EU Changes to Drivers' Licences Heralds Nullification Crisis

Via yet another executive fiat, Brussels is poised to erase whatever remains of member-states' sovereignty this autumn: a deep dive into what digital drivers' licences mean (part 1)

Let’s go down this rabbit-hole—and in a few minutes, you’ll either be ‘WTF?’ or think about other things. So, let’s do this—and keep in mind that non-English content comes in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added.

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In a Few Weeks, the EU Decides: Is the Driving License Revolution Threatening Millions?

By Philipp Hansen, Frankfurther Rundschau, 4 Oct. 2025 [source; archived]

The countdown is on: between October and November 2025, the EU Parliament will vote on what are arguably the most controversial driving licence reforms in years. For millions of drivers in Germany, things are getting serious—uncertainty is high, as the new rules could radically change the daily lives of many. Will seniors soon have to see a doctor to continue driving? Will campers be subject to an additional test? The planned changes, which are expected to take their final form in a few weeks, bring new obligations and heated debates.

According to the German Automobile Club (ADAC), up to 14 million drivers aged 65 and over could be affected if medical checks become mandatory. The EU leaves the decision to the member states: doctor’s visit or self-disclosure? Camper vans will soon be subject to a 4.25-ton limit—with additional training. This weight is equivalent to about two adult elephants. Implementation will take up to four years, but the decisive steps are being taken now…

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What’s in a Word (‘Reform’)?—Digital Driver’s Licence

I’ll stop needlessly citing from that breathless piece of reporting™, if only because it’s second-hand stuff; that link in the first paragraph is there in the original, and it leads to this piece with essentially the same information in the Munich-based Merkur dated 30 Jan. 2024 (archived), with one exception, however, for Martina Lippl spills the beans about the EU’s intentions here:

92 per cent of all adult Germans have a driver’s license. For 88 per cent of them, having their own license is important or even very important for managing everyday tasks. This was the result of a representative survey commissioned by the TÜV Association in 2022 [which isn’t linked].

Digital Driver’s License

A digital driver’s license has been under discussion for some time [are you surprised?]. A corresponding app on a smartphone would then be sufficient for a police check or when renting a car. The digital driver’s license was supposed to be launched in September 2021. Technical problems and security issues slowed the launch of such a digital driver’s license at the time.

And this, dear readers, is where we depart from more or less known German legacy media outlets and go down some of the crevices of the deeper rabbit holes. Buckle up, lest we run into a EU traffic stop.

The EU-Led Push to Digitise Everything

First up, some background via that Deep State-infested repository of common knowledge to set the scene. Over at Wikipedia, we read this:

On 1 March 2023, the European Commission released a proposal to modernise the legal framework surrounding driver training, examination, licences and cross-border enforcement of driving offences.^[18]

Specifically regarding driving licences, the measures presented included:

• Creation of a European digital driving licence, valid throughout the EU,

• Digitalisation of all licence renewal, replacement and exchange procedures, and

• Lowering the minimum age for obtaining a driving licence for cars and lorries to 17 years old.

These proposals would have to be considered through the usual EU legislative procedure before coming into effect.^[18]

Couple of things, and we’ll start with the last sentence: ‘the usual EU legislative procedure’ is coded lingo for ‘shit coming out of the Brussels-based Eurocrat netherworld’, which functions like this:

The EU Commission issues a new “directive” (which in non-Western countries is called a “decree”, except for the US where the term “executive order” is used), the content of which must then be aligned with, and integrated into, national legislation of the various member-states within a set period of time. This is meant by the term “transposition”, and it explicitly refers to national legislatures or even constitutions adapting existing laws or introducing new ones, that allow for the implementation of the “directive” issued by the EU Commission.

I’ve written these lines in spring 2024, which appeared under the title ‘A Citizen’s Guide to the Subversion of Democracy’, and the issues with the architecture of the EU boil down to the following conundrum:

The EU Commission, technically the “guardian of the EU treaties”, issues regulations, decisions, and directives that, as a matter of course and EU “Law” as defined above, either apply automatically or must be “transposed” into national law.¹

And we’re at the point where the EU Commission, with the help of the EU Parliament (don’t worry, it’s not a real legislature as it lacks the fundamental right to initiate legislation, which is the Commission’s prerogative) is mulling such a ‘directive’.

Don’t take it from me, here’s directly from the horse’s mouth (apologies to all friends of equines) as per—yet another press release dated 1 March 2023—the following (emphases in the original):

Modernised driving licence rules to make roads safer and simplify everyday life

The proposal on driving licences amends existing EU law and is inspired by best practices already in force in several Member States.

