Open Letter from LEVA-EU to Commissioner Séjourné and to all his colleagues in the European Commission
Guy Salens – THE PACK: “We stand fully behind this letter. LEVA-EU has been saying it for years, and they’re right: light electric vehicles are a climate solution sitting idle in the wrong legislation, while politicians keep protecting the car. Enough studies, enough reports, enough “no time for LEVs.” The world is on fire, and the people who can act keep looking away. It’s time politicians grow a spine and actually change things – not next mandate, not after another consultation round, NOW!“
Hereby the full letter:
Subject: Light Electric Vehicles: A climate solution trapped in the wrong legislation – Open letter on a sector left waiting.
Over the past summer months, it has become painfully clear how the climate crisis is driving us towards ever more frequent and ever more severe disasters. These disasters cause excess mortality in which our most vulnerable fellow citizens are hit hardest, both physically and economically. Scientists and environmental activists have by now grown hoarse from shouting, but so far it remains a voice crying in the wilderness.
Politicians at every level of government, with the exception of a handful of local ones, remain deaf and mute to all these warnings. They hide behind the defence of economic growth and of Europe’s borders, and in doing so shove the climate crisis into a drawer.
That applies to you too, dear Commissioner Séjourné, and to all your colleagues in the European Commission. Your department is called “Grow”, and so you do everything in your power to keep the sacred cow of the transport economy – the car – on the road in large numbers. In doing so, you remain not only deaf but also blind to the contribution that cars and other large, heavy vehicles make to the climate crisis. Worse still, you remain deaf and blind to genuinely valid alternatives that could improve our society and every individual citizen’s life – not only economically and environmentally, but in many other respects too. In other words, you remain deaf and blind to a solution that serves the common good, and you focus unilaterally on a solution that harms society as a whole and is accessible to only part of the population.
In the LEV4Climate Report, independent scientific research already confirms what our sector has been saying for years. A 2022 study by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), commissioned by LEVA-EU, modelled the substitution of car trips by Light Electric Vehicles [1] in Germany and found that up to 76% of all car trips – and 50% of all car mileage – could technically be shifted to LEVs, since 98% of trips are shorter than 100 km and the average car carries just 1.4 occupants. For the trips actually substituted, LEVs would emit on average only 12% of the CO2eq per kilometre of the passenger car they replace, an 88% emissions saving per substituted trip.
Applied nationally, this theoretical potential amounts to a 44% reduction in Germany’s passenger car emissions, or 57 million tonnes of CO2eq saved every year – from a single country, without requiring any change in current mobility patterns, only a shift in which vehicle is used for which trip.
According to Umweltbundesambt, in 2024 the German transport sector emitted 143.1 Mt CO2eq. A massive changeover to LEVs would reduces this with almost 40%. Worth noting: transport is the one major sector where Germany’s emissions have barely moved since 1990, and it has consistently missed its own legally-mandated targets, overshooting by about 18 million tonnes above target in 2024.
LEVs are already accessible to a large share of citizens, and – with the necessary legislative changes – could become accessible to everyone. They contribute to improved public health, social inclusion and, above all, more environmentally friendly transport. They require few raw materials and pollute barely at all.
And yet these LEVs are, from every corner of the political spectrum, either attacked or ignored. Decisions on how and where they may be used – if they even make it to market at all – are made on the basis of sheer ignorance and gut feeling. Indeed, the European technical legislation governing these vehicles is entirely inadequate and inaccurate, and runs counter to the principle of technology neutrality and the prohibition of discrimination.
For years we have been knocking on your services’ door to get this problem onto the agenda. Every time, we are told there is no time for LEVs because your services are too busy with other transport sectors – at this particular moment, with the car sector especially. The task at hand is to extend and soften the transition from environmentally harmful combustion-engine cars to environmentally harmful electric cars. As part of this, your services have, among other things, cooked up a proposal to encourage the rollout of “small” cars. Small?! Up to 4.2 metres – provided they fall under category M, not category L. And so it is that, for example, the Jeep Avenger Electric, at 4.08 m long and weighing between 1.52 and 1.57 tonnes, qualifies, while the Microlino, at 2.52 m and roughly half a tonne, along with every other category-L microcar, does not. That is less the result of ill will on the part of your services than of a lack of knowledge of LEVs. Indeed, the very concept of a LEV is unfamiliar to them, because these vehicles lie hidden within European regulations for mopeds and motorcycles (sic) on the one hand, and for machinery (sic) on the other. Even Kafka couldn’t have made this up.
Speed pedelecs – bicycles with pedal assistance up to 45 km/h – must be type-approved as mopeds. As a result, numerous EU member states apply the same conditions of use for mopeds to speed pedelecs as well. That forces cyclists onto the road – even where a cycle path exists – alongside cars, vans, lorries and the like overtaking them at 50, 70, even 90 km/h. A basic principle of good road infrastructure is that vehicles capable of similar speeds should share the same space, and vehicles with different speed capabilities should be separated. As we’ve already said: politicians frequently decide on the basis of ignorance and gut feeling. But the root of this particularly serious problem lies in European technical legislation – which falls under your responsibility.
For electric scooters, a European legal framework does exist – the Machinery Regulation – far from ideal, but at least it’s there. Nevertheless, numerous member states have since introduced national technical rules of their own, with differing construction-based speed limits, nonsensical caps on maximum continuous power, and so on. In doing so, they breach the principle of free movement of goods and the exhaustive harmonisation of CE legislation. On this point too, we have knocked in vain on your services’ door – but under both the Machinery Regulation and Regulation 168/2013, LEVs are treated as a mere afterthought.
