The head of the Swedish car manufacturer Håkan Samuelsson told the Financial Times conference that his company will stop selling cars with internal combustion engines within ten years. He thus joined the British luxury brand Bentley, which also connects its future in the ten-year horizon only with electric cars.
“I would be surprised if we supplied non-electric cars in 2030,” Samuelsson is quoted as saying by Automotive News Europe. At the same time, the carmaker has not even really launched its first purely electric car, the XC40 P8 Recharge model. He should not get to the Czech Republic until next year. According to the carmaker’s earlier plan, clean electric cars should account for half of the carmaker’s sales in 2025.
Volvo combines its present mainly with plug-in hybrids. In this case, it should account for twenty percent of global sales, and thanks to them, the Swedes are calmly meeting their European CO2 emission limits. This avoids fines for exceeding them. The exemplary Volvo will even link its fleet of sold cars to Ford, helping it meet its 2020 emissions limit.
According to Samuelsson, he also supports the end of the sale of combustion models in general, fixed data in his opinion will encourage customers to buy electric cars rather than various forms of financial support.
“Setting clear rules on when we must stop selling cars with internal combustion engines is the right way to go,” he said. “Once you find out that gasoline and diesel engines are not part of our future, it’s easier for you to learn to speed up your transition to a new world.”
According to Samuelsson, Volvo, which belongs to the Chinese company Geely, can come to terms with the plans to end the sale of internal combustion engines, which were recently set by the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, according to them may be offered for another five years. “We will be very careful and will only supply electric motors before the laws require it somewhere,” Samuelsson said.
The transition to electric cars in the light of the ban on the sale of internal combustion engines was then likened to the advent of safety technologies, such as seat belts and their pretensioners, airbags, ABS or ESP. “These technologies were implemented relatively quickly, and it certainly wasn’t through financial incentives, and so on. It was all a matter of safety regulations.”
– .
