Climate Targets in Mobility - Quo Vadis?

This article begins with a single line posed during the Vienna Motor Symposium 2026 pre-briefing: “Climate targets in mobility - quo vadis?” At a time when Europe, the United States, and China are moving to different regulatory rhythms, it examines why a portfolio approach, rather than a one-way transition, is becoming the industry’s new survival grammar. The coexistence of life-cycle (LCA) criteria, the EU’s Automotive Package, and a program where AI, hybrids, hydrogen, and BEVs share the same stage points to one conclusion: the debate is less about “which technology wins” than about how conditions are designed. One question remains: who will calculate the speed of this transition - and who will prove that calculation in industry?

By Sang Min Han _ Han@autoelectronics.co.kr
한글로보기

On the screen were Matthias Zink of Schaeffler and Geoffrey Bouquot of Audi.

 

A pre-briefing that felt like a diagnosis
During the Lunar New Year holiday, I was invited online to the pre-press briefing for the 47th Vienna Motor Symposium 2026. On screen, Managing Director Rudolf Melzer greeted participants from in front of Hotel Regina (Rooseveltplatz) in Vienna. “The Hofburg is just a few minutes away,” he said. The palace - familiar to me from The Autonomous each autumn - overlapped with the scene beyond the screen. Welcoming attendees from Asia, including Korea, he called the symposium “the Davos of mobility.”
This was not a routine event announcement. The question “Climate Targets in Mobility - Quo Vadis?” sounded less like a slogan than a diagnosis. The world is no longer moving in the same direction - and in the gap between those directions, the powertrain is being redefined.



A divided world

“Europe is moving toward zero emissions. But in other regions, the very frame for understanding climate and CO₂ risk is changing.”
That was the message from Prof. Bernhard Geringer, President of OVK (the Austrian Association for Automotive Engineering). The world no longer shares one map. Europe is designing regulation on the assumption of zero emissions beyond 2035. Other markets - including the United States - are revisiting how they interpret climate risk and reorder policy priorities. China, through Technology Roadmap 3.0, has systematized its 2030 - 2040 technology strategy to a point that feels closer to a long-term calculation already completed.
The automotive industry must move on top of these three rhythms at the same time.
Previewing this year’s Vienna Motor Symposium, Prof. Geringer asked what kind of mid-term strategy manufacturers, energy suppliers, and consumers should adopt under such conditions. His answer was the safest - and the most expensive - option: maintain a portfolio that keeps three paths in play at once: pure electrification, hydrogen, and advanced internal-combustion technologies with renewable fuels.
In that context, hybrids re-emerge as an “ideal solution for a continuous transition” - a way to preserve efficiency and market acceptance on the road toward electrification. In a world fractured by competition and divergence, this is not an argument for retreat, but an argument for risk dispersion.
At this point, I raised a follow-up question: if the industry is not transitioning in one direction, but instead operating across three regulatory rhythms, how should OEMs and supply chains design product and investment roadmaps? The response was simple: technology choice is not a matter of belief, but a matter of conditions - and those conditions move differently by country. A portfolio, therefore, is not hesitation; it is scenario-based design.



Technology is not one thing

“We should not speak of a single future powertrain, but of a robust and resilient technology portfolio.”
Although he was not present at the briefing, Prof. Stefan Pischinger of RWTH Aachen was cited as rejecting binary thinking in exactly those terms. Reality is a structure where regulation, market demand, technological maturity, and industrial execution speed are tightly entangled. It cannot be explained by BEVs alone - or by hydrogen alone. “Technology neutrality” is not a political slogan; it is an industrial design problem.
Prof. Geringer pointed to life-cycle emissions as the key criterion - an end-to-end view that includes not only tailpipe emissions, but also battery production, electricity generation, and the supply chain. At the same time, he did not look away from cost and energy consumption. If green hydrogen remains too expensive, or if e-fuels in high-electricity-cost industrial economies demand excessive costs, market acceptance will inevitably fall. Industry, in other words, must satisfy both environmental goals and economic feasibility.
In particular, life-cycle criteria expand the scope of regulation from the vehicle’s tailpipe to battery production and the energy mix. This is not merely an environmental metric; it becomes a mechanism that redefines the conditions of industrial competition. Cost gaps between regions with different production footprints and power structures are shifting from being “technology problems” to “policy framework problems.” Some regions define “clean” by extending it into the electricity mix; others frame it to include supply chains, raw materials, and manufacturing bases. Life-cycle regulation carries the banner of carbon, but it also functions as the language of market access - and, at times, a protective framework.



