BMW boss Oliver Zipse has called for a radical overhaul of European regulations to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035 – warning that the car industry "will halve in size in Europe" under the current rules.
EU regulations feature a firm 2035 cutoff for the sale of all CO2-emitting vehicles. UK regulations (under the zero-emission vehicle mandate) share the same cutoff date but feature an increasing percentage of EVs that must be sold each year.
Zipse said the decision to focus CO2 reduction purely on the tailpipe emissions of vehicles, rather than by looking at the whole lifecycle emissions of a manufacturer, along with the manufacturing, use and disposal of its vehicles, risks distorting the market.
Speaking to a select group of journalists at the launch of the electric BMW iX3, Zipse said: "We have the current system only because it's easy to explain to the public because a combustion engine has an exhaust pipe and to only look at that. That's not enough, just because it's so easy to explain.
"If you leave the current system, this industry will halve in size in Europe; it will only be 50% of the size. That's a big consequence for having a simplistic solution that's easy to explain to the public."
Zipse said the new regulations were flawed because they only look at tailpipe emissions and only apply to new cars.
"That's a very small, tiny bit [of a firm's overall CO2 output]," he said. "We don't look at supply chains. We don't look at fuels. We don't look at how the car was used or what happens to it at the end of its life cycle. We don't look at the structure of corporations and suppliers. Everything is completely ignored, because we only look at tailpipe emissions.
"It's a completely absurd system, and the only reason why it exists is because it exists. And you know, status quos are so robust because they're status quos; it doesn't mean that they're very good solutions."
BMW has developed its own proposal, which Zipse said is to "replace the electric-only approach with a technology-open approach" that measures overall emissions reductions by a company.
"It's right to have a target for CO2 reduction and then let them decide how they do that, whether they do that through more efficient buildings or their car fleet," he said.
"Everything counts as long as it reduces CO2: that can be a normal combustion engine, a plug-in hybrid, the new range-extender technology coming from China. The most important factors will still be electric cars, but everything that can contribute to bring down CO2 should contribute already today.
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