What EU EV Rules Miss: The Concept Of a 100-Year “Forever Car”

At the end of 2025, the European Union (EU) provided clarity (and relief…) regarding its transportation legislation, and more specifically the role electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to play.

The summary take is that current EU automotive regulation is overwhelmingly focused on tailpipe emissions, enforced through fleet-average CO₂ targets, not on lifecycle sustainability, durability, or material permanence.

This matters, because it shapes what automakers optimize for, with potentially enormous consequences down the line if they don’t optimize for the proper metrics.

Under today’s framework, a car’s longevity is effectively invisible. A vehicle that lasts ten years and one that lasts a century are treated identically, provided their tailpipe emissions fall within prescribed limits at the point of sale.

From a regulatory perspective, both are equivalent.

From a strategic and environmental perspective, they are absolutely not.

Does this even matter though? Indeed, the real question is whether longevity can still become a competitive and strategic advantage within a tailpipe-focused regulatory regime.

Longevity is not just compatible with the current regulatory framework; it may be one of the few strategies that allows legacy automakers to survive the next phase of Chinese EV competition without competing on China’s terms.

Tailpipe rules create blind spots…and strategic opportunities

Let’s start with what the rules actually do.

EU fleet-average CO₂ targets penalize volume, not existence. They are designed to reduce aggregate emissions across millions of vehicles, not to eliminate every internal combustion engine at any cost. This is why exemptions, flexibilities, and carve-outs already exist for low-volume manufacturers, specialty and performance vehicles, and historic or grandfathered cars.

These are not loopholes, but rather acknowledgements of scale: the more you make and sell, the larger your environmental impact.

Regulators understand that the environmental impact of a few thousand high-end ICE vehicles per year is negligible compared to the mass market.

What this means in practice is simple but under-discussed: regulation punishes churn, not permanence.

A manufacturer that relies on high-volume, fast-replacement vehicles faces mounting compliance pressure.

A manufacturer that sells fewer vehicles, kept on the road for decades, faces far less.

Longevity is not rewarded directly, or at all, but it reshapes the math, and the emissions curve.

What this creates, whether policymakers intended it or not, is a strategic fork in the road for legacy automakers.

One path assumes continued reliance on high-volume turnover: frequent model cycles, rapid replacement, and thin margins spread across millions of vehicles.

The other assumes fewer units sold at higher prices, designed to remain in circulation for decades.

Under fleet-average CO₂ rules, the first path compounds regulatory exposure over time, the second limits it.

In practical terms, the question is no longer whether to electrify, but whether volume itself has quietly become the liability.

Sustainability is about time, not just technology

Much of the EV vs. ICE debate is framed as a binary technology contest, but this obscures a more fundamental variable: how long a product remains in use.

A car driven for 40 or 60 years amortizes its manufacturing footprint in a way that no rapid-replacement product ever can, and this is true regardless of powertrain.

The environmental costs of mining the material for batteries, making batteries, doing the equivalent for combustion engines, shipping all the supplies to a factory and then making a vehicle are considerable.

While rigor requires doing a quantitative study, it’s a defensible hypothesis that a disposable EV replaced every eight years is not automatically more sustainable than a combustion car maintained for half a century (or more), and the only reason that most combustion engine vehicles don’t last that long today is commercial, not technical.

To be clear, this is not an argument against EVs.

Many consumers rightly prefer them for their quietness, ease of use, low maintenance, and daily practicality, and it is commendable that battery technology has advanced far enough to offer such choice over what used to be the combustion engine status quo.

That choice should remain fully open, and in fact, the idea of a “forever EV”, designed around modular, easily replaceable battery packs, is not only desirable, but necessary if EVs are to escape the disposability trap that consumer electronics must already contend with.

So, sustainability conversations that ignore duration of ownership are incomplete, and current EU EV regulations do exactly that.

Why Chinese EVs win the middle, and why that may not matter

Chinese manufacturers are not succeeding because EVs are inherently superior in all contexts.

They are succeeding because without an incumbent ICE manufacturing base, they went all-in on EVs and batteries, and can now deliver highly competent vehicles at lower prices (euro-for-euro), at scale.

