Making electric cars the dominant vehicles on the road is key to curbing planet-warming emissions and protecting the climate. In a bid to reach that goal, an increasing number of countries and cities across the world have pledged to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by the end of the decade.
Now, Germany’s new governmental coalition has committed to phasing out the sale of combustion-engine vehicles by setting an ambitious target of putting at least 15 million electric vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2030.
The goal was announced last week in a document published by Germany’s next government of Social Democrats, Greens, and Free Democrats. To reach that goal, the country will need to rapidly increase the production of EVs while also banning the sale of new combustion-engine cars in the next few years.
“It can only be achieved if new cars with internal combustion engines are no longer registered before 2030,” Volker Quaschning, professor of renewable energy systems, told Bloomberg. “It makes sense to stop the registration of gasoline and diesel cars by around 2028.”
Currently, EVs make just one percent of the country’s fleet, with only about 570,000 registered battery-powered cars, according to Bloomberg. To get 15 million electric cars on the road, the country will have to boost production and sales of EVs by 33 percent a year through 2030. This may very well be feasible as the country has been making progress over the past year with generous subsidies and funding that helped double EV registrations.