Europe’s automotive supply chain: strength and anxiety

Matthias Zink, CEO of Automotive Technologies, stood in Vienna wearing two hats: one as President of CLEPA (the European Association of Automotive Suppliers), representing Europe’s supply chain, and another as a member of the Schaeffler board, responsible for corporate strategy.
He began with numbers. Europe still creates up to 75% of vehicle value, supports around 1.7 million jobs, and invests about €45 billion annually in R&D and facilities.
Then the tone changed. Roughly 50,000 layoffs were announced in 2025 alone. According to a Roland Berger analysis, about 40% of the industry is not profitable. A warning followed: as many as 350,000 jobs could be at risk by 2030.
Zink described this as a “structural crossroads.” Global competition is accelerating, production is shifting, and energy costs and regulatory complexity are squeezing European companies. In this crisis, he read the European Commission’s “Automotive Package” not simply as a support measure, but as a policy signal. It is a policy bundle intended to design a “realistic transition” by tying emissions regulation together with investment, competitiveness, jobs, and energy costs - an acknowledgement that climate targets alone cannot move industry, and that competitiveness and employment must be placed back into the same sentence.
He stressed that “the real complexity hides in the details.” Regulatory design determines investment and product roadmaps, and at the end of that chain stands the final customer - what people can actually afford, and whether infrastructure exists to support it.
“We must protect the manufacturing base from unfair competition, reflect real driving efficiency (utility factors) in CO₂ rules while keeping technology openness, and reduce energy costs and administrative burdens,” Zink said, making three conditions explicit. The core, he argued, is for Europe to secure the conditions that allow innovation to remain in Europe. If the framework is unstable, investment moves.
He also used Schaeffler as evidence that industry is not standing still. A multi-mode hybrid transmission integrates electric mode, series-hybrid mode, and parallel-hybrid mode into a single system - running the engine in its most efficient sweet spot while extracting both electrification benefits and mechanical efficiency.



Is the future engine AI?

“Engines were not just power sources. They were benchmarks, emotions, differentiation. But we no longer talk about horsepower. Now we talk about TOPS.”
With that line, Audi CTO Geoffrey Bouquot summarized the past - and quietly shifted the direction.
This was not rhetorical flourish. The engine used to be the technical center, the reference for design, and a symbol of brand character. The sound of a straight-six or a V8 was a language of emotional differentiation. Today, that role is increasingly replaced by AI-driven compute architecture. Compute capacity is not just a number; it becomes the central axis of vehicle architecture.
Bouquot connected AI directly to user experience, using China as an example: more natural interaction, emotionally engaged interfaces, cross-domain connectivity. The vehicle’s internal system is no longer a collection of separate features, but a unified structure. That integration expands beyond the cockpit into ADAS and chassis control. Automated driving, too, is shifting from rule-based systems - weak in edge cases - toward AI-based systems that interpret complex context and broaden the response envelope.
But he drew a clear line: “We do not develop technology for technology’s sake. User experience is defined by the OEM.” AI can become an engine, but OEMs remain the authors of brand experience. Even if big tech provides enabling technology, the authority to design user experience stays with automakers. AI is the tool and the foundation; the final narrative belongs to the brand.



The Vienna Motor Symposium 2026 will be held for three days from April 22 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna.