The worst injustice is that this technical legislation results in outright discrimination. A distinction is drawn, for example, between e-bikes where you must pedal to receive motor assistance, and e-bikes where you could, say, switch between pedalling and motor assistance by pressing a button or turning a lever. That produces two entirely different regulatory frameworks for two vehicles that generate identical kinetic energy and therefore pose identical safety risks requiring identical coverage. In 1999 – 27 years ago – the EU decided to introduce two entirely different frameworks with two entirely different conformity procedures. For bikes where you must pedal to receive motor assistance, self-certification may be used. If the motor can function on its own, type-approval applies – worse still, moped type-approval. There was never any consultation whatsoever with the sector on the need for type-approval. As a result, there are currently no such bikes on the market at all. None!
Of the roughly 90 million people with disabilities in the EU, several million are physically unable to pedal continuously. They are denied access to e-bikes by wholly nonsensical legislation that not only discriminates but also runs counter to technology neutrality.
Your services turn a deaf ear to us, and you evidently don’t instruct them to put LEVs on their to-do list either. We suspect this may be because you yourself are not even aware that LEVs fall under your competence. And yet the European technical regulation governing LEVs consists of the Machinery Regulation and Regulation 168/2013 on mopeds and motorcycles – and both belong to your department. The same is true of another legislative monster, the Battery Regulation, which introduced the unfortunate term “light eans of transport”. From the very start, we warned the Commission that the far-reaching obligations of that Regulation, combined with the Extended Producer Responsibility principle, risked throwing the baby out with the bathwater for our sector. That disaster scenario is now slowly starting to unfold and poses a very serious threat to many SMEs in our sector, which have no choice but to source their batteries from outside Europe. The EU, after all, chose to invest in European car batteries, not LEV batteries – as illustrated, for instance, by the recently launched Battery Booster Facility. It is appalling to see that LEVs remain a blind spot even within DG CLIMA, led by your colleague Wopke Hoekstra.
We fully recognise that the final text of the Battery Regulation is the responsibility of the Council and Parliament. But it is the Commission that lit the fuse without thoroughly examining the sector’s warnings. We are currently working to “clear up the wreckage”. The EU has acknowledged that some requirements may not have been entirely optimal – the requirement that battery cells be removable and replaceable, originally even by the consumer, is a good example of this. The Battery Regulation, too, shows just how invisible LEVs are to the Commission.
LEVs must, as a matter of urgency, first and foremost be removed from these two ill-fitting, inaccurate and inadequate legal frameworks and placed under a dedicated LEV Regulation, modelled on the Machinery Regulation. Why should our sector have to make do with the Machinery Regulation when LEVs are not machinery at all? Why should it have to make do with Regulation 168/2013 on mopeds and motorcycles? That entire piece of legislation runs to 1,032 pages of text (not counting UNECE Regulations), much of which concerns emissions and noise. Even Kafka couldn’t have invented this.
This is urgent because the companies in our sector are currently under enormous pressure. Too many companies have already fallen victim to this poor legislation. These companies have a right to adequate legislation grounded in expertise and developed in consultation with the sector itself.
Such legislation would give them the room to grow and flourish, to contribute to the economy, to the creation of green, local jobs, and above all, to help turn around the role of transport in the climate crisis.
Only with an LEV Regulation can the companies in our sector reach their full potential – and, moreover, deliver major benefits for the common good. Besides the benefits already mentioned, there are more: reduced use of raw materials, improved road safety, social inclusion, reduced transport poverty, and better public health.
Our sector does not (yet) have the financial capacity to build up advocacy as powerful as that of the car industry. As a result, the LEV sector can make its voice heard by politicians less often and less loudly. That must not be a reason for you to withhold attention from a sector and a class of vehicles with such a clear societal benefit.
This benefit is, incidentally, already recognised to some extent politically in your own country, France. L’Extrême Défi, a long-running project to encourage the development of LEVs (in French, Véhicules Légers, or “Véli”), is funded by ADEME, the public agency for ecological transition. Should you be curious about concrete examples of what LEVs can mean for our society, we warmly recommend the video reports produced by your fellow countryman Jérôme Zindy.
We also wish to emphasise that our sector stands ready to help work on the urgently needed LEV Regulation. We are, of course, willing to work with your services to translate the essential safety requirements for LEVs into an LEV Regulation. We have already done a great deal of the “homework” involved. For the European standards that already exist for a number of LEVs, extensive risk analyses have been carried out.
In 2024, the Commission Expert Group on Urban Mobility (EGUM) recommended the development of dedicated legislation for LEVs. Two years have since passed, and you have still done nothing with that recommendation.
We already touched on the financial capacity of our sector, which limits our advocacy efforts. LEVA-EU is a member of EGUM and naturally contributed to the recommendations on LEVs. If you fail to act on them, our participation in EGUM becomes counterproductive.
LEVA-EU is, moreover, also a member of the Motorcycle Working Group (Regulation 168/2013) and of the Machinery Expert Group. There, we are obliged to spend a great deal of time on debates that have nothing to do with LEVs – equally counterproductive. That is why we consider the creation of an LEV Expert Group a legitimate demand, sorely needed, and one that must be granted.
The societal situation resulting from the climate crisis is now such that continuing to neglect Light Electric Vehicles runs directly counter to the societal interest and, more importantly still, to the interests of European citizens. We therefore kindly but urgently request consultation at the earliest possible opportunity.
This letter was written while a heavy thunderstorm raged over our city – without victims or damage this time, we hope.
We look forward to your invitation for consultation.
Yours sincerely,
Annick Roetynck, LEVA-EU Managing Director
[1] Light Electric Vehicles (LEVs) are all electric vehicles in the scope of EU Regulation 168/2013 as well as electric vehicles excluded from that Regulation based on Article 2.2 and therefore under the Machinery Regulation.