Approximately 25% of new car sales in Europe are electric today. To meet the EU’s proposed target of 46% electricity as a share of Final Energy by 2040 through road transport alone, that figure would need to reach 100% almost immediately, and stay there, so that 80% of all vehicles on European roads are electric by 2040.
Not 80% of new sales, but 80% of the entire operating fleet, including heavy trucks, vans, and passenger cars already registered. There are currently around 7 million heavy trucks on Europe’s roads, with less than 0.5% running on electricity and less than 2% of annual sales going to electric models. The EU Commission’s 2040 electrification target is not an ambitious goal. It is an arithmetically impossible one, and the reason is not insufficient political will but a fundamental flaw in the measurement framework underpinning it.
The EU Commission has proposed a target of raising electricity’s share of Final Energy from 24% to 46% by 2040 as the central metric of its electrification strategy. The problem was identified previously in the context of the COP31 “35 by 35” target, where the same metric produced equally distorted results. The EU’s version is more precisely specified and more clearly counterproductive, because the 14-year timeframe makes the implied deployment rates quantifiable and the impossibility concrete.
Why the Metric Produces the Wrong Numbers
Final Energy is the energy content of fuel and electricity sold to end users, including all the energy those users waste. It is not a measure of how much useful work the energy system delivers. When a petrol car consumes fuel, the entire energy content of that fuel is counted as Final Energy, even though only around 20% of it actually moves the vehicle. An electric vehicle covering the same distance is roughly 90% efficient, meaning its Final Energy is approximately 4.5 times smaller for the same service delivered.
The mathematical consequence is that Electricity divided by Final Energy is not a ratio that tracks how electrified an economy is in any intuitive sense. If you own two cars, one electric and one petrol, you might reasonably describe yourself as 50% electrified in road transport. But your Electricity/Final Energy ratio in that fleet is 1 divided by the sum of 1 and 4.5, which equals 18%. The petrol car’s inefficiency so dominates the denominator that the ratio is far lower than the physical penetration rate suggests. The same mathematics applies to heat pumps and gas boilers. With a heat pump delivering a coefficient of performance of 3 and a gas boiler at 90% efficiency, a household that has converted 50% of its heating to the pump reaches only 23% on the Electricity/Final Energy measure.
The practical implication is that reaching 46% Electricity/Final Energy in road transport would require approximately 80% of the entire European vehicle fleet to be electric, and reaching 46% in space heating would require 75% of all buildings to be heated by heat pumps, not 75% of new installations but 75% of the full existing stock. These are not targets that can be achieved in 14 years under any realistic deployment trajectory. European heat pump installation rates would need to increase to levels for which neither the trained installer workforce nor the manufacturing supply chain currently exists.
What the EU Electrification Strategy Gets Right and Where It Fails
The EU Commission’s embrace of electrification as its primary decarbonisation lever is substantively correct. Space heating, road transport, and low-to-mid temperature industrial heat together represent over 40% of European greenhouse gas emissions, and electric alternatives in each of those sectors are at or near cost parity. The policy architecture supporting electrification, including efficiency standards, building renovation mandates, EV charging infrastructure deployment, and grid investment packages, is broadly pointing in the right direction.
The failure is in target-setting. A target that cannot be translated into sector-specific, country-specific deployment goals that anyone can measure and deliver is not a policy anchor. It is a communications framework that will generate confusion and eventually discredit the electrification agenda when it becomes apparent that the stated metric cannot be reached on the stated timeline. Policymakers who committed industrial and fiscal resources based on the 46% target will have to explain, at some point between now and 2040, why the ratio that was supposed to track progress is moving far more slowly than the physical deployment rates on the ground.
The alternative that would resolve both the measurement and the credibility problem is penetration-based targeting by sector. A target for the share of new vehicle sales that must be electric by a given year, combined with a target for the share of space heating installations using heat pumps, gives every market participant a clear number to orient investment, supply chain development, and regulatory enforcement. These targets follow S-curve dynamics that are well understood, comparable across countries, and directly measurable without the mathematical distortions of the Final Energy ratio.
The Deployment Realities That the Target Obscures
European EV sales reached approximately 1.3 million units in 2024, representing around 13% of total passenger car sales after subsidies in key markets were reduced or withdrawn. Heavy commercial vehicle electrification is moving at a fraction of that pace: European registrations of electric heavy trucks reached around 3,000 units in 2024, from a baseline fleet of approximately 7 million vehicles. To go from 0.5% of the heavy truck fleet being electric today to 80% by 2040 would require average annual fleet additions of roughly 400,000 electric trucks per year from now until 2040, a production rate that does not exist anywhere in the world at present and that the investment decisions driving European truck manufacturing are not currently targeting.
The heat pump picture is similarly constrained. European heat pump installations reached approximately 2.9 million units in 2024, down from 3.05 million in 2023, with the market contracting as interest rates and energy price moderation dampened replacement demand. There are an estimated 170 million buildings in Europe that require heat. Converting 75% of that stock, approximately 127 million buildings, to heat pump heating in 14 years would require an average annual installation rate of around 9 million units, triple the peak rate achieved in 2023 and roughly seven times the 2024 rate. Installer training pipelines, electrical grid reinforcement for heat pump loads, and heat pump manufacturing capacity are all growing, but from bases far too low to support that trajectory.
None of this means the EU’s electrification ambitions are wrong. It means that the 46% Electricity/Final Energy target by 2040 will not function as a navigational instrument for the transition because it describes an outcome that cannot occur in the timeframe given. A target that is impossible to achieve does not motivate deployment at the margin; it produces either cynicism when the gap becomes visible or motivated reasoning to explain why the number does not mean what it appears to mean. The EU’s electrification strategy deserves a measurement framework that is as robust as its underlying policy logic, and the Final Energy ratio is not that framework.
