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• Auto industry incumbents use a delay strategy to thwart environmental policies. • The strategy is not temporal, as others argue, but pressure sensitive. • Our study introduces new resistance tactics deployed by incumbent actors. • Both industry and government use the EU-level to influence the other side. Most serious environmental and health problems caused by the transport sector stem from the automobile. While other sectors have reduced emissions, transport emissions have increased and the sector's sustainability transformation seems stalled. Why is that? And what role do incumbent automobile industry actors play? Relatively few scholars have focused on the behavior of these incumbents. Our study contributes towards filling this gap by analyzing two case studies of how the German automobile industry has reacted to environmental policy initiatives. Our analysis allows us to make several contributions to the literature. First, we demonstrate how industry and policy makers attempted to outmaneuver each other. Second, we illuminate several tactics employed by incumbents to resist change. And third, our analysis reveals a pattern of behavior that we argue is linked to the degree of pressure placed on incumbents. Most other attempts to identify patterns have prioritized the temporal dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]