WHEN REALITY OUTPACES IDEOLOGY

Simone Marchetti Cavalieri
Dec 17, 2025
2 min read

The fact that internal combustion cars will continue to exist beyond 2035 is not a surprise, nor an ideological victory of one side over the other. It is, much more simply, an acknowledgment of a reality that the market had already expressed clearly, while politics pretended not to listen.

The European Union has been forced to admit what had been obvious from the very beginning: the transition as it had been envisioned could not withstand the test of real-world conditions. Not because of a lack of technology, not because of cultural backwardness, but because of an element that was treated as a minor inconvenience: people.

The issue was always there. The average customer was asked to give up an object that had reached an almost definitive level of maturity — immediate, reliable, flexible — in order to embrace one that requires time, infrastructure, planning, and a level of patience that not everyone can or wants to afford. The outcome was predictable. Not out of spite, not out of environmental denialism, but because of a simple incompatibility between narrative and everyday life.

And yet the push continued, because admitting the mistake would have meant questioning a moral narrative before even an industrial one. The internal combustion engine had become the “absolute evil,” and like all absolute evils it had to be eliminated, no ifs, ands, or buts. The problem is that reality, the concrete kind, does not operate by ethical decrees. You can theorize a world without cars, but then you actually have to live in it. And almost no one was willing to do that.

So silence was chosen. No one wanted to be the one to raise their hand and say that perhaps ecology at any cost was producing effects contrary to those intended. It was easier to keep proclaiming loyalty to decarbonization, even as the system showed clear signs of short-circuiting. Because courage, when it is lacking, cannot be improvised. And it certainly cannot be generated by decree.

2035 remains a symbolic date, but no longer an ideological dividing line. It is the moment when, finally, the obvious stopped being unspeakable. And in the end, more than a defeat, it is a belated admission of reality. About time.