Will you have to surrender your car to the state when the European Union implements a limit on the number of cars per household? No, that's not true: There are no factual reports that this is a true statement or agenda of the European Union.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok where it was published by @raond78 on June 17, 2023. It opened (translated into English by Lead Stories staff):
Since the date the EU will limit the number of cars per household, you will have to surrender your car to the state.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Jun 20 15:19:21 2023 UTC)
The video shows this article in Czech from the website autozive.cz.
The EU does want to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2035, though existing cars could still be driven. However, even this is still in talks since the German government decided to push for a loophole that would allow the sale of combustion engine cars beyond the 2035 deadline as long as they run on synthetic fuels. Germany was joined by several other countries -- Italy, Poland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. The ban is part of a plan for the EU to become carbon-neutral by 2050.
A search for the phrase "EU limits number of cars per household" using the Google News index in English and Czech of thousands of credible news sites did not reveal any such articles.
Cars currently account for around 15 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the EU. The legislation demands that carmakers cut carbon emissions from new vehicles by 100 percent.
Synthetic fuels, or e-fuels, are made using hydrogen and carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. Burning these man-made fuels releases similar amounts of planet-heating emissions and air pollutants as using conventional fossil fuels. E-fuels are made from carbon that was removed from the atmosphere, which offsets the emissions they produce. However, synthetic fuels are yet to be produced at scale.
