Automotive News Europe - January 2020 - 9

AUTOMOTIVE NEWS EUROPE

COVER STORY

hybrids, favorable lease deals for employees, sales to
short-term rental services and aiming for fleet sales,
where running costs are often more important than the
dealership price. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has agreed
to pay Tesla hundreds of millions of euros to join an
emissions pool to benefit from sales of the Silicon Valley company's electric cars in Europe.
But those carry inherent risks, especially with everstricter targets looming in 2025 and 2030, said Martin
Benecke, an analyst at IHS Markit. "What will you do
next year, or the following years?" he said. "You can't
self-register a lot of vehicles if nobody will buy them."

symposium

Surprise solution?
One solution, at least for 2020 and 2021, may be hiding
in plain sight: diesels. After diesel's market share fell
sharply in the last several years following VW Group's
admission that it cheated diesel emissions tests, sales
appear to be holding steady at about 30 percent to
32 percent of the European market. "We see a stabilizing in diesel share," Benecke said. "It's a good tool to
reduce CO2 levels for now, and for company cars or
larger SUVs, diesel remains the only option" for lower
emissions. But, he warned, any future emissions gains
for diesels will be marginal and expensive.
LMC's Bedwell said diesel sales would be flat in 2020,
which "in the context of a likely 600,000 unit decline
in 2019 is very positive." In fact, he said, "Already we
are seeing signs of reversal in the declining diesel share
of some models," and some automakers are replacing
high-emitting gasoline models with diesels.
Last month LMC said the European market was already
starting to see seasonal distortion as a result of impending
regulatory hurdles. LMC said it expected automakers would
take measures to move registrations of high-CO2 emitting
cars from 2020 into the last quarter of 2019. "Our default
position is that automakers will do everything in their power
not to miss CO2 targets," LMC said. Besides fines, automakers would not want to take the "potentially unquantifiable
losses that would stem from image damage in these environmentally conscious times," LMC said. "The pulling forward of
sales from 2020, coming on top of other confidence-sapping
factors, leads us to forecast a rather disappointing 2020
Western Europe car market just over one percentage point
lower than that seen in 2019."

March 19/20, 2020
Leipzig

Meet top-class experts from a wide variety
of domains and industries and learn about
weaknesses, attack vectors and Cyber Security
challenges that companies face today and that
will be crucial in the future.
Enjoy the exciting evening event at the Porsche
World with co-pilot drives and use it for crossindustry networking.

symposium.dekra-cyber-security.com

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW

Even bigger challenges loom as CO2 rules will get even
tougher for automakers operating in Europe. The new
European Commission said last month it will propose revising legislation on CO2 emissions standards for cars
and vans "to ensure a clear pathway from 2025 onward
toward zero-emissions mobility," it said in a document
called the European Green Deal. The revision is set to
happen by mid-2021. ANE

JANUARY 2020

www.autonewseurope.com

http://symposium.dekra-cyber-security.com

Automotive News Europe - January 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Automotive News Europe - January 2020