DETROIT — General Motors wants to end production of all diesel- and gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs by 2035 and shift its entire new fleet to electric vehicles as part of a broader plan to become carbon neutral by 2040, the company said Thursday.

The company plans to use 100% renewable energy to power its U.S. facilities by 2030 and global facilities by 2035 — five years ahead of a previously announced goal.

GM’s announcement comes a day after President Joe Biden signed a series of executive orders that prioritize climate change across all levels of government and put the U.S. on track to curb planet-warming carbon emissions.

Shares of GM increased as much as 7.4% during intraday trading Thursday morning to $53 a share. As of midday Thursday, shares were up about 4%. GM has a market cap of about $73 billion.

For several years, GM has touted a guiding “triple zero vision,” including a future with zero emissions through electric vehicles, but it never announced a time frame. The other goals include zero congestion and zero crashes through advanced safety technologies and self-driving vehicles.

“For General Motors, our most significant carbon impact comes from tailpipe emissions of the vehicles that we sell — in our case, it’s 75 percent,” GM CEO Mary Barra said in message on LinkedIn. “That is why it is so important that we accelerate toward a future in which every vehicle we sell is a zero-emissions vehicle.”

The company characterized its 2035 EV goal as an “aspiration,” citing regulations, infrastructure and other factors need to come together for the plan to be achieved. David Friedman, vice president of advocacy at Consumer Reports, criticized the automaker’s lack of commitment to the goal.

“Strong aspirations are important and inspirational, but firm production plans and strong policies are what move the market and the climate,” he said in a statement.

Electric vehicles, including battery-electric and fuel cell-powered vehicles, are currently a niche segment of the global automotive industry, estimated at less than 5% of sales by analysts. EVs are more costly to produce than those with internal combustion engines due to the battery and fuel cells that power the vehicles. But automotive executives and analysts are bullish that EVs, led by stricter regulations to reduce carbon emissions, are the future for the automotive industry.

Dane Parker, GM chief sustainability officer, reiterated that the company plans to be profitable in its transition from vehicles with traditional internal combustion engines to EVs.

“We feel this is going to be the successful business model of the future,” he said during a media briefing Thursday. “We know there are hurdles, we know there are technology challenges, but we’re confident that with the resources we have and the expertise we have that we’ll overcome those challenges and this will be a business model that we will be able to thrive in the future.”

GM has already announced plans to shift three of its U.S. plants to produce electric vehicles. Parker said the company is “excited” about the transition at its other plants.

Read more: CNBC

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The size and style of the houses, the goods in the shops nearby – all this can help build a picture of the relative affluence of a neighbourhood. Now it seems we can add the number of electric cars to the mix.

One of the building blocks to becoming zero carbon by 2050 will be the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles, with the UK government committed to all new cars being ULEVs or Ultra Low Emission Vehicles by 2030. Seemingly not a week passes without a car manufacturer releasing its latest electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid.

But while the number of new registrations of ULEVs doubled in the year to the end of September 2020, they still account for less than one per cent of all existing vehicle registrations. Despite lower running costs, the additional cost of production means a lot of those vehicles are targeted at the top end of the car market, while those produced by non-luxury brands still carry a significant up-front premium compared with their more traditional equivalents.

Partly for that reason, such cars are increasingly being seen as a status symbol.

Our research shows that on average, levels of private ownership of electric vehicles and hybrids in local authorities with an average house price of over £500,000 are more than four times those seen in the local authorities where the average price is under £200,000.

In the extreme they account for 1 in 27 privately registered vehicles in the five London boroughs with an average house price over £1 million – Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, the City of London, Camden and Hammersmith and Fulham. Meanwhile they account for fewer than 1 in 500 privately registered vehicles in eight local authorities, including Middlesbrough, Blaenau Gwent and Hull.

And while 40 per cent of private ULEV registrations are in London and the South East, their highest concentrations are in some of the most affluent areas in each of the 11 regions of the country, with Harrogate topping the list in the North of England, Rushcliffe and Stratford upon Avon doing so in the Midlands.

How then do we get from a position where the electric car is the preserve of the wealthy to one where we have widespread adoption? Much is made of the need for a widespread public charging infrastructure. Generally the growth in the provision of these facilities has gone hand in hand with the rise in vehicle registrations.

