New Cars in EU Will Be Zero Emission By 2035

March 30, 2023·1 hr 11 min

The EU news lands first. Ted calls it not so fun for car enthusiasts, then backs off a bit because the whole thing sounds less like a clean law and more like a standard everyone agreed to. The wording is muddy. They kick around CO2, carbon neutrality, and whether e-fuels should count, with the loose garage-table energy of people trying to remember exactly how the rule was phrased. California becomes the obvious comparison. The policy talk does not last long, because the more useful question is what these mandates feel like once they turn into cars people actually own. Then the Ford Transit arrives. Ted has a newer van for moving kids around, and the side sensors have already become one of those helpful features that helps too much. Airport cones are the example. He sees them. He is already creeping through the line. The van still beeps like it has spotted danger before anyone else. The parking brake bugs him more. After years of vans with a big handbrake beside the seatbelt release, his body still reaches down before he gets out. Now there is nothing there. The electronic parking brake sits under his left knee by the driver door, so one tiny control move wrecks a week of muscle memory. That is where the episode works best. A regulation story opens it, but the sharper stuff is modern car design replacing old habits with features that sound sensible until they get annoying. CarPlay becomes part of that. The van has Bluetooth but not CarPlay, which sends them into Ford base-model decisions and why some newer vehicles still miss features people expect. It ends a little crooked: Josh loses audio, Ted wraps alone, asks listeners for missing information or future questions, and makes a reluctant YouTube subscriber pitch because views and watch hours are ahead of subscribers.

As heard by us

EU CO2 rules, e-fuels, and a few sharply felt van annoyances share the spotlight.

Ted and Josh, with Nick possibly joining later, use the EU's CO2 no-go standard to sort through what e-fuels do and do not change. The piece stays close to policy language and car-world consequences, treating Porsche's synthetic-fuel work and the idea of CO2 neutrality as part…

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Why you'd press play

You get a policy fight over the EU's CO2 no-go standard that keeps drifting into the annoyances of a newer Ford Transit van.

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