EU truck manufacturers on track to meet first-ever CO2 emissions targets
Report
Within reach – The 2025 CO2 targets for new heavy-duty vehicles in Europe
Manufacturers of heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) in the European Union face a CO2 target for the first time in 2025. The average CO2 emissions of most HDVs first registered in the 2025 reporting period (between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026) must be 15% less than the average of all HDVs first registered in the 2019 reporting period (between 1 July 2019 and 30 June 2020).
This report considers the progress manufacturers have made toward this 15% target to date and the efforts required to achieve the target, focusing on the top seven HDV manufacturers by market share: Daimler Truck (19% of the EU’s truck market in 2024), Volvo Trucks (15%), MAN (14%), Scania (14%), Iveco (12%), DAF (11%), and Renault Trucks (8%).
We determine the effort of compliance required by establishing a status quo based upon the latest official CO2 data from internal combustion vehicles (covering those first registered up to the 2023 reporting period) and the latest data from national statistics on the sale of zero-emission (ZE) HDVs (covering those first registered up to the 2024 reporting period).
Key findings
Based on this status quo and including the compliance flexibilities available in the CO2 standards, this report finds that five out of the seven main manufacturers in the European Union are already compliant with their 15% target two years in advance. They will not require any further improvements to their fleet compared to their performance in the 2023 reporting period. Only Daimler Truck and Iveco have yet to close their compliance gap with the 15% target in the 2025 reporting period, extending from July 2025 to June 2026.
Figure. Fleet-average specific CO2 emissions for HDV manufacturers, 2019–2023
Already compliant manufacturers
Scania and Volvo Trucks will comfortably meet the 2025 target. Both of these manufacturers have already reduced their fleet average CO2 emissions by 15% in the 2023 reporting period. By selling the same vehicle technologies sold up to then, they will be compliant with the 2025 targets.
Renault Trucks and DAF will also meet the 2025 target thanks to early credit accumulation. Both manufacturers have amassed a significant number of early credits in the 2019–2023 period due to low CO2 performance of their vehicles sold. These manufacturers could rely on the accumulated credits to meet the 15% target without making any further improvements to their vehicles between 2023 and 2025.
MAN can already meet the 2025 target by relying on compliance flexibilities. The CO2 standards allow for connected manufacturers to transfer HDVs as a compliance flexibility. This allows Volvo Trucks and Renault Trucks (both part of Volvo Group) and MAN and Scania (both part of TRATON Group) to freely transfer vehicles amongst each other. Scania has accumulated the largest share of credits of all manufacturers. If MAN were to transfer all their vehicles to Scania (effectively pooling their emissions), the credits already earned by Scania would be enough for MAN to also meet the 2025 target.
Not-yet-compliant manufacturers
Daimler Truck will have to moderately improve their conventional vehicles or increase their ZE HDV share to reach the 2025 target. Non-connected manufacturers can trade a limited number of ZE HDVs amongst each other, and this flexibility can help Daimler Truck get to a 14% reduction relative to 2019 based on its status quo. To reach the 15% reduction, Daimler Truck would either have to increase their ZE HDV sales share to 3.4% in 2025 (up from 2% in 2024) or improve their diesel technology to represent the upper 50th percentile—i.e., slightly lowering their average to match the median—of their vehicles’ performance sold up to June 2024. A combination of these measures is expected.
Iveco faces one of the more challenging paths to compliance among manufacturers. To avoid penalties in 2025, Iveco must also seek to maximize the ZE HDV transfer flexibility. In addition, it will have to improve the average performance of its conventional trucks to the 20th percentile registered in 2023 and increase its ZE HDV sales share of vehicles covered under the scope of the CO2 standard to around 1.5%. While this corresponds to sales of about 210 ZE HDVs, Iveco only sold 16 ZE HDVs in scope of the standards in 2024.
Figure 2. Fleet average specific CO2 emissions for HDV manufacturers and the gap to compliance for their 2025 targets.