'Dieselgate could encourage their use'

Ba­si­cally, we are look­ing at a much more seg­mented mar­ket in the fu­ture. If today, in gen­eral, some 60% of reg­is­tered ve­hi­cles are diesel, with an­other 39% using petrol and 1% elec­tric, in the next 10 years we are prob­a­bly look­ing at 20% of cars being petrol, be­tween 10 and 15% diesel, an­other 20% elec­tric, 15% gas and be­tween 5 and 10% pow­ered by other types of en­ergy, such as hy­dro­gen.

Each type of ve­hi­cle re­sponds to a dif­fer­ent need. It makes lit­tle sense for some­one who only does about 30 kilo­me­tres a day to go and buy a diesel-dri­ven car. It just does not make fi­nan­cial sense.

No. With the cri­sis, few peo­ple con­sider buy­ing an elec­tric or plug-in hy­brid ve­hi­cle, de­spite the many fi­nan­cial in­duce­ments, such as re­duced tolls, sub­sidised or free park­ing, and other in­cen­tives. How­ever, it now seems as if sales are ris­ing and that peo­ple are be­gin­ning to see it as an­other op­tion. You also need to bear in mind that while the price of an elec­tric car is a bit higher than that of a con­ven­tional ve­hi­cle, in the long term the sav­ings on fuel and main­te­nance are sig­nif­i­cant. The dif­fer­ence in price can be seen above all in the more eco­nom­i­cal ve­hi­cles. If a car costs 15,000 euros, a sim­i­lar elec­tric model will cost you about 4,000 euros more. How­ever, with higher-end cars that cost more than 60,000 euros, there is al­most no dif­fer­ence in the prices of elec­tric and con­ven­tional ve­hi­cles. The same is true for the likes of light goods ve­hi­cles, which for cities is a good eco­nomic op­tion.

About four or five years ago there was a big change, with sales on the rise in just about all sec­tors of the mar­ket and man­u­fac­tur­ers start­ing to use new tech­nol­ogy to de­velop in­creas­ingly ef­fi­cient bat­ter­ies. The aim now is to make bat­ter­ies lighter that will charge quicker and also pro­vide greater range. I think that the next 10 years will be cru­cial.

We could say that Nis­san and Re­nault are a step ahead of the other man­u­fac­tur­ers, even though all of them are now in­volved in the mar­ket, but they were the first ones to take it se­ri­ously. An­other pi­o­neer in the sec­tor is the Tesla com­pany, which makes what we could call the fer­raris of elec­tric ve­hi­cles. They are ex­pen­sive cars but have a good po­si­tion in the mar­ket in the US and north­ern Eu­rope. De­pend­ing on the mar­ket, they pro­vide di­rect com­pe­ti­tion to brands such as Mer­cedes and BMW and have de­vel­oped ve­hi­cles with a range of 400 to 500 kilo­me­tres. In terms of coun­tries, Nor­way is the leader, with 20% of their cars being elec­tric thanks to a tax sys­tem that pe­nalises the use of con­ven­tional com­bus­tion en­gines.

It could ac­cel­er­ate their adop­tion in cities like Paris, which is look­ing into ban­ning diesel ve­hi­cles in the cen­tre of the city. It could speed things up, but the elec­tric ve­hi­cle is a re­al­ity and it is here to stay.