Good news for the e-nobbly brigade. http://www.bike-eu.com/laws-regulations/nieuws/2017/5/new-whitepaper-e-mtbs-excluded-from-type-approval-10129996
After I cut and pasted the URL (ahem).
I discovered it's just some boring drivel about e-MTBs not being included in some EU legislation on road going vehicles...
So what?
A rather misleading use of the term "whitepaper", it is in fact just some commentary by a website on a law that was passed in 2013 (EU [url= http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32014R0044&from=EN ]Regulation 168/2013[/url]), presumably published for discussion a couple of years before that. Not a white paper in the sense of a proposal for legislation by someone actually responsible for putting legislation forward. Of course, it doesn't actually tell you where to find the actual Regulation, or even give a reference to the number so you can look it up yourself. Maybe they haven't actually read it themselves but are just relying on what other people have said about it?
Struggling to find a link to the actual thing, which works, I think this does it:
[url= http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32014R0044&from=EN// ]http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32014R0044&from=EN[/url]
Though it says it came into force in Jan 2016. There are also some delegated Regulations with more detail in them, which is what my link above ended up as for some reason.
ETA re the date, there is a let-out for the specific category in question, see Article 77.