It’s Thursday, February 18, and electric vehicles are gaining steam.
Less than a month after General Motors announced its intention to end sales of gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035, Ford and Jaguar are both making major electric vehicle pledges. Ford is investing $1 billion in an electric vehicle production facility in Cologne, Germany, and announced on Wednesday that its entire passenger vehicle range in Europe will be all-electric by 2030. Jaguar is beating that date by five years, pledging earlier this week to become an all-electric brand by 2025. Land Rover, Jaguar’s sibling brand, is aiming for 60 percent of new vehicles to be emissions-free by 2030.
“We have the technology,” Thierry Bollore, the CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, told Bloomberg Television. “We know how to do it.”
These announcements point to big changes in the industry. After Mercedes-Benz tripled its all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle sales in 2020, Ola Källenius, CEO of Daimler (the parent company of Mercedes-Benz), told CNBC that the auto industry is “in the middle of a transformation.” The next decade will be “transformative,” according to Källenius, as the industry navigates a path to emissions-free driving.
The Smog
Need-to-know basis
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