Car manufacturers blow up 1.5-degree target with combustion engine plans

The car industry's sales plans for more cars with internal combustion engines are said to be incompatible with the climate target of 1.5 degrees, a new Greenpeace study shows. According to the study, Toyota, VW and Hyundai/Kia want to sell at least twice as many diesel and petrol cars as their remaining CO2 budget allow. According to the study, the planned overproduction for the entire car industry is about 400 million internal combustion cars - about five times the number of cars produced worldwide in 2021.

The study, co-written by car expert Stefan Bratzel, first calculates how many internal combustion cars may still be sold worldwide to stay within the remaining CO2 budget for 1.5 degrees. In a second step, the authors break down this number to the four major manufacturers Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai/Kia and General Motors and compare it with their sales plans for internal combustion cars.

With an overshoot of its available internal combustion budget by up to 184 per cent, Toyota comes off worst. Volkswagen had the highest e-car sales of the four in 2021 and thus the best starting position, but plans to increase its e-car share comparatively slowly. As a result, VW's planned internal combustion car sales also exceed the figure still justifiable for 1.5 degrees by at least double (100 to 136 per cent).

"The sales plans of the manufacturers have feet of clay. They also represent a high risk for investors," says Greenpeace financial expert Mauricio Vargas. "In view of the increasingly drastic consequences of global warming, more and more countries, cities and regions are deciding to ban cars with combustion engines. Those who do not change over quickly enough risk being stuck with millions of unsaleable diesel and petrol cars." For companies as heavily indebted as VW or Toyota, "this can quickly lead to a dicey situation.
The study calculates the debt of the twelve largest traditional car manufacturers at 1.2 trillion US dollars (September 2022). Volkswagen's debt is the highest at 239 billion US dollars.

At the UN Climate Change Conference COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, representatives from 200 countries are currently discussing ways to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees as agreed in Paris in 2015. Transport causes about one fifth of global CO2 emissions, about three quarters of which come from road traffic.