It is very sad indeed. Weak politicians caving to commercial self interest yet again. Now they've got the problem of setting the correct bandings which is always a nightmare.

And if they do it by weight alone it won't help the sports car manufacturers at all. The Ferrari F430 weighs about the same as a Ford Focus Estate but the Ferrari puts out 430g/km and the Ford puts out emissions around the 160g/km mark.

GM & Ford are both "German" automakers too. This is a bit deeper than just an EU thing. Hard to believe there is no pressure coming from this side of the pond and Japan/Korea/China as well. Smaller displacements and more turbo/supercharging may be the ticket.

A2 1.2 TDI
0.240 g/km NOx emissions
0.021 g/km Particulate emissions
0-60mph: 14.0 seconds

Toyota Prius
0.032 g/km NOx emissions
0.016 g/km Particulate emissions
0-60mph: 9.8 seconds

"Unfortunately, the cost of working with aluminium, particularly with small production runs, meant that the A2 was more expensive than its competitors. This may have contributed to the relatively slow sales in conjunction with the dearth of marketing from Audi."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_A2

The beauty of a single limit across all cars is its simplicity and clarity.

Once you start introducing bands, you encourage people to move up the bands to hit their CO2 limit. Thus you might have a company making a car heavier to get it into a higher weight band - which is exactly what you are trying to avoid.
The trick is to figure out how to "band" it.

By weight is completely the wrong way.

- By internal volume - by some metric of head, leg and shoulder room + luggage volume ?

Some people do need Big cars - they do not need Heavy cars.

This would allow larger cars, but disallow sports cars, which would be sensible but a bit miserable.

Or you could additionally pay a tax to be in a certain CO2 band - say the excess number of gms of co2 * 200 Euros.
This would allow Porsche to stay in business but at a cost (which they could reduce over time).

I agree it this is a bit sad, perhaps a somewhat more gradual phase-in which won't ultimately stop at 130 g/km would be more realistic. The idea of a tax on bigger emitters is a good one. If that would also push a trend to EVs of one sort or another that would be excellent -- but then powerplant emissions would also need to be restricted. That said, the comparison of a Ford Focus to a Ferrari is a bit specious: low production garage queens may have terrible numbers but contribute basically nothing in the big picture. I see on the front page that Toyota sold 23150 Tundras in July 2007 -- in one month that's over 4.5 times Ferrari's annual production for all models. A phase-in for very low production marques would also be fair.

An opportunity missed...

I would have opted for the original 120 g/km as an fleet average, and producers of high-emissions cars would have to buy CO2 emissions rights (per vehicle) from producers of small / efficient cars.

That way, still everybody would be allowed to drive whatever he wants - but the pricing would be highly dependant on the CO2 emissions; ultimately, high- consumption cars (luxury/sports cars would need to be sold at a steep premium, if small cars like Smart, Aigo, C2, A2, Fox would not sell; when small cars would sell like crazy, big cars would get less expensive (and small cars more expensive).

Let the forces of the free market decide the "price" for making low emission cars; unfortunately, politicians can not repeat the same successful model of auctioning SO2 emissions rights as in the late 1980's... It simply was too successful getting rid of acid rain... (and, nowadays noone would believe that cleaning up SO2 would cost anywhere near 5000 USD/t as companies originally claimed - the prices dropped to somewhere around 80 USD/t...

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