In an interview with the automotive news service "Automobil Industrie ", Dr. David Bothe, Director Frontier Economics, comments on the competition in the mix of the best powertrains.
The questions revolved around how to ensure a mix of drivetrain technologies so that our climate targets are met - and what role eFuels can play in this mix.
Here are some of the key points of view:
We will not reach our climate targets in mobility based on a single technology like electrification, but need a mix of different technologies.
Competition has always been the best motivation for technological progress.
Unfortunately, we have established a trend towards regulatory micromanagement in mobility:
While companies were used to competing with other suppliers and managing technology and market risks, the EU and member states have now introduced a level of regulation that sometimes resembles the characteristics of a planned economy: Companies sometimes no longer build what customers want or what offers a competitive advantage, but what meets regulatory requirements.
While electrification will certainly be part of the solution, still only 1% of Europe's 250 million cars have a plug, and half of them even still have an internal combustion engine as "plug-in" hybrids. So we are only at the beginning and the race is long - there is a great need for other technologies like hydrogen and eFuels to help fill the gap. These technologies, for example, have the ability to make otherwise "stranded renewable energy" available to European (and other) markets around the globe.
The biggest hurdle to a rapid ramp-up of such alternative technologies is the tight and inflexible regulatory framework that leaves much of the innovation in the automotive and fuel industries untapped - a luxury we cannot afford given the urgency to address climate change decisively.
