electric shock time is set for 2019 Volvo calls time on

Plug-in power: Volvo’s T8 chassis adds electric power to combustion engine

electric shock

time is set For 2019

Volvo’s recent announcement that it would no longer launch diesel- and petrol-only models came as a surprise to the auto industry, a business that rarely delivers the totally unexpected. Tony Lewin looks at the implications for the sector.

The effect of Volvo’s decision is to call time on petrol and diesel as automotive fuels and to mark out a glidepath towards fully carbon-neutral electric and hydrogen power by the middle of the century. The development was given added impetus when France’s new environment minister expressed the intention of weaning French motorists off these liquid fuels by 2040.

In practice, at least as far as Volvo is concerned, the move means that from 2019 every Volvo will be electrified in some way – either as a pure battery model, or a hybrid with either a petrol or diesel main engine. Full details of how much electric range will be on offer have not yet been given, but with even the mildest of the hybrids operating with the new 48-volt technology, useful electric autonomy can be expected.

The likelihood, then, is that from 2019 the Volvo brand will see a steadily declining proportion of petrol and diesel hybrids in its sales mix as battery and pure-electric technology improves and more customers come on board. In parallel, the Swedish company is re-purposing its Polestar performance sub-brand as a standalone marque for pure electric cars – a clear move to counter the all-electric success story of California’s Tesla, and evidence that Volvo has a clear view of which way the market is shifting.

Five fully-electric models will be launched by 2021, three under the Volvo label and two as high-performance Polestar designs. “This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” said Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson. “Volvo Cars has stated that it plans to have sold a total of 1m electrified cars by 2025. When we said it we meant it. This is how we are going to do it.”

Other leading groups are converging on a consensus expectation that by 2025 one quarter of all production will be electric, though definitions of what constitutes electric do vary from brand to brand and past predictions have often been wide of the mark. But whatever the eventual figure, it is clear that with today’s electric share still below 1 per cent a major shake-up is in the offing – not just in the industry’s own engineering supply chain but also on the retailing side. There could, for instance, be major opportunities for other activities such as shopping, sport and cinema- and theatregoing to be linked in to the recharging of customers’ electric cars.

Volvo XC60: best-selling candidate for electric power

Volvo’s pioneering move must be a wake-up call to the rest of the industry, at least in the mature markets of Europe, North America and eastern Asia. Despite the outpourings of President Trump, climate change is a deadly serious issue, denial is no longer a valid response, and automakers must begin engineering electric power into their future product plans right now.

Volkswagen’s alternative route

The giant Volkswagen group has also been propelled into electric territory, but by an altogether more powerful and more malign force – the after-shock of the diesel emissions scandal that erupted in September 2015. This, too, came as a complete surprise even to the canniest of corporate insiders: the industry’s biggest and most technically respected player suddenly exposed as a cheater and a manipulator. Now VW and its associated marques are downplaying diesel as a future solution and talking up the prospects of a broad range of electric – and electrified – models, all the way from Skoda and SEAT to Bentley.

On a broader level the VW diesel emissions scandal lifted the lid – in Europe, at least – on another problem that had been bubbling under for many years. In industry circles it had been privately acknowledged for some while that almost every new car was failing to perform as cleanly on the open road as in the officially sanctioned lab-based emissions tests. This affected almost every brand and model and came as a major shock to the buying public once the scale of the deficit became clear.

The effect was two-fold and immediate: firstly, public trust collapsed in the supposedly objective vehicle testing regime and suspicions of collusion between automakers and testing authorities began to circulate; secondly, the shockingly high nitrogen oxide emissions figures revealed for diesels (though, ironically, not for recent VWs) prompted a wholesale reevaluation of how we power our cars. Diesel, once the miraculous solution that would save our climate, was suddenly branded the bad guy, cities rushed into banning diesels, and the normally around 50/50 split between diesel and petrol has swung significantly in favour of the latter. Citroen’s CEO, Linda Jackson, recently conceded that her brand’s diesels had plunged from 70 per cent of sales in 2013 to just 50 per cent now.

Which is the way ahead?

While Citroen’s issue of falling diesel sales is, in common with most other brands, relatively easily addressed on an industrial level by stepping up the production of petrol engines, that is at best only a stop-gap strategy. Petrol engines are some 20 per cent less efficient than diesel, knocking a large hole in automakers’ carefully crafted strategies to hit the tough legislative targets for corporate average CO2 emissions beyond 2020–21; breach of these targets will result in massive fines that are related to each brand’s total output, thus hitting the biggest producers hardest.

Automakers are in a bind: improve corporate average CO2 performance, fast, or face the bank-busting fines. Yet petrol engines on their own are unlikely to provide the necessary quantum jumps in efficiency in the next decade: small improvements, such as the variable compression ratio of Infiniti’s VC-T engine, may help, but they won’t be game changers. Diesels, already out of favour, can be made a lot cleaner but will burdened by the very high cost of emission-control equipment – something which would constitute a prohibitively high proportion of the cost on big-selling small cars, though more feasible on premium models and larger SUVs. Either way, though, none of these foreseeable developments will be the ‘get out of jail free’ card that the big automakers have been hoping for.

