Author / Liu Shanshan
Editor/Zheng Yu Typesetting/Wang Lin
What makes fuel vehicle fans shout out is that Europe, which has accumulated a century of advantages in the automotive industry, has radically proposed to stop selling fuel vehicles in 2035.
A few days ago, the European Parliament put forward a proposal to stop the sale of new fuel vehicles in the EU in 2035.The proposal was passed with 339 votes in favor, 249 against, and 24 abstentions.
What is even more unexpected is that the traditional fuel car companies Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have publicly expressed their support for this proposal.Volkswagen said the proposal was "ambitious, but achievable".Ekater von Kleiden, head of external relations at the Mercedes-Benz Group, said that Mercedes-Benz is now ready to sell 100% of its electric models by 2030.
The fuel car giant Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen have approved the ban on combustion. Does this mean that the "banning order" is really coming?
Soon, things turned around.On June 21, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said at an event hosted by the Confederation of German Industry (BDI) that Germany would not agree to stop selling gasoline-powered cars around 2035.On June 22, a German government spokesman once again made it clear that the German government still needs to discuss the European Union's plan to ban the sale of new vehicles with internal combustion engines from 2035.
Since the policy of banning the sale of fuel vehicles requires the consent of all member states, Germany is now shouting "no", making the EU's ban on the sale of fuel vehicles in 2035 again uncertain.
In recent years, new energy vehicles have indeed been recognized by more and more consumers, but must there be an alternative relationship between new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles?
Why transform?
In fact, before the European Parliament proposed a proposal to stop the sale of new fuel vehicles in the EU in 2035, the plans of countries around the world to stop the sale of fuel vehicles were endless.
According to public information, Norway plans to implement a policy of banning the sale of traditional fuel vehicles in 2025; the Netherlands initially set this time at 2025, but it was later changed to 2030; the California government, which has independent legislative power in the United States, limited the ban on the sale of fuel vehicles. By 2030; France and the United Kingdom will delay by ten years, and will ban the sale of traditional fuel vehicles in 2040, including the United Kingdom, including gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles.
Although my country does not have a clear plan for the ban on the sale of fuel vehicles, as early as during the TEDA Forum in 2017, Xin Guobin, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology, revealed that my country is working on making a timetable for the delisting of fuel vehicles; in 2019, the thirteenth national The National People's Congress's discussion on the delisting of fuel vehicles has been put on the agenda again.At present, Hainan Province in my country has given priority to setting an example, and the local area will officially stop the sale of fuel vehicles in 2030.
The reasons why fuel vehicles have become the "target of public criticism" are that, first, environmental pollution is serious, and reducing carbon emissions has become a global goal; second, many countries hope to change the situation of heavy dependence on foreign oil resources.
Data show that due to the melting of polar glaciers caused by global warming, sea levels are changing at a rate of 6 cm per 10 years; according to 2017 related data, cars emit as much as 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. , in the next 30 years will grow to 6 billion tons, the situation is grim.
Under the Paris Agreement, the members of the agreement aim to limit the global average temperature rise this century to within 2 degrees Celsius and to keep global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Belgium, as the main member states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are the first to take the lead in reducing carbon emissions.
In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the EU proposes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 55% from 1990 levels by 2030, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from new cars by 100% by 2035.According to a study released by the United Nations, nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation.About 12% of EU CO2 emissions come from cars.
In addition, there are currently 163.6 billion tons of recoverable oil reserves in the world, which are mainly concentrated in the Middle East, the Russian Far East and the ocean.Although Europe and the United States also have oil, they still rely more on imports.China has a lot of oil reserves, but the consumption is huge.According to previous data, China's dependence on foreign oil is about 70%, and it is also a major oil importer.For countries in a similar situation, they all hope to reduce oil dependence on foreign countries and take the lifeblood of industrial development into their own hands.
Open the curtain of transformation
The reason why Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and other companies have been light on the proposal of "banning combustion" is that they all formulated transformation plans earlier.
The Volkswagen Group is one of the car companies with an earlier and more determined plan for electrification.In 2021, Volkswagen and Audi announced that they will stop the research and development of internal combustion engines; according to the plan, the Audi brand will launch its last all-new fuel model in 2025, and Audi will stop selling fuel models by 2030, while the Volkswagen brand announced that it will stop selling fuel vehicles in the European market in 2035. Sell petrol cars.On March 5, 2021, the Volkswagen Group said that by 2030, electric vehicles will account for 70% of new cars sold by the Volkswagen brand in Europe, while the Chinese and US markets will account for 50%.
At the same time, Mercedes-Benz has previously released an electrification transformation plan.According to the plan, Mercedes-Benz will realize that the sales of pure electric and plug-in hybrid models will account for 50% of the total sales in 2025, and stop the sale of fuel vehicles in 2030, that is, the sales of new cars in 2030 will basically be transformed into pure electric models.In addition, starting from 2025, all new models released by Mercedes-Benz will be based on pure electric platforms, and each of its models will provide a choice of pure electric versions. At that time, Mercedes-Benz will also launch three new pure electric vehicle architecture platforms, covering all Medium and large passenger vehicles, performance electric vehicles, pure electric MPVs and light commercial vehicles.
