On the contrary, Europe is committing seppuku (and I say this as an European) by desperately clinging to an industry that is, and wants to keep being, obsolete.

On the contrary, Europe is committing seppuku (and I say this as an European) by desperately clinging to an industry that is, and wants to keep being, obsolete. We have an almost negligible amount of oil, very far from covering our own consumption. We are very reliant on imports. It should have been our utmost interest, not now but already a decade or so ago, to tell our car industry to wake up once and for all and electrify. Instead, they doubled down on ICEs. Every day we have news in major newspapers, I suppose subsidized by Stellantis and Volkswagen, dwelling on how much EVs suck (full of fallacies like they will always be expensive, they actually emit more CO2 than ICEs if you consider manufacturing, sales are going down in X country - when actually it's invariably the first or even second derivative which goes down -, etc.) - it's pathetic. We have rampant inflation (to a large extent, precisely due to reliance in fossil fuel imports and the stop of inflows from Russia). People complain that even the lowest-end ICE cars have gone to €20K while anything more or less considered midrange is €30K, when only a decade ago sub-€10K cars and midrange €15K cars were a thing. European ICE cars are ridiculously uncompetitive so most people who want an EV and have the money buy a Tesla. And the response when someone wants to bring cars at the prices people want is to slap large tariffs... hell, I'm far from a free-market believer and I generally support tariffs as a way to support local industry and avoid external dependence, but this must be the paradigmatic example where they are a bad idea, with our industry only wanting to cling to ICE and being patted in the back for it. What do they want the EU to become, a country stuck in the past where you can see a fleet of cars from decades ago, like Cuba? Do they think it can even work? It's not only China, when Tesla releases the Model 2 it will be game over for the EU car industry anyway. They are already very late, any measure that doesn't focus on "Electrify. Yesterday" will only deepen an already dire situation.