Across the country as a whole there are 7.5 ULEVs and 20.5 fully electric vehicles for every public charging point. But there are significant local and regional disparities. London sits alone in terms of having relatively high rates of ULEV registrations and a relatively high number of public charging facilities.

The logistical challenge of the roll out of a public charging infrastructure will mean that access to charging facilities at home will be critical. However, the English Housing Survey tells us that 33 per cent of dwellings do not have a garage or off-road parking facilities, rising to 63 per cent in urban and city centres.

Ultimately, although home charging is critical the importance of destination and on-route charging should not be overlooked. Colleagues in the sustainability team at Savills are working with a number of installers to help with the national roll out of EV charging infrastructure, with the expectation that EV forecourts and charger hubs will have an increasingly important role to play in the coming years.

In the meantime, the extent of electric vehicle ownership in an area is as good a measure as any of the affluence of the neighbourhood. So if the growl of a V8 is being replaced by the whizz of an electric motor where you live, the chances are it is on the up.

Read more: savills

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We’re on the cusp of transitioning to electric vehicles—if Biden and Congress take the right steps.

Joe Biden’s father sold used cars, steeping the future president in the world of combustion engines. The younger Biden washed vehicles on weekends, borrowed a Chrysler off the lot to drive to the prom, and hit automobile auctions to help stock his dad’s dealership. President Biden still owns the green ’67 Corvette his father gave him as a wedding gift, which he told Car and Driver magazine has “a rear-axle ratio that really gets up and goes.”

But if the White House’s resident motorhead gets his way—and that remains a big “if”—we may one day look back on the Biden presidency as the beginning of the end for gasoline-powered cars and trucks in the United States.

Biden is proposing sweeping reforms to the nation’s energy system to tackle climate change. But they aren’t just aimed at greening the electric grid or driving the nation away from coal and natural gas. Transportation accounts for more than a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; it’s proven particularly thorny to figure out how to reduce that, given the number of vehicles on the roads. So, Biden is pitching a host of ways to steer the country toward electric vehicles, or EVs.

By nearly every measure, the popularity of EVs and hybrid vehicles is already surging. Yet despite an avalanche of promising news, the shift away from gas-fueled cars remains stubbornly marginal, compared with the scale of the problem, even as global temperature records driven by fossil fuel use are broken year after year. Clean vehicles still account for just 2 percent of cars sold in the United States, 5 percent in China, and 10 percent in Europe—and those are the world’s biggest markets.

“This transition is by no means inevitable,” says Nic Lutsey, with the International Council on Clean Transportation, an independent research outfit that works with policymakers around the world.

Yet analysts, environmentalists, clean-tech experts, and auto industry-backed researchers all say the right mix of regulation, consumer incentives, and research support might just be enough to spur dramatic acceleration. And thus far, these experts agree, Biden seems intent on pulling the right levers.

“The dam is breaking; the tipping point is here,” says Sam Ricketts, a member of the team that authored Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s climate action plan during his presidential run. Many of Inslee’s ideas have since found their way into Biden’s plans. “The question is how fast can the auto industry go,” Ricketts says, “and can it be fast enough to confront the climate crisis?”

That will depend in no small part on what happens next in Washington, D.C.—and whether Biden and the Democrats, who hold the White House and a razor-thin majority in Congress, can even get the pieces into place.

So close, yet so far
Vehicles powered by electricity have been around since the auto industry’s inception—several of the first 19th-century cars were powered by electrons. But their real promise wasn’t apparent until Toyota began globally mass-producing the Prius hybrid 20 years ago. Less than a decade later, Tesla introduced the Roadster, its all-electric sports car, and got a $465 million Department of Energy loan, jump-starting production of its all-electric sedans. The loan has since been repaid, and Tesla is currently worth seven times as much as General Motors.

Today, the trend is impossible to miss. Just since 2016 EVs and hybrid sales have nearly doubled in North America, and in 2018, for the first time ever, sales rose even as gas prices collapsed. Last year, with an economy wracked by COVID-19, electric or partly-electric vehicle purchases rose almost 5 percent over 2019 as auto sales overall declined by 15 percent.

Read more: National Geographic

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