At the same time, BMW Group will stop selling fuel vehicles in the EU in 2030. It expects to launch 12 pure electric models in the Chinese market by 2023, covering almost all current market segments.
In other words, in the schedules of Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW, the time point for stopping the sale of fuel vehicles is basically earlier than the plan formulated by the EU.The biggest test for these car companies may be whether plug-in hybrid models are within the scope of suspension.
In fact, the transformation of traditional fuel vehicles has not been chosen by enterprises.Today, even Japanese car brands that had previously taken a wait-and-see attitude toward electrification have announced their transformation.In April last year, Honda said that pure electric and fuel cell models would account for 40% of total vehicle sales in 2030, 80% in 2035, and 100% in 2040, and discontinued the production of fuel vehicles.In January this year, Katsuhiro Inoue, head of Honda Motor China, stated that he would strive to sell 800,000 pure electric vehicles by 2030, and pointed out: "If we cannot win the competition in China, which is promoting electrification, we will be eliminated from the world. We must Change the whole field, and the winner will be decided in the next five years.”
Ultra-luxury car brands are also not immune. Ferrari has previously planned to launch its first pure electric model in 2025, and Lamborghini has also set the launch of its first electric car in 2028.
No matter whether the proposal to ban the sale of fuel vehicles is radical or not, the reality is that the trend of electrification has been fully rolled out.
market expansion
From the data, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles is indeed rising.
According to the 2021 global new energy brand sales data released by the CleanTechnica website, the cumulative global sales of new energy models in 2021 will be nearly 6.5 million, an increase of 108% over the same period last year.In 2021, China will rank first with sales of 2.9398 million new energy passenger vehicles, accounting for 45% of the global new energy passenger vehicle market share.
"The cumulative sales of new energy vehicles has risen sharply from 20,000 at the end of 2012 to 11.08 million at the end of May this year. Since 2015, production and sales have ranked first in the world for seven consecutive years." At the press conference on the theme of "China's Decade" series, Xin Guobin said that in the past ten years, the development of my country's new energy vehicle industry has grown from small to large, from weak to strong, and has become an important force leading the transformation and upgrading of the global auto industry.
According to the latest data of the domestic passenger vehicle industry, by the end of May 2022, the penetration rate of domestic new energy vehicles will reach 26%.A year ago, in January 2021, this figure was only 6%.
Some car companies have even announced their bid farewell to fuel vehicles.As BYD announced in April this year, it will stop the production of fuel vehicles from March 2022.In the future, BYD will focus on pure electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the automotive business, becoming "the first traditional car company in the world to stop producing fuel vehicles."
"From the perspective of the new energy vehicle plans issued by major countries and governments around the world, by 2030, or 2035 at the latest, there will be no more fuel vehicle sales in the market, and a new trend has already occurred." Ni Jun, chief manufacturing officer, said this at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
These data point to the fact that more and more consumers are beginning to accept the new thing of new energy vehicles.However, is there necessarily a substitution relationship between electric vehicles and fuel vehicles?The choice should still be left to the consumer.
opposition
Putting aside the pressure that the proposal to stop selling fuel vehicles brings to traditional auto companies, energy supply and the resulting unemployment problems cannot be ignored.In Lindner's view, there will still be a market for internal combustion engines after 2035, so banning the sale of gasoline vehicles in 2035 is a wrong decision.
The European Parliament also proposed that more than 1 million charging stations must be built in Europe in 2025, and this number will increase to 3.5 million by 2030. At the same time, it must also ensure that there must be a charging station every 60 kilometers on the highway, and every 150 There must be a hydrogen refueling station per kilometer.
However, in the opinion of Mueller, chairman of the German Automobile Association, the current charging infrastructure in Europe is far from being able to support a full switch to electric vehicles, and rashly stopping the sale of fuel vehicles will only increase the cost of buying cars for consumers.Data show that there are currently about 60,000 charging piles in Germany.
More than that, the automotive industry plays an important role in the European economy, accounting for about 7% of EU GDP, supporting 14.6 million jobs in the region, and figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association show that electric vehicles and plug-in Hybrid vehicles will account for 18% of new passenger car sales in the EU in 2021.
Representatives from Italy also tried to propose exemption regulations at the meeting: car brands with annual production of less than 1,000 vehicles can be exempted from this case, while manufacturers with production between 1,000-10,000 vehicles can delay the implementation.
In fact, European new energy vehicles still rely on external materials.Taking lithium batteries as an example, the European battery industry lags behind in terms of talent, technology accumulation, raw material supply, and even the structure of the industrial chain.According to the German "Süddeutsche Zeitung" report, traditional German car manufacturers are rapidly launching a variety of electric models, which require a large number of battery components, mainly lithium-ion batteries containing nickel, manganese and cobalt. The above battery materials and battery products are mainly imported. from China.
It is worth noting that the fuel vehicles mentioned in the proposal of the European Parliament even include hybrid models, which means that more car companies will be affected.When Europe began to ban the sale of fuel vehicles in the past two years, many car companies have adopted 48V mild hybrid and PHEV plug-in hybrid routes to "evade" the classification of fuel vehicles.However, the proposal mentioned that "in 2035, the carbon dioxide emissions of passenger cars must be reduced by 100%", which has completely avoided the previous "edge ball" practice of car companies.
