The European Parliament has given its final green light to a new regulation that will (finally!) change the way cars are designed, sold and disposed of in Europe.
The European Parliament has approved the regulation introducing new rules for car design and material recycling. The vote, which came on Thursday 18 June with 437 in favour, 112 against and 20 abstentions, marks an important step towards a more circular automotive industry, one capable of consuming fewer resources and better tracking what happens to vehicles when they reach the end of their life.
The green light reached by the European Union last week on the management of end-of-life vehicles (ELV) is a significant one, covering new rules on vehicle circularity requirements and end-of-life vehicle management. The numbers alone speak to its importance: 285.6 million motor vehicles circulate on European Union roads, and every year around 6.5 million of them reach end of life. An enormous volume of materials — plastics, metals, electronic components — that today is not always recovered and reused as efficiently as it could be.
The first pillar of the reform concerns design. From now on, new cars will have to be conceived from the outset to facilitate disassembly: all new vehicles must be designed so as to allow the easy removal of as many parts and components as possible. This is no minor technical detail: it means that whoever designs a car will have to think, right from the drawing board, about how that car will be taken apart twenty years later.
Added to this are binding targets on the use of recycled plastic. The plastic used in every new vehicle type must contain a minimum of 15 per cent recycled plastic within six years and 25 per cent within ten years, with at least 20 per cent of that recycled plastic coming from end-of-life vehicles or used parts. And plastic may not remain the only material under scrutiny: on the basis of feasibility studies, the Commission will be able to introduce targets in the future for other materials too, such as recycled steel, aluminium, magnesium and critical raw materials.
The new rules also intervene in the buying and selling of used vehicles. Businesses, unlike private individuals, will be required to produce an assessment confirming that the vehicle is not an end-of-life vehicle, or alternatively a valid roadworthiness certificate. To avoid overcomplicating matters, private transactions will only require one of these two documents in specific cases: if the vehicle has been declared a total economic loss or if the sale takes place exclusively through an online platform.
This new regulation on vehicle end of life did not emerge from nowhere. Back in 2023, the European Commission had already proposed a new regulation on circularity requirements for vehicle design and end-of-life vehicle management, in line with the objectives of the European Green Deal and the circular economy action plan. This move therefore fits into a broader strategy — one the European Union has been pursuing for years — to make the continent's economy less dependent on the extraction of virgin raw materials and more capable of "closing the loop" on the materials it already possesses.
One of the most significant innovations is the introduction of extended producer responsibility. Three years after the new rules enter into force, manufacturers will have to cover the costs of collecting and treating end-of-life vehicles at any point within the European Union. In other words: those who produce a car will no longer be able to consider their responsibility ended at the point of sale.
There is also an issue on which the European Parliament chose to intervene decisively: that of so-called "ghost vehicles" — cars that simply disappear from registries without any trace of what happened to them, often because they were dismantled or processed illegally outside EU borders. To combat this phenomenon, the new law bans the export of vehicles declared unfit for road use, a rule that will apply 5 years after the regulation enters into force. But what happens now? The process is not yet entirely complete: following the Parliament's green light, the new regulation will need to be formally approved by the Council before entering into force and becoming applicable 24 months thereafter.