A key objective of the new rules will be improving road safety, with measures including:

• A probation period of at least two years for novice drivers after passing the test, and a zero-tolerance rule on drink-driving. This is essential as even if young drivers only represent 8% of all car drivers, 2 out of 5 fatal collisions involve a driver or rider aged under 30.

• Allowing young people to take their test and commence accompanied driving of cars and lorries from the age of 17, to gain driving experience.

• Adapting driver training and testing to better prepare drivers for the presence of vulnerable users on the road. This will help improve safety for pedestrians, cyclists, as well as users of e-scooters and e-bikes as the EU transitions to more sustainable urban mobility.

• A more targeted assessment of medical fitness, taking into account advances in medical treatment for diseases such as diabetes. Drivers will also be encouraged to update their driving skills and knowledge to keep up with technological developments.

Now, I’m all for some of these things, such as the DUI aspects, but they’re already an offence punishable by a variety of penalties depending on the seriousness of any given incident.

Do note that the EU Commission infers causation to correlation in the first bullet point about young people driving; yes, I’m aware of the fact that new drivers cause most accidents for a variety of reasons, many of which boil down to esp. male brains not being fully mature before the mid-20s.

What is done here, however, is insidious as the age-accident correlation is put to work in a simple calculation of ‘young people drink + young people drive = stricter rules for all under 30’. Now, I’m not making claims that these things don’t happen; all I’m saying is that most countries already have laws and regulations on the book prescribing the ingestion of alcohol before/while driving a car, and I’m all for this. The issue I take here is—the enforcement of this, and this is where we will venture further into this rabbit-hole.

Before we do so, do note the third bullet point with the now-ubiquitous inference of ‘vulnerable users in the road’, which is a clear reference to the Covid era and its ‘no-one is safe, unless everyone is safe [vaccinated]’ mantra. I must mention this here before continuing for this is the wedge that’s going to be used: all that is proscribed is done to ‘keep you safe’.

Specific Nonsense, Courtesy of the EU

Here follow a few more paragraphs from that press release to indicate what the EU Commission thinks (sic) about these new rules (Italics mine):

It will be much easier to replace, renew or exchange a driving licence since all procedures will be online. In the same vein, it will also be easier for citizens from non-EU countries with comparable road safety standards, to exchange their driving licence for an EU one.

Updated testing rules will take into account the transition to zero-emission vehicles. They will, for example, assess the knowledge and skills linked to advanced driving assistance systems and other automated technologies. Novice drivers will also be taught how their driving style has an impact on their emissions—the timing of gear changes, for example. Finally, the permitted mass of a ‘B’ category vehicle will be adjusted for alternatively fuelled vehicles, since battery-carrying zero-emission vehicles can be heavier.

Two things to note: first, of course, driving instructions will now come with appropriate shaming of new drivers, which is particularly hilarious considering that most vehicles now have automatic transmission. Second, there you have it: ‘alternatively fuelled vehicles’ are heavier, which means that several problems—that will, in due course, be taken into account as soon as a social credit carbon emissions rationing scheme is introduced in a few years—are built into this piece of nonsense; these include way more maintenance (costs) for roads due to heavier EVs, the unresolved issue of used EVs, and, at the very least, greater pollution due to heavier EVs equals more particulates. You may rest assured that all of these things are known to the Eurocrats, and once everybody has such a shiny new digital (S.M.A.R.T.) driver’s licence, new rules will be issued.

And if you thought, I’m joking about any of this shit, I’m decidedly *not*:

Current EU rules on cross-border enforcement have helped to ensure that non-resident road offenders do not remain anonymous. Nonetheless, in 2019 some 40% of cross-border offences were committed with impunity, either because the offender was not identified or because the payment was not enforced.

Today’s proposal seeks to address this by allowing enforcement authorities to gain access to national driving licence registers [i.e., your driver’s licence data will be shared automatically]. The Commission is also proposing to strengthen the role of established national contact points so they can better cooperate with the enforcement authorities involved in the investigation of offences. This will address current shortcomings in cooperation between Member States when investigating offences.

CCTV is everywhere, registration number identification is among the easiest things to do (think: CCTVs at traffic light-mediated intersections), and once the data-sharing is up and running, there’s no escaping Big Brother. Moreover, if convenience™ (‘look, it’s all on your S.M.A.R.T. phone’) is the sandwich part, here’s the turd in said sandwich:

The Commission proposes to expand the scope of traffic offences covered to:

• not keeping sufficient distance from the vehicle in front;

• dangerous overtaking;

• dangerous parking [lol, if they weren’t serious: enforcement of parking fees in Bergen, Norway, is already done with a car scanning licence places: no more metre maids here];

• crossing one or more solid white lines;

• wrong-way driving;

• not respecting rules on the use of emergency corridors;

• the use of an overloaded vehicle.

