What the study looked at
The Industrial Accelerator Act is the manufacturing strand of the EU's Clean Industrial Deal. As proposed, it would attach local-content conditions to electric vehicles and to the batteries inside them. The study tests Europe's supply chain against those conditions and concludes that planned capacity falls short of the demand the rules would create.
ACEA's release gives the headline result and its own reading of it. The detailed, plant-by-plant figures are in the underlying report, which is where anyone checking the percentages should start. For a buyer, the more useful exercise is the arithmetic behind the headline.
The arithmetic per million cars
Take a mid-size family EV with a 77 kWh usable pack, the size of a Škoda Enyaq 85 or a VW ID.4 Pro. One million of those cars needs 77 GWh of cells. A plant of 40 GWh, the announced size of PowerCo's Salzgitter site, covers roughly 520,000 of them.
Europe registers battery-electric cars in seven figures per year, so the requirement lands in the hundreds of gigawatt-hours while every announced European plant is counted in tens. That ratio is the whole argument in two sentences.
The chain matters as much as the cells. A pack needs cathode active material, anode graphite, separator film and electrolyte. Those lines are thinner in Europe than cell assembly is, and the study assesses the supply chain rather than gigafactories alone. A plant can be finished and still wait months for material it cannot buy inside the customs union.
What Europe has actually built
Most European cell output today comes from a small set of factories in Hungary and Poland: LG Energy Solution in Wrocław, Samsung SDI in Göd, SK On in Komárom. Newer projects are announced, under construction or ramping: CATL in Debrecen, ACC in northern France, Verkor in Dunkirk, PowerCo in Salzgitter and Valencia. Northvolt, meant to anchor the Swedish end of the chain, filed for bankruptcy in March 2025 and took a large block of planned capacity with it.
Announced capacity is not installed capacity. A line that has been ordered, permitted and staffed still needs qualification runs before a carmaker will put its cells into a vehicle sold with an eight-year battery warranty. That step takes quarters, not weeks.
Who is making the argument
ACEA commissioned the study, and its members sell the cars that local-content rules would affect. That does not make the arithmetic wrong. It does mean the framing is worth a second look.
Carmakers want thresholds they can reach, or a phase-in long enough for plants already ordered to come online. Cell manufacturers and some member states argue that targets create the demand signal which makes investment bankable in the first place. Both positions are on the table as the file moves through Parliament and Council.
What it means for buyers
Nothing in the study changes the car in your driveway. Pack price is the channel through which local-content rules reach customers, and if European cells cost more per kWh than imported ones, the difference appears in the price list rather than in the WLTP figure.
Running costs are easier to pin down. A family EV using 18 kWh/100 km costs about €6.30 per 100 km on home charging at €0.35/kWh, and roughly €12.40 on DC at €0.69/kWh. A petrol car at 6.5 l/100 km and €1.50 per litre sits near €9.75. Our charging cost calculator takes your own tariff, and the savings calculator compares annual totals.
For long trips, our supercharger database lists 483 locations across Europe with prices; the cheapest chargers page is worth a look before a holiday drive. Charging build-out keeps moving: Electrify America opened a 24-stall, 350 kW hub near Disney World. Cell supply is the slower queue.
National rules move faster than EU industrial policy. England dropped planning permission for cross-pavement charging, which our report put at up to £300 of avoided cost for households without a driveway. Range figures, meanwhile, are best checked against Bjørn Nyland's real-world measurements and our range calculator rather than the homologation sheet.
ACEA published the study summary on 22 September 2026. The Industrial Accelerator Act is still a proposal in the ordinary legislative procedure, so the localisation percentages the study tests against can change before any of them applies to a car on a forecourt.