The news that Volvo will join Stellantis in leaving the European car makers’ lobby association ACEA begs the question: can the 30-year-old lobby group survive? And if so, who can present the unified voice needed to present the industry’s case to the European Union?

Volvo’s official reason for leaving was that its “sustainability strategy and ambitions aren't fully aligned with ACEA’s positioning”. Privately, the company says it’s cross with the lobby group’s efforts to water down the EU’s recent decision to reduce CO2 emissions emanating from new cars to zero by 2025.

Volvo is committed to going all electric by 2030, so paying to be a member of an organisation that thinks zero emission by 2035 is a stretch doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Related articles

The optics for ACEA are at least as bad as Stellantis leaving, given that Volvo was one of the group’s founding car makers back in 1991. The Geely-owned Swedish brand is keen to point out that its timing is unrelated to Stellantis’s announcement in June. However, the fact that two members have announced they're leaving the 16-member organisation within the space of a month is a bad look.

Interestingly, Stellantis likely decided to leave ACEA for the opposite reason to Volvo: because the lobby group wasn’t pushing hard enough to water down the emissions. The announcement from the 14-brand giant was coupled with news that it will set up a Freedom of Mobility Forum to discuss the “key questions” arising from the EU’s increasingly short timetable for decarbonisation.

When one of your members is leaving because you’re pushing too hard in one direction and another likely believes you’re not pushing hard enough while your goal is to find a common voice, you have a major problem.

Both Stellantis and Volvo will be thankful for the savings on membership fees, thought to be in the region of between €500,000 to €1 million per year.

However, neither will give up on the lobbying, and a united voice targeted at the right law makers has proven to have an effect. So who will car makers turn to in their bid to nudge law makers in their preferred direction?

The answer for current or imminent electric-only car makers is increasingly AVERE, aka the European Association for Electromobility. Based in the Belgian capital Brussels (like all EU lobby groups), it's winning around brands that like that it “represents the entire width of the e-mobility ecosystem”, according to its declared purpose.