VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer said recent discussion of an e-fuel exception to the EU’s 2035 gas car ban is “unnecessary noise” and that “in 2035”. [combustion engines] they’re over anyway,” in a recent interview with Automotive News Europe.
The interview mostly covered European topics, such as the availability of Volkswagen’s upcoming electric vehicles in Europe. But the VW executive also spoke forcefully that electrification is a no-brainer.
The EU recently came close to finalizing a plan to ban new internal combustion engine cars by 2035 across the bloc, but at the last minute, car-producing countries such as Germany and Italy they opposed it. The proposal was scheduled not to get final approval until Germany reached a compromise with the EU Commission, allowing e-fuels as a “climate neutral” fuel for combustion vehicles.
E-fuels are synthetic fuels that can be produced from captured carbon emissions. They can be considered carbon neutral because these carbon emissions would have been released into the atmosphere, but are captured, converted into fuels, and then burned and…released back into the atmosphere. However, because their use as fuel did not contribute to increasing emissions above what would have been the baseline before their capture, they are therefore considered carbon neutral.
But e-fuels also need a source of carbon to power themselves to begin with, and most carbon capture currently occurs in oil and gas fields. This carbon is often used to help drill for more oil or is used in complicated accounting to make companies appear carbon neutral when they are not. If carbon reductions from capture are counted twice, for example by the oil company doing the capture i by the cars that are burning it; then we end up pretending we are making more carbon reductions than we really are.
And they still emit as many harmful air pollutants as fossil fuels and therefore remain harmful to human health.
It also takes energy to make e-fuels, and that energy could only be used to power an electric car in the first place. Why waste solar and wind resources turning carbon into fuel, only to burn it and release that carbon into the atmosphere, when you could charge a car with solar and wind electricity in the first place?
And they also perpetuate the combustion engine. An e-fuel exemption means companies can continue to make combustion engine cars, convince themselves they are carbon neutral, but also sell them in places without an e-fuel requirement, which still causes global warming . And these global warming emissions affect everyone, whether in Europe or Saudi Arabia.
The head of the VW brand sees e-fuels as a distraction
So the e-fuel exemption is a bit of status quo maintenance or “unnecessary noise,” as Schäfer rightly called it:
What do you think about Germany? [subsequently successful] proposal to amend the EU’s 2035 combustion engine ban to include cars powered by e-fuels?
Schäfer: It’s unnecessary noise from my point of view. Around 2035 [combustion engines] they are over anyway. We said that by 2033 we are done. By 2030 we plan to have 80 percent of our vehicles sold in Europe be battery electric, so why spend a fortune on old technology that doesn’t really give you any benefit?
Who is behind the German position? party politics? Oliver Blume, CEO of the VW Group?
Schäfer: There is no Mr. Blume behind it. I guarantee it. This discussion of e-fuels is widely misunderstood. They have a role to play in existing fleets, but they will not replace electric vehicles. This is total nonsense. Look at the physics of making e-fuels. We don’t have enough energy as it is, so why waste it on e-fuels?
VW has been one of the industry leaders when it comes to electrification. Much of its progress came under former CEO Herbert Diess, who stepped down last year and was replaced by former Porsche CEO Oliver Blume.
There was some question as to whether Blume would be as positive about electrification as Diess, who said consumers would be “fools” to buy one of VW’s gas cars in 2021. But it seems VW as a brand is at least moving forward with your electric vehicle. plans, according to Schäfer’s comments in this interview. And according to Schäfer, Blume, CEO of Germany’s largest company, appears not to have been behind Germany’s push to incorporate the e-fuel exemption into EU regulations.
Schäfer points out that the e-fuel issue is largely irrelevant for VW and should be irrelevant for the industry as a whole. VW is made with combustion engines, the demand for electric vehicles will be high in 2035 and it makes no sense to invest money to improve an older and inferior technology like combustion engines.
He also stated, in a response to the upcoming Euro 7 emissions regulations, that VW “would prefer to put [its] money on electrification over the last few years of the combustion engine than to make a final version that is prohibitively expensive.” If Euro 7 requires a lot of research and development to make gas engines cleaner, why bother with spend that money when electric vehicles are already clean?
The Electrek dam
Clearly we agree with Schäfer here. Making exemptions from regulations solely to perpetuate combustion engines is madness.
Not only will companies spend money developing a dead-end technology (which Daimler, the inventor of the combustion engine, stopped doing in 2019), they will now give up a perfectly good opportunity to electrify. By losing focus on dead technology, they only put themselves in a worse position in the long run for the future to come, no matter what.
We see this happening in the US as well, as the current commitments from car manufacturers are not enough in light of the new EPA rules. Automakers could respond to these rules by asking for exceptions so they don’t have to follow the rules, or they could increase their commitments in recognition that technology, consumer desires and the threat of climate change are advancing rapidly.
In the EU, some governments chose the former path, asking for exemptions. But smarter brands, like Voltswagen, seem to see the tide turning.
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