July's ledger sighs like a broken amphora, its contents clever and cruel in equal measure: EU car registrations rise 7.4% year on year after June's dimming, yet the year-to-date lingers in the grey, about 0.7% negative, with roughly 6.5 million new cars entering the theatre of consumption. The old continent’s engines beat with a stubborn cadence: VW Group extends its lead with a 3.8% rise, while BMW and Mercedes-Benz press on with higher seven-month figures, and Stellantis, that Opel parent, shows a fall of nearly 10% since January, as if the chariots themselves recoil from the road’s modern liturgy. It is not triumph but a precarious equilibrium, a stoic breath beneath a sky thick with doubt.

In the realm of electricity and borrowed light, the scene grows tragic in a Greek tragedy of propulsion. Tesla loses ground—roughly 42% in July, to about 6,600 units—while BYD surges to 9,698 registrations, tripling its EU filings and, in this market, clearly outpacing the American engine and trailing only SAIC among Chinese brands. April had seen Tesla EU sales falter by more than half, while Volkswagen and BYD retained appetite in the crowd. The new locomotives ride on a mixed chorus: hybrids now account for about one third of sales; petrol and diesel together constitute 37.7%, down by about ten percentage points from a year ago. Electric vehicles hold roughly 15.6% of the market, yet ACEA himself would whisper that this is still a distant shore from the promised land of transition.

China presses further into Europe as its own home market wages price wars and the United States remains a quiet, unhelpful sea. To appease the gods of CO2, the Commission has granted more time, but the letters of the ACEA president, Ola Källenius, and the CLEPA president, Matthias Zink—the heralds at the gates—urge a rethink of the 2030 and 2035 targets in a missive to Ursula von der Leyen. Under the present covenant, fleet CO2 emissions must fall by 55% by 2030, and no combustion-engine vehicles may be sold from 2035 onward. The law, like a stern chorus, binds the horizon and binds the hand that would press the accelerator.

And so we linger at the edge of a civilization’s arena, where the incentives of efficiency eclipse the old satisfactions of grandeur. The air grows heavier with the scent of policy and price wars, of markets that expand yet refuse to be cured of their unease. Nietzsche would name it: the last man of the showroom, content with comfort and cadence, shrinking the world to a subdivision of kilowatts and quotas. The Greeks would call it tragedy, where hubris builds a mechanism that cannot sustain meaning, and fate—dressed in bureaucratic vestments and auto-industry jargon—continues to tighten the strings. If progress is a flame, it now burns under a bell jar of targets, subsidies, and timelines, until the road itself seems to vanish into a dim horizon.

Thus we gaze at the dwindling chorus of combustion and the rising chorus of regulation, two siblings of a single contemporary hunger: to move forward, at any cost, toward a future that promises salvation only through constraint. In such a world, Western culture trembles, not with audacity but with elegy, and we are left to ponder whether we are witnessing the birth of a new order or the slow extinguishing of an old flame—the flame by which, in ages past, men believed they might conquer the earth and then discovered the earth conquers back.