Opinion: Frankfurt is when electrification gets serious

In the intervening four years, the EU introduced stricter pollution laws and real-world tests but, much more importantly, has put in train extremely demanding fuel economy laws, which start to kick-in next year.

The short version is that many carmakers have to sell quite a few electrified vehicles for 2021. According to one calculation, the average will be between 8 and 15% of annual new car sales. Makers of larger cars, including Daimler, Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo, are looking at a share of 10% and above.

Selling a pure EV is the most efficient way of driving down a company’s fleet CO2 figure, which is why you’ll be hear an awful lot about battery electric cars over the next six months.

According to detailed calculations by Berlin-based automotive analyst Matthias Schmidt based on the complex rules used to work out a maker’s fleet CO2, Volkswagen will need to sell around 300,000 electric cars next year. That’s as well as selling many more plug-in hybrid version models of its conventional cars in order to hit its EU target average of 96g/km of CO2.

To give you some idea of the sales mountain European carmakers have to climb, Schmidt’s figures show that in the first half of 2019, China saw sales of around 550,000 electric vehicles (though this includes light commercial vehicles) Western Europe 184,000 sales, with 127,000 sales in the US and a minuscule 13,000 in Japan.

Although this shows the EU market for electric cars leaping – albeit from a very small base – VW’s ID sales in 2020 will have to be as high as the entire Western EU market for electric cars was this year alone.

When you add in the number of electric cars the other brands also need to sell, European car buyers are going to be pushed to embrace plug-in motoring next year in the kind of market shift that has probably never been achieved in the history of the European industry. And missing fleet CO2 targets means expensive fines for carmakers.

The EV and Hybrid advertising blitz at Frankfurt station is going to be a drop in the ocean of what will be happening later this year. Whether the marketeers can pull off the Great Electric Switch remains to be seen.

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