Carlos Tavares had promised it, he did it. On Wednesday March 29 at 2:30 p.m., the first meeting of its “Freedom of Movement Forum” will be held online, “an annual meeting of contributors committed to identifying how to provide clean, safe and affordable mobility for society and to face the challenges of global warming”. Their mission: “Solve problems, in a fact-based approach. »
Who are the contributors? Potentially, everyone. The forum, which will be held entirely on the Internet, is open to everyone. Just register there. The Stellantis boss has chosen to co-chair his council with Sobel Aziz Ngom, general manager of the Senegal Youth Consortium. Around them, they invited five experts: Massimo Ciuffini, an architect in charge of mobility within the Foundation for Sustainable Development in Rome, François Gemenne, migration specialist and co-author of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC), Kristina Lund, CEO of the American energy supplier AES, Reema Nanavaty, director of the Indian Association of Self-employed Women, and Jaehak Oh, president of the Korea Transport Institute.
This new place of debate is an institutional animal apart. On June 13, 2022, Carlos Tavares announced that Stellantis was leaving the Association of European Automobile Manufacturers, ACEA, to create this forum. It was five days after the vote by the European Parliament of the text prohibiting the sale of heat engines in Europe after 2035.
The right order
In the eyes of the boss of the world’s fourth-largest automobile group, the European lobby, still paralyzed by the “Dieselgate”, was unable to convince MEPs that they were tackling the problem from the wrong end. He therefore wants to raise public awareness in his own way.
The right order to decarbonize the automobile, he repeats each time he meets the press, would have been for Europe to first develop the production of green electricity − or at least decarbonized −, then to creates a charging infrastructure for electric cars, and only then bans the sale of thermal cars. Too bad if it took twenty years. In the meantime, motorists would have continued to buy less polluting engines than those of old cars which, in certain countries, are recharged with electricity supplied by gas or even coal-fired power stations, and which they will keep for too long before being able to buy electric cars that are still too expensive.
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