Only one solution presents itself: sell enough zero-emission and near-zero emission models to compensate for the missing diesels and bring down corporate average CO2 emissions to the legislated values. And that, as we have already seen, means large numbers of electric and hybrid vehicles. And these, in turn, mean large-scale reorganisation of the established manufacturing and supply chain base, as well as in transitioning from a refuelling to a recharging infrastructure. It promises to be the biggest upheaval the car industry has ever seen – and it is about to begin.

Who’s best placed in the new energy race?

China, already the largest car market in the world, has also become the biggest buyer of electric and hybrid models thanks to its aggressive promotion of so-called New Energy vehicles – a useful blanket term cov-

Volvo Ceo Håkan Samuelsson: from 2019 all Volvos will be electrified Volkswagen Golf: will be supplemented in 2019 with the all-electric I.D. hatchback

ering plug-in hybrids, pure electric vehicles and fuel cell models.

Following Nissan’s trail-blazing Leaf, the world’s first volume production battery-electric car in 2009, landmarks in electric car popularisation have included the Tesla Model S, the BMW i3 and Renault Zoe; Volkswagen has all-electric versions of its Golf and Up, and in the US General Motors has caused a stir with its Bolt EV, again a pure electric. Inexorably, however, the centre of gravity of most things electric is beginning to shift to China, as symbolised by another Volvo announcement, that it will launch its electric car production through its Chinese facilities.

Indeed, several fledgling Chinese companies have been showing highly ambitious battery powered prototypes on the international exhibition circuit, though the hyperbole of their promoters has yet to translate into on-the-road reality. But while western commentators are tempted to scoff at the extravagant claims of these China-inspired hopefuls, it would be unwise to bet against them in the long run.

For the moment, however, and narrowing the focus to a European perspective, it is the Renault Nissan partnership that has made most of the initial running and which enjoys the greatest public awareness of its electric models. Nevertheless, it could be the mammoth Volkswagen combine which stands to grab the lion’s share of the market thanks to its carefully planned modular components strategy – a system of construction which allows almost any combination of engine (diesel, petrol, hybrid, electric) to be installed in a wide range of models simply and economically. In this way, Volkswagen has the potential to flood the market with vehicles for all possible requirements, and its modular systems even extend into the automotive stratosphere in the shape of Bentleys, Porsches and top-line Audis.

In common with its German premium competitors, Volkswagen has taken the precaution of establishing a sub-brand, I.D., for its new-wave electric models; several concept models, including a Golf-sized hatchback and two studies for a Microbus-type leisure van, have already been displayed at motor shows, and the first production model is set for 2020. For Audi, the electric appellation is e-tron, with a launch model due in 2019, while Mercedes-Benz’s EQ series of dedicated vehicles, also previewed with a 2016 show concept, will reach production within a similar timeframe.

BMW is of course already established with its i3 hatchback and i8 sports car: its big bet will be an ambitious all-new electric model in 2021, provisionally labelled iNext. This model is tipped as a big leap forward, not just in terms of its carbon-neutral powertrain but also in advancing another major trend, the move towards partial and eventually total autonomous operation.

In the meantime, however, it could be Jaguar that is first to market with a new type of car – a fully-electric, medium-sized i-Pace crossover that is both sporty and fashionable in an urban style. Even Aston Martin has confirmed plans for a production electric luxury sports saloon, the RapidE.

Driving – and charging – range extended

What all of the above models will be sure to offer is sufficient battery capacity to provide a driving range of around 500km or 300 miles: this is widely seen as the minimum figure necessary to pull in a broad range of buyers. But some engineers contend that more powerful charging systems will make costly long-range batteries superfluous. If drivers can add 60 miles’ worth of range in a charging session of just five minutes, long waits at the charging station may become a thing of the past and the extra weight and expense of a very large battery may no longer be required.

Improvements in the convenience as well as the speed of recharging are also on the way. Messy cables are awkward to hook up and store away again, so engineers are looking at inductive charging where the vehicle parks over the charging plate and the current is transferred through a magnetic field. This is already being trialled on electric buses, allowing opportunistic recharging at bus stops as passengers enter and leave the vehicle. Renault is even taking the idea as step further and experimenting with mobile recharging: the car drives along a special section of road fitted with inductive loops and picks up charge as it travels.

The recharging road opens up major possibilities that could dramatically boost the case for electric vehicles. Yet it will be some while before they become the dominant force on our roads: the next decade will see a three-way struggle between efficient standard hybrids, plug-in hybrids with lower CO2 emissions, and battery electric models offering true zeroCO2 performance. Who will emerge on top will depend as much on the shape of future legislation as on the skills of the engineers who put the cars together. n