Ex-VW boss Herbert Diess pushed through a purely electric course. Successor Oliver Blume is now weakening this dogma: Most of the group’s cars will be electric in the future, but e-fuels will also be pursued further.
E-fuels are a sensible addition to electromobility, said Blume in the trade journal “Automobilwoche”. Even decades from now, there will still be vehicles with internal combustion engines. With synthetic fuels, these cars could make a contribution to rapid CO2 reduction.
Blume is moving from his successful position at Porsche to Volkswagen and will replace Herbert Diess there in September – so in future Blume will be responsible for the overall strategy of the car giant. At Porsche, Blume had been in favor of so-called e-fuels as a supplement to battery cars for years. E-fuels are synthetically produced petrol that is produced with wind or solar energy and is significantly more climate-friendly than normal petrol. Porsche is already producing the air-conditioning fuel in a test facility in Patagonia. Corporations like Saudi Aramco are planning to mass-produce the eco-fuel so that it will also be marketable on the cost side.
Blume’s predecessor Herbert Dies had rejected e-fuels because they were not efficient enough – but also because Diess wanted to avoid conflicts with the Greens and ecological organizations. They see e-fuels as a threat to a “drive turnaround” towards a traffic concept that wants to drastically reduce individual traffic and only allow it electrically. Accordingly, this put the VW group on a 100 percent electric course and earned applause for this from organizations such as Greenpeace. Within the group, his course was much more controversial – not only because of the many jobs that depend on combustion engine technology, but also because of the implementation problems of e-mobility in practice, which are becoming more and more apparent with the increasing number of electric vehicles.
The new VW boss is at least partially breaking with the policies of his predecessor. Experts welcome that. The well-known engine expert Professor Thomas Koch from KIT Karlsruhe recently said in an interview with FOCUS Online: “You have to look beyond the European horizon. From a global perspective, an electro-only strategy that is based solely on ideology and not on feasibility will fail – at least in the volume segment. In my opinion, it is important for environmental protection, the economy and also the employees that we retain the freedom of drive technologies for Germany as an industrial location, because all of them can be used in a climate-friendly manner.”
All electric car and plug-in hybrid models at a glance
However, the right of way for electric vehicles in the passenger car sector will initially change little, even under Blume – especially not in the EU, because there politicians are blocking all alternatives to electric cars and even banning them from 2035 in an unusual act of ecological planned economy Registration of all non-electric vehicles. Even Porsche is planning 80,000 units for its new, purely electric generation of the SUV Macan, i.e. at the level of the combustion model. With the Taycan, Blume himself ensured that Porsche was able to successfully place its first electric sports car on the market. Nothing will change about that.
The support of e-fuels should therefore play a role for Volkswagen, especially in other markets that are more tech-savvy than the EU. In Germany, e-fuels for new vehicles would only be an option for a few model series such as the Porsche 911, which the manufacturer wants to run with its legendary boxer engines for as long as possible. However, Blume also keeps an eye on the existing vehicles – which technically also run on synthetic fuel without any problems. This is particularly interesting for Porsche, whose classic sports cars are driven for decades – and then with eco-fuel the bottom line would be as low in emissions as e-cars.
In the EU, Audi will be the first manufacturer in the VW Group that only wants to sell electric cars – by 2026 no new models should come onto the market, only existing combustion engines will continue to be built. After the Taycan, Porsche is electrifying its Macan compact SUV and the Boxster/Cayman entry-level sports car.
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