Mercedes-Benz makes an interesting announcement. By 2039, all passenger cars it offers must be climate neutral. This means that from that year on, conventional combustion engines will no longer be part of the Mercedes range.
Ambition2039 is the name of a new action plan from Daimler AG, the group that includes the brands Mercedes-Benz and Smart. In Ambition2039 the company sets a number of interesting goals.
Daimler calls reducing CO2 emissions one of the most important aspects of the new business strategy. Daimler AG wants plug-in hybrids and fully electric cars to account for more than half of passenger car sales by 2030. The Smart range is already fully electric in some markets and the recently presented plans for the future show that Smart, with its new Chinese partner Geely, will only produce EVs in the future.
This does not, of course, apply to Mercedes-Benz. 2039 will be the year in which all passenger cars that Mercedes-Benz sells are ‘CO2 neutral’. In that year, it will become impossible to buy a Mercedes-Benz with a regular petrol or diesel engine. From that year on, Mercedes-Benz is aiming for a range including exclusively EVs and EVs with a fuel cell (hydrogen) on board.
In the coming years, Daimler will pay more attention to issues such as mobility services to reduce the group’s CO2 emissions. In addition, the German group says it is investing heavily to improve its electrical engineering.
All European factories that Daimler has in Europe must be CO2 neutral by 2022 at the latest. The group says it will urge its suppliers to follow the same path. Daimler says that it links part of the salaries of the members of the Executive Board to the achievement of the new objectives.
