From 29 November, Europe Starts Counting the Particles That Come Off Your Brakes and Tyres, Not Just Your Exhaust

On 29 November, a European rule that has been on the statute book since 2024 finally starts to bite. Euro 7, the emissions standard set out in Regulation (EU) 2024/1257, applies from that date. It is the first European emissions standard that does not confine itself to what leaves the exhaust pipe: it also puts legal limits on the particles that come off brake pads and tyres, and it sets a floor under how much capacity an electric car's battery has to keep.

Two things about the date are worth getting right before anything else, because a lot of coverage blurs them.

What actually happens on 29 November

The regulation applies from 29 November 2026 to new types of passenger cars and light commercial vehicles (categories M1 and N1), and to the components and systems built for them. It applies from 29 November 2027 to new vehicles in those categories.

That distinction is the whole story of the next twelve months. A "new type" is a model design being put forward for type-approval for the first time. A car whose type-approval was granted before November under the existing rules can go on being built and sold for another year. So the showroom does not change on 30 November. What changes is that any model a manufacturer newly submits for approval from that point has to meet the Euro 7 limits, and by November 2027 every new car registered in the European Union has to.

Heavier vehicles run a separate clock. Buses, coaches and lorries (categories M2, M3, N2, N3) plus larger trailers (O3, O4) come in at 29 May 2028 for new types and 29 May 2029 for new vehicles. Tyres are staged by class: new types of C1 tyres, the ones fitted to ordinary cars, from 1 July 2028, C2 from 1 April 2030 and C3 from 1 April 2032. Small-volume manufacturers get until 1 July 2030 for cars and vans.

Because this is a regulation rather than a directive, it applies in Portugal directly. There is no Portuguese transposition to wait for and no national version that could differ.

Brakes and tyres become a regulated emission

The genuinely new part is that Euro 7 treats what the regulation calls "non-exhaust emissions" as pollution in its own right. It defines brake particle emissions as the particles thrown off a vehicle's braking system, and tyre abrasion as the mass of material a tyre loses to the road and releases into the environment. The reasoning in the regulation's own recitals is straightforward: as vehicles electrify, exhaust particles shrink as a share of the total, and what is left is the dust from brakes and rubber.

Annex I sets the first brake limits, which run until 31 December 2029. For cars and most vans, PM10 brake particles are capped at 3 milligrams per kilometre for a pure electric vehicle and 7 milligrams per kilometre for everything else, whether plug-in hybrid, conventional hybrid, fuel cell or combustion. Heavier N1 Class III vans get 5 and 11 respectively. A tighter set of limits, including a count of particles as well as their mass, follows from 1 January 2030 after a review the Commission is required to run.

The electric car gets the lower brake limit for a practical reason rather than a political one: regenerative braking does much of the slowing without touching the pads. That matters more here than in most of Europe: electrified models have been taking a rising share of Portuguese new-car registrations through 2026.

Tyre abrasion limits are not printed in the regulation yet. Europe has left the numbers to the United Nations working party on vehicle regulations, UN WP.29, and given itself a fallback: if uniform provisions for C1 tyres had not been adopted by 1 July 2026, the Commission is to adopt a delegated act setting state-of-the-art limits itself. The benchmark it is working towards is the Union's target of cutting microplastic releases by 30 percent by 2030.

A battery warranty written into law

For anyone thinking about a used electric car, the battery provisions may matter more than the tailpipe ones.

Euro 7 requires every vehicle with a traction battery to carry a monitor of that battery's state of health, and it sets minimum performance requirements underneath. For a passenger car, a plug-in hybrid or a battery electric vehicle must retain at least 80 percent of its certified battery energy from new up to five years or 100,000 kilometres, whichever comes first, and at least 72 percent up to eight years or 160,000 kilometres. For a van, the thresholds are 75 percent and 67 percent.

Those are type-approval requirements on the manufacturer, not a consumer warranty you claim against your dealer. But they establish a legal minimum where the market has so far offered only commercial promises of varying quality, and they come with a measurement obligation attached, which is the part a second-hand buyer can actually use.

The paperwork changes too

Every vehicle is to come with an Environmental Vehicle Passport, a digital record of its environmental performance at the moment of registration: the pollutant limits it was approved against, its CO2 emissions, fuel and electricity consumption, electric range, motor power and battery durability. Drivers are also to have access to up-to-date readings from the car's own monitors, covering fuel consumption, battery state of health and pollutant emissions.

On-board monitoring systems are required to detect when exhaust emissions exceed the legal limits by a factor of 2.5 or more, to report that through the diagnostic port for roadworthiness tests and roadside inspections, and to trigger a warning to the driver so the fault gets repaired. In Portugal, that feeds into the inspeção periódica obrigatória (compulsory periodic inspection) that every car has to pass at a centre licensed by the Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (Institute for Mobility and Transport). The regulation also bars owners and workshops from disabling emissions control systems, which sits alongside the national rules on what a driver may legally change on a registered car.

What it clears away

Euro 7 replaces the framework that has governed vehicle emissions for nearly two decades. Regulations 715/2007 and 595/2009, the legal basis of Euro 5, Euro 6 and Euro VI, are repealed. Regulation 2017/1151, which carries the WLTP test procedure, is repealed with effect from 1 July 2030, and three further instruments follow on 1 July 2031. Exhaust tests themselves stay anchored to the WLTP laboratory cycle and to on-road Real Driving Emissions measurement, under UN Regulations 154 and 168.

For a driver in Portugal, the practical summary is short. Nothing about the car currently on your drive changes on 29 November. Nothing you can buy in a showroom changes that day either. What changes is the specification of the cars that will be designed from now on, and from late 2027 the specification of every new car that can be registered here at all.