VW Says the Next Generation of Combustion Cars Will Be Its Last (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Volkswagen AG expects the era of the combustion car to fade away after it rolls out its next-generation gasoline and diesel cars beginning in 2026. "Our colleagues are working on the last platform for vehicles that aren't CO2 neutral," Michael Jost, strategy chief for Volkswagen's namesake brand, said Tuesday at an industry conference near the company's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. "We're gradually fading out combustion engines to the absolute minimum."

The world's largest automaker has started to introduce its first wave of electric cars, including next year's Porsche Taycan. The rollout across its stable of 12 automotive brands is forecast to comprise about 15 million vehicles, as the company earmarks $50 billion over the next five years to spend on its transformation to self-driving, electric cars. Production of the VW brand's I.D. Neo hatchback will start in 12 months in Germany, followed by other models from the I.D. line assembled at two sites in China as of 2020. VW plans to launch fully or partly electric versions across its lineup of more than 300 cars, vans, trucks and motorbikes by 2030. The company "will continue to modify its combustion engine technology after the new platform is introduced next decade," reports Bloomberg. "After 2050, there may still be some gasoline and diesel models in regions where there is insufficient charging infrastructure, according to Jost."

Comments

Better Product

[monkeyxpress]

The interesting thing is that this is not going to be because of the whole 'green' thing. Sure for some people that is important, and it is a nice add on, but if people really cared about that they would buy city cars instead of trucks or luxury sedans.

No, the reason this is going to happen is because they are better products. I live in a central city area, and after 5 years being carless am looking at buying a second hand car for work. I fix my own cars, but don't have the time to do that anymore. It is extremely annoying having to deal with timing belt changes (thankfully not so common now), potentially expensive emission control problems, changing spark plugs, water pumps, flushing coolant, engine oil every 6 months. As they get older (~100km for many modern cars) you have a whole bunch of gotchas that will empty your pocket. On one model of Nissan/Renault (would never buy) a friend had the direct injectors fail. They basically had to strip the head to fix it, and it was half the value of the car to fix. That's just incredible. Gas cars also have incredibly complicated transmissions and these can cause problems.

With an electric car you don't have to do any of these issues. You just charge and go. You don't even need to change the brake pads these days. And depending on your housing situation, not having to go to a petrol station and having a fully filled car every morning is a positive not a negative.

The other thing is that the cost of these things is going to keep going down. I see another trend on the horizon which will be battery replacements. I expect that once there are enough old electric cars with poor batteries, someone will start making replacement packs enmass. These will be cheap (as batteries have gotten cheaper) or have better capacity. So you can probably keep the same car for much longer and just keep changing the tyres and upgrading the pack as required.

Outside those with the money to burn, most people just want a car that is reliable and cheap to maintain. Electric cars will do that for them, and for that reason alone nobody will want to touch a thousands-of-things-can-go-wrong gas car once the cost becomes competitive.

Re: Interesting, "combustion cars"

[fluffernutter]

I can buy a Honda Accord new at $30K Canadian and buy another $30K of gas before I'm at your price point. That would probably take me the lifetime of the car.