These additions will help reduce impunity for such offences and improve Member States’ ability to penalise offenders from other Member States. It will also ensure equal treatment of resident and non-resident offenders.

I didn’t add any Italics here, for everything is spelled out; add your vehicle’s virtually permanent collection and transmission of reams of data about all of the above to the analytical possibilities of AI™-enabled enforcement, and you can easily see how this entire scheme grows from a shit sandwich into an instrument of coercion in no time:

• 9 out of 10 people may require a car (driver’s licence) in their everyday life

• soon, all such licences are digital and transmitting non-stop

• and if you do any of the above-related things—and let’s be honest: everyone is doing several of these every time we drive—it’s directly linked to you soon-to-be digital ID/wallet combo, you’re fucked

For this is what the EU Commission’s press release (!!!) also envisions:

The updated laws will ensure that the rights of people accused of traffic offences are upheld. Non-residents retain the right to an effective remedy and a fair trial, to the presumption of innocence, and to defence. These rights will be better guaranteed by provisions ensuring unified content and delivery of penalty notices, by ensuring recipients of such notices are able to verify their authenticity, and by making the sharing of information with presumed offenders a standard requirement [in case you wondered what the EU considers ‘due process’].

A dedicated IT portal will give citizens easy access to information on the road safety rules in place in each Member State and, in time, allow them to pay any fines directly [isn’t that just *wonderful*?]…

Driver disqualifications with EU-wide effect: an end to impunity for severe offences

To prevent impunity among road traffic offenders, a new system will be put in place, allowing for an EU-wide driving disqualification when a Member State decides to disqualify a driver because of an offence committed on its territory.

The End of Sovereignty (in the EU)

All of the above sounds eminently reasonable as long as you disregard the minor technicality that such a disqualification cannot be done because of, you know, national borders delineating jurisdiction. Basically, e.g., German police may take away your permission to drive in Germany but they cannot, for obvious reasons of being police in Germany, make you stop driving elsewhere in the EU, for instance in Spain. This has to do with both Germany and Spain being different countries.

What the EU Commission now proposes is to effectively change this via executive fiat—and all is done, of course, in the name of ‘safety’ when, in fact, this is a power grab of the first order:

Holding road traffic offenders accountable in all Member States is essential for road safety. However, under current rules, when a serious offence results in a driving disqualification, it cannot be enforced EU-wide if the driver committed the offence in a Member State other than the one that issued his/her driving licence [yep, because German police isn’t authorised to enforce German rules in Spain].

Today’s proposal covers severe road traffic offences such as excessive speeding, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and causing death or serious bodily injury as a result of any traffic offence.

With the EU Commission’s new proposal, the above-related laundry list of offences is added to the existing regulatory régime.

Here’s the bullshit bingo verbiage with links and references:

In its EU road safety policy framework 2021-2030, the Commission recommitted to its ambitious goal of having close to zero deaths and zero serious injuries on EU roads by 2050 (‘Vision Zero’) and to reducing deaths and serious injuries by 50% by 2030. Today’s proposals will help to achieve these goals, and were announced in the Commission’s 2020 Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy.

The Commission published most recent road safety figures last week, showing fatalities remain below pre-pandemic levels, but progress remains to [sic] slow.

The Commission is implementing a Safe System Approach to driving in the EU. This Safe System requires safe driving, safer vehicles, safer infrastructure, lower speeds and better post-crash care.

Bottom Lines

Don’t do stupid shit, such as voluntarily handing over your driver’s licence if you don’t have to.

As long as the EU exists, the Eurocrats will come up with stupid ideas to enforce whatever absurd shit they deem necessary. I’ll dissect one of the parts of their proposal in the next posting, for rapid enforcement via cumbersome procedures that are fragmented across jurisdictions is one of, if not the, key to compliance without an openly totalitarian police force.

Permanently-transmitting devices, such as S.M.A.R.T. phones and esp. newer cars are the ideal tool for this kind of dystopian nonsense (‘Vision Zero’): if 9 out of 10 people need a car right now, taking away and/or fining them for things, such as ‘not keeping sufficient distance’ or ‘dangerous parking’ is a sure-fire way to achieve compliance.

