| Even bigger than the city by city ban is the huge, and ever more demanding EU commission fines on car makers, measured by grams of CO2 averaged across the fleet. So what's happening is VW is trying to get ahead of the enormous fines which will make it impossible to keep selling larger sized ICE cars in the EU (e.g. SUVs which are becoming ever more popular in Europe). > According to the EU, fleet emissions in 2018 were 120g/km, which means automakers need a 21 percent reduction overall to avoid fines that could total as much as 33 billion euros this year, according to some estimates. Each gram over the limit, per vehicle, will cost automakers 95 euros. > Each automaker has a different target, based on the average mass of the vehicles they sell, and only 95 percent of sales are measured in 2020, meaning that some high-polluting cars won't count. Even so, analyst ISI Evercore has warned that the "2020-21 CO2 regulation poses the biggest risk to the auto industry in recent memory." Source: https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/how-automakers-plan-a... EDIT: Some countries, e.g. Ireland[1] and the UK[2], have decided to ban all new ICE cars completely from 2030. [1] https://www.newstalk.com/news/electric-vehicle-ownership-sho... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/the-uk-plans-to-ban-sales-of... |