run exclusively on e-fuel.