Then there’s the entire jurisdictional quandary, which we’ll look at in a future posting, but I’ll mention one thing here: whatever the arguable merits of cross-border enforcement, just consider the fundamental implications here—this simple regulatory rule-change not merely virtually erases the jurisdictional boundaries that still remain between EU member-states; more insidiously, it creates a precedent for future ‘adjustments’ of the EU Commission’s purview in light of increasingly anachronistic things, such as the sovereignty of the citizenry, constitutional jurisdictions, and ‘even’ (sic) in the field of int’l relations—if the UN is an assembly of notionally sovereign states, EU member-states that cannot specify their jurisdictional boundaries (if any) may, ipso facto, no longer claim to be a full-fledged sovereign state.

Yet, these things are ‘high politics’, and we’ll revisit this issue soon.

In the meantime, here’s what I think can be done as a private individual:

• if possible, get a so-called dumb phone, preferably with a pre-paid card and a removable battery, and only use it when necessary

• it is virtually impossible not to have a S.M.A.R.T. phone these days, so try to limit your use, switch off everything in terms of data transmission that can be done (e.g., GPS tracking, apps reporting™ usage automatically, etc.; if I’m not using™ my phone, it’s in flight mode, which isn’t good but it’s better than trans-ceiving permanently; consider getting a ‘de-googled’ phone)

• buy used cars without much fancy electronics (I’m driving a 2017 model), preferably with an internal combustion engine as driving an EV is tantamount to sitting in a microwave oven on wheels while the fancy assistance™ or self-driving software results in insane amounts of RF exposure

• speaking of cars, find out about your Vehicle Identification Number (this is in the multi-digit number visible in one of the corners of your car’s windshield) and look it up online (e.g., here) to learn what and to whom your (sic) car automatically transmits data

• if installed, get rid of so-called S.M.A.R.T. devices in your home, such as laundry machines, dishwashers, or light systems; first of all, you don’t need to switch on the light or turn up the heat while you’re on vacation (doh), and, second, if you can do so remotely, others may do so, too

While the listing could continue for some time, the purpose of these data-transmitting devices is perfectly obvious: it’s to enforce compliance with whatever shit comes down the pipe once most people signed onto it.

The driver’s licence régime change is the perfect vehicle (pun intended) for this as most people rely on cars; one way to opt out of these things, of course, is to move into a shiny new ‘15-minute S.M.A.R.T. city’ (prison ward) where you don’t need a car. In this ‘Hotel California’ (The Eagles) dystopian future, you may also never leave, but, hey, at least you can get wasted and walk home, right?

The bigger problem I do sense here is the creation of a EU/EEC-wide precedent for both enforcement of ever-changing rules made no longer by an authority related to one’s residential/national jurisdiction but upon determination of the Eurocracy in Brussels.

In the end, this is what the post-sovereign age is shaping up to becoming, with its un-natural emergence due to both an insouciant, care-less citizenry (whose members are becoming ever less-deserving of that moniker) and the creation of an ever-expanding roster of new offences that will be enforced digitally once digital ID/wallets are adopted.

Note, specifically, the connection of renewal of driver’s licences for seniors can now be made contingent on passing a health check; while I’m not technically against doing this for the obvious reasons (e.g., ability to see and have commensurate glasses is a relevant thing), doing so re-creates, and thus institutionalises, mobility restrictions in the mould of one’s ‘vaccination status’.

So, in the grander scheme of things, the European national state—and with it the freedoms and laws deriving from the sovereign individual—aren’t merely under attack.

Compliance with this all-out assault has already resulted in a thousand cuts, and if this continues unchecked—something your and my politicos™ are determined to do—all of what remains of your liberty will be gone before you notice it.

The most pertinent historical analogy here appears to be the so-called nullification crisis of the 1830s, which was unresolved until the so-called Civil War between the US and the Confederacy.

Looks like we’ll get a farcical re-do of these issues before too long; heck, we’re already in the middle of it.

1. For some more relevant passages, I’d recommend consideration of these two paragraphs, but I submit that the entire essay is worth your time:

In the olden pre-EU membership days, the citizens elected representatives who, assembled in a parliament, promulgated laws to be executed by the government and double-checked by the judiciary. In this brave new world of ours, by contrast, the EU Commission, technically the “guardian of the EU treaties”, issues regulations, decisions, and directives that, as a matter of course and EU “Law” as defined above, either apply automatically or must be “transposed” into national law.

If we applied the EU’s own definitions of “primary” and “secondary” law, we clearly see that whatever the EU Commission decrees must be incorporated by the various national legislatures, either automatically or via changes in the national laws of member-states, including constitutional arrangements.