Every car show needs a narrative and this year’s industry jamboree in Geneva looks like the time when the electric car came of age.
Some manufacturers such as Renault are still showing concept electric cars but the main message from chief executives in Geneva is that full-electric cars are no longer a pipe dream, but are coming to the market.
Perhaps the most ambitious of all is a relative laggard at the moment: Volkswagen. At a glamorous event early in the week with Justin Timberlake no less (not singing though, fortunately or not, depending on your taste), Martin Winterkorn, VW’s ultra-Teutonic chief executive, unveiled plans for the German group to become the leading electric carmaker in the world by 2018. By my reckoning, he estimates VW will sell about 240,000 electric cars by then. The big news in Geneva was that VW will make an electric version of its best-selling Golf hatchback.
Dieter Zetsche of Daimler
But for an even longer-term bet few could beat Daimler. The German luxury carmaker hasn’t had a good crisis but seems to be in a more buoyant mood now. It has signed a deal with BYD, the Chinese battery maker in which Warren Buffett has a stake, to produce an electric vehicle just for the Chinese market. Dieter Zetsche, its walrus-mustachioed chief, told me that the world can’t stop the 1bn-plus Chinese getting cars but to save the planet these vehicles could not be petrol or diesel.
It seems to make eminent sense but I doubt Daimler will be the only carmaker coming up with ideas of this kind. In fact, with the lack of infrastructure for electric cars still provoking a chicken-and-egg kind of debate, I’m not sure being an early mover will necessarily confer huge advantages – see the Toyota Prius for how that might be the case with hybrids too. I also foresee that electric cars’ zero-emission claims will come in for some scrutiny as the implication for electricity use rises – and where on earth we get the energy from for it?
Much better to come with a product that definitely works. That at least is the view of Norbert Reithofer, the head of BMW, who sees its electric car hitting the streets in 2015. BMW is a highly intellectual company that has been trying to imagine how people will travel around cities in the future. Rather than producing an ugly electric car along the lines of the Prius, expect something a bit more tasteful.
But as a real sign of how carmakers are signing up to greener cars look no further than Ferrari’s hybrid. Yes, a hybrid from Ferrari. Yes, it is in a truly disgusting colour. But it’s still a Ferrari. And as Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s colourful chief executive, told me in his usual excitable way, he could even imagine a hybrid Formula One car.
Now that would be the definitive signal that the car industry is taking the green issue seriously.
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