Bratislava: The Slovak parliament is working through a bill that will rewrite who pays when a product goes wrong, and it is doing so with less than three months on the clock. Every member state must transpose Directive (EU) 2024/2853 by 9 December 2026. Three have finished. Most have not.
Hungary adopted its implementing law in December 2025, Lithuania followed in June 2026 and Croatia in July. Twelve more governments have published drafts, among them Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Italy, Poland and the Nordic states, with the German, Dutch and Slovak texts furthest through their parliaments. Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal and Spain have shown no public progress at all.
Why the deadline bites harder than usual
Late transposition normally produces a warning letter and a slow infringement file. This directive behaves differently because it draws a line in time rather than in law. The new regime governs products placed on the market or put into service after 9 December 2026. The 1985 rules continue to govern everything placed on the market before it.
A manufacturer therefore needs to know which regime attaches to a shipment leaving a warehouse that week, and in five member states nobody can answer that question from the statute book. Insurers pricing 2027 liability cover face the same blank. Companies end up drafting contracts against a directive rather than against the national law that will actually be litigated.
Software became a product and nobody has tested it
The substantive change is broader than the calendar dispute. The directive treats software, artificial intelligence systems, digital manufacturing files and interconnected digital components as products subject to no-fault liability. A defective update now sits in the same legal category as a defective brake pad. Free and open-source software developed outside commercial activity stays out, which spares maintainers but not the companies that package their work commercially.
Claimants also get help proving their case. The directive lowers the evidentiary burden, introduces disclosure obligations that force defendants to hand over technical material, and extends liability along the supply chain to importers, fulfilment providers and, in defined circumstances, the firm that substantially modifies a product already sold.
Each of those elements will produce its first real ruling somewhere in Europe, and the venue matters. A software house facing a claim in a member state that transposed generously will fight a different case from one facing the same facts under a narrower national text.
The directive claims maximum harmonisation, which in principle forbids governments from adding or subtracting protection. The published drafts already diverge in three places.
The first is the development risk defence, the argument that the state of scientific knowledge at the time made the defect undiscoverable. Member states may retain it or drop it, and they are splitting. The second is non-material damage, where national tort traditions treat psychological harm very differently. The third is the scope of disclosure, where courts in some systems will order far broader production of documents than in others.
Forum shopping follows naturally. A consumer group choosing where to bring a representative action across a pan-European product will read those three variables before anything else, and the collective redress machinery built under the 2020 representative actions directive gives them the vehicle to act on the choice.
The Commission will eventually report on how the regime works in practice, but that review arrives years after the first judgments have set the direction. The formative cases will be decided under whatever national texts exist in December, including the improvised ones.
Companies selling connected devices, industrial software or anything that receives an over-the-air update should treat the next twelve weeks as a mapping exercise rather than a compliance one. The obligation is uniform on paper. The exposure will not be.
