99 Good News Stories 2021
https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-goodnews-2021-2492e4fcacfb Interesting article, Electric Vehicles section below and suggests significant change are coming for cars and trucks. How about #76?
Solving climate change isn’t just about decarbonizing electricity, industry and agriculture, but also transport, which accounts for a third of global carbon emissions. On that front, it’s been a standout year. So good in fact, that for the first time ever we’re giving EVs their own section (we usually include them with clean energy).
73. 2021 was the year that the world’s carmakers finally seemed to accept the inevitability of an all-electric future. General Motors said it would eliminate the sale of all fossil fuel powered cars and SUVs by 2035, Jaguar said it would stop selling them within the next five years, and Hyundai said no more after 2040.
74. Ford said it would sell only EVs in Europe from 2030, Fiat said it would be an all electric company by 2030, Volvo said its entire car line-up would be fully electric by the same year, and both Audi and Daimler-Mercedes announced they were no longer developing new combustion engine models.
In terms of products, there is no longer any rational reason to opt for a combustion engine in the near future.
Wolf-Henning Scheider
CEO, Mercedes Benz
75. In March, the IEA said that the global demand for gasoline had peaked, and was unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels given the shift to electric vehicles, and in July, the world officially rid itself of leaded gasoline, after a refinery in Algeria used up the last stockpile. It took a 40 year campaign by the UN to achieve this, and it’s estimated elimination will prevent more than 1.2 million deaths annually.
76. If you remember just one number from this section, make it 10%. That’s the proportion of global vehicle sales that are now electric. To put this in perspective, in the first quarter of 2010, 395 electric vehicles in total were sold worldwide, 0.002% of passenger car sales. In the last quarter of this year, 1.7 million were sold, of which more than half were in Asia.
77. Sales in Germany and China were particularly mindblowing. More than a third of new German cars sold are now plugins, while in the world’s largest car market EV sales have reached nearly 20%. In October, the Tesla Model 3 was the best selling car in Europe (not the best selling electric vehicle — the best selling car, overall), and Hertz bought 100,000 of them for its new fleet, the largest electric car order of all time.
78. In May, Ford unveiled its new electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, whose petrol-powered counterpart, the F-150, is the biggest selling pickup truck in the United States. The real gamechanger however, were the first customer deliveries for all electric carmaker Rivian’s new truck, and the company’s subsequent $100 billion plus valuation, higher than GM or Ford.
79. It wasn’t just passenger vehicles that had a good year. Ebike sales continued to boom, and trucks also proved they were poised for electrification, as 13 models were released in the US alone. Also, we heard that the global fleet of battery powered buses has increased by 22% since 2019, and 18% of all municipal buses on the road worldwide are now zero-emissions.
80. Canada and Chile announced bans on sales of combustion vehicles by 2035, the EU proposed a plan to do the same (although it’s not law yet) and then the really big one: at COP26, 37 countries, including the UK, India, Mexico, Morocco and Turkey, committed to phasing out gas car sales by 2035 in rich countries, and by 2040 in poorer ones.
81. Thanks to progressive policies over the past 24 years, California announced that it had clocked up a 78% reduction in diesel particulate pollution, the toxic black stuff from car exhausts, and that the cleaner air had resulted in 82% fewer deaths from heart and lung disease. New York also became the second state after California to announce combustion engine ban, after governor, Kathy Hochul, signed a bill requiring all passenger vehicles sold in the state to be emissions-free by 2035.
82. In December, the US EPA issued new rules that significantly tighten greenhouse gas emissions levels for new cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks sold in model years 2023 through 2026. All told, these standards will cut carbon emissions by 3.1 billion metric tons by 2050, equivalent to two full years of emissions from all transportation in the United States.
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