The trailer is concrete

What makes this pre-briefing compelling is that it refuses to force the technology story into a single answer. As Prof. Geringer suggested, mobility today is no longer something you can explain by isolating an engine or a transmission. Powertrains, energy supply, automated driving, and software-defined architectures are being woven into one system. The symposium program, therefore, looks less like a forecast and more like a reality-based combination table.
Commercial-vehicle regulation, for example, is moving differently across Europe, Asia, and the United States. Where it used to be enough to tweak country-specific specifications around a base engine, now the implicit requirement becomes simultaneous: electric in Europe, hydrogen in parts of Asia, and internal combustion in the U.S. That alone explains why Vienna’s lineup cannot be reduced to a single direction.
This year’s “trailer montage,” then, arrives in multiple cuts at once.
On range extenders and hybrids: AVL and Chery present a hybrid gasoline engine with a mass-production thermal efficiency of 48%, calling it “a breakthrough for range extenders.” Toyota previews its next-generation hybrid system for plug-in hybrids, while Volkswagen signals its latest hybrid generation. Hybrid importance is rising again - not as a pretext to delay electrification, but as an industrial choice to secure efficiency and acceptance in the middle of pushing electrification forward.
Meanwhile, BEVs do not step aside. BMW will unveil its GEN6 battery-electric drivetrain for the first time. As hybrids and REEVs expand, BEVs evolve in parallel - less a competition than a synchronization with the speed demanded by markets and regulation.
Hydrogen appears as the language of commercial vehicles. Cummins brings a hydrogen internal-combustion solution for heavy-duty applications, and FAW presents hydrogen technology in the context of decarbonizing medium and heavy trucks. AVL × Scania’s H2 HPDI (high-pressure direct injection) is introduced with a pairing that is deliberately bold: “zero emissions” and “60% efficiency.”
And the symposium is not only about powertrains, as the SDV section demonstrates. AVL introduces “Copper Car,” a concept for ultra-fast regression testing for high-voltage EV systems. The key phrase - “very fast and informative software regression tests” - signals a shift: SDV is framed not as a feature, but as a structure of validation and operations. After OTA, does the system behave consistently? How is safety proven? Even the powertrain transition ultimately becomes a question of systems proven through software.



China SAE widens the stage

“This is not a side event. The structure has changed. One day before the symposium officially opens, China’s agenda enters the Vienna stage.”
As Prof. Geringer framed it, the symbolic moment this year is not that China has been invited - it is that China arrives carrying its own roadmap. It is not that the schedule has moved earlier; the agenda arrives first.
On April 22, the day before the official opening, OVK and China SAE will jointly hold the Powertrain Forum for Sustainable Mobility.
China’s Roadmap 3.0 is not a simple list of technologies. It is a long-horizon strategy aimed at 2030 through 2040. If Roadmap 2.0 designed the pace of electrification, 3.0 calculates energy, efficiency, and industrial structure as well. In other words, this forum is not about showing what China is building - it is about translating what China is calculating into a language Europe will recognize: regulation, industrial structure, efficiency, and the speed of market transition.
The keynote will be delivered by Prof. Xiangyang Xu, who leads the Roadmap 3.0 powertrain group. BMW, Great Wall Motor, AVL, SERES, and Aurobay will join to tie together technology routes, European market strategy, battery supply chains, and technology development into one set of questions. This is not a scene of China merely attending a European event. It is a stage where different regulatory systems and industrial strategies are compared in public.


Vienna Motor Symposium is no longer easy to describe as a regional technology symposium. Here, the powertrain is treated not as a question of fuel, but as a question of conditions: energy costs, regulatory predictability, industrial ecosystems, and software validation structures all sit within the same context.
The pre-briefing was a trailer: a divided world and survival, multiple technology strategies, industrial competition built on conditions, AI as a new central axis, and China’s official participation. At the Hofburg in April, what will matter most is not which technology “wins,” but who calculates the speed of the transition - and who proves that calculation in industry.

AEM(오토모티브일렉트로닉스매거진)

---