For the mass market, this is decisive, because another defensible hypothesis is that as more and more European consumers see how good these cars are, to the extent they are just looking for reliable and comfortable transportation, they will vote with their wallet (as they did with Japanese brands in the latter half of the 20th century).

Persisting in the middle of the market therefore does not preserve competitiveness; it accelerates erosion by forcing legacy manufacturers into the exact segment where their disadvantages are most acute.

The middle of the market (high volume, thin margins, rapid replacement) is precisely where Chinese EVs are strongest, and where regulatory pressure is most intense. Those are the volume cars that ultimately lead to the 90% emissions target mandated by EU regulations, and it is telling that Volkswagen has already made a significant announcement regarding cars in this consumer segment.

Longevity as a second-order regulatory strategy

Here is where longevity becomes relevant again, not as a moral argument, but as a strategic one.

A vehicle engineered to remain desirable, serviceable, and legally operable for several decades reduces fleet turnover.

Reduced turnover reduces compliance exposure.

Reduced exposure allows higher per-unit margins, tangibly at the time of sale because consumers will pay more for cars they perceive as reliable (there is already a tongue-in-cheek term used in car circles to refer to this called the “Toyota Tax”).

Why longevity and motorsport reinforce each other

A long-lived product must remain desirable long after its launch, which is why luxury brands such as Rolex advertise constantly, even if putting an ROI on every marketing initiative is impossible; quite simply, they have to stay present to keep old and future customers feeling good about the brand.

Desire does not come from specification sheets, and Rolex was not picked as a random example in the context of an article covering the automobile sector.

While Rolex does make mechanical watches at the cutting-edge of the industry, very rarely does the company actually tout its technical advantages. Since its inception, its marketing has focused more on what those technologies inherently allow the wearers of Rolex watches to do in the most extreme situations, with motorsport a key area of focus.

Motorsport absolutely matters in the context of the EU’s announcements, not as engineering R&D, but rather as cultural reinforcement.

Racing is one of the few mechanisms that can continuously refresh the meaning of a machine over decades. It turns mechanical objects into narrative ones.

This is why brands with deep motorsport histories retain residual value so effectively. The car is no longer just transportation; it is a carrier of identity, memory, and legitimacy.

Going back to Volkswagen, the company had a tremendous run in the 2010’s in the World Rally Championship, arguably the most effective proving ground and platform for consumer-facing vehicles ; if the company wants to sell more EVs, it doesn’t even have to go back to the Special Stages for a new season, it just has to reference its past glories and make consumers believe that same magic still gets baked into newer, battery powered vehicles.

It has been a very long time since this association was a prevalent message of automobile marketing, and yet it is the one thing to which Chinese EV brands cannot fast-track their way.

In an era where EVs increasingly compete on software and convenience, motorsport becomes more, not less, important for brands that wish to justify permanence.

The strategic endgame

Chinese EVs will dominate the middle of the market, just as quartz dominated mass-market timekeeping after the prevalence of mechanical timekeeping.

That outcome is already visible, inevitable even.

What survives disruption is not the average product, but the one that becomes something more than functional.

Longevity, permanence, and identity are defensive assets in a commoditizing world.

Under current EU rules, longevity is not rewarded explicitly, but it is tolerated. In strategic terms, tolerance is enough to pilot models that test whether permanence, not replacement, can become a durable source of margin, identity, and regulatory resilience.

A car that lasts 100 years will not save the climate on its own, but in a world racing toward disposability, permanence remains one of the few forms of value that cannot be cheaply copied or, crucially, marketed.

And that may be the most important advantage legacy automakers still have.

A strategic question worth answering

If EU regulation penalizes churn rather than existence, then longevity is an underexplored strategic lever; the brands that understand this early will have options others won’t.

Vaucher Analytics helps automotive leaders evaluate how regulation, brand equity, and motorsport strategy interact, before capital is irreversibly committed.

If you are responsible for long-term product, brand, or regulatory strategy and want to pressure-test assumptions, you can reach me at contact@vaucheranalytics.com

Main image credit: Severin Demchuk via Unsplash