General Motors, the largest US automaker, intends to completely abandon the production of cars with gasoline or diesel engines by 2035 in order to fully focus on electric cars. It is set to be carbon neutral by 2040, CNBC reports.
As the director of sustainable development Dane Parker said, in the near future the company wants to achieve the profitability of the new direction. The management is confident that it will be able to solve the problem, despite the technological problems.
GM CEO Mary Barra said that 75 percent of the company’s carbon dioxide emissions come from combustion-powered vehicles. That is why it is important to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.
At the end of last year, it became known that GM is going to release 30 new models of electric vehicles by 2025. It is expected to spend $ 27 billion on production.
The American company became the first of the largest automakers in the world to announce the exact timing of the full transition to electric motors. GM’s competitors are taking into account hybrid engines, which have both a battery and an internal combustion engine, in their plans. Specifically, Nissan only says that by 2030 all of its vehicles in the US, Japan and China will be either fully or partially electric. Volvo wants to completely abandon internal combustion engines by 2030, but it is a relatively small company, its sales differ from General Motors by an order of magnitude.
Earlier it became known that the most famous manufacturer of electric vehicles Tesla showed annual profit for the first time. Over the past year, the company has set a sales record. Against the background of a sharp acceleration in the transition to alternative energy in the developed countries of the world, its cost soared tenfold, and the head of Tesla, Elon Musk, became the richest man in the world.