It’s official. From 2035, the sale of thermal cars within the EU Member States will be prohibited. On this Thursday, May 11, the Commission for the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) has just voted the new law relating to CO2 emission standards for internal combustion vehicles.
In December 2020, you were able to discover in our columns the ambitions of the European Union concerning thermal cars. Via brand new legislation, Europe wanted to ban the sale of thermal vehicles within the Member States from 2035. With this measure, the EU hopes to be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the Old Continent by 55%.
However, MEPs have just taken a first step in the adoption of this legislation. As announced on Twitter Pascal Canfin, President of the Environment Committee of the European Parliament, the new law governing car CO2 emission standards has just been passed, with 46 votes for, 40 against and 2 abstentions.
The EU votes the end of thermal cars for 2035
“The end of the sale of non-zero emission cars in 2035 is voted”, he congratulates himself. In fact, car manufacturers now have no choice but to to gradually electrify their fleet for the European market. Note that the brands did not wait for EU directives to proceed with the massive electrification of their productions. This is for example the case of Renault which aims for 100% electric cars by 2030 in France. For its part, Volkswagen has announced that it will stop the production of thermal cars for 2035. As for Toyota, the Japanese manufacturer has confirmed a massive investment of 13.6 billion dollars in batteries for electric cars, a sign of interest of the mark for this source of energy.
Even luxury brands like Porsche have decided to go electric. The German team claims that 80% of its cars will be electric by 2030. As you can imagine, Europe is not alone in adopting this kind of measure. The US government also wants 50% of new vehicles to be electric by 2030. Going back to European legislation, it should be noted that this is only the beginning of the parliamentary process, the project to be voted on in plenary session in June 2022 before final adoption.
Source: Pascal Canfin via Twitter