Europe’s Top Truck Makers Vow To Stop Diesel Vehicle Sales By 2040

The biggest van and truck manufacturers in Europe have committed to phasing out traditional combustion engines running on diesel by 2040, ten years earlier than initially planned, the Financial Times reported on Monday ahead of an official announcement from the truck makers.

The companies, including Ford, Scania, Man, Volvo, DAF, Daimler, and Iveco, have signed a joint commitment to phase out diesel trucks within two decades and work to roll out vehicles running on hydrogen or using battery technology, according to FT.  

The commercial vehicle manufacturers are expected to invest between US$61 billion (50 billion euro) and US$122 billion (100 billion euro) in such technologies, Henrik Henriksson, chief executive officer at Scania, told FT.

“There is no silver bullet; it won’t be that one technology will rule everything, there will be parallel technologies over time,” Henriksson, who is also chairman for 2020 of the Commercial Vehicle Board of Directors of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), told FT.

The pledge from the biggest commercial vehicle manufacturers in Europe comes days after the European Union (EU) reached last week an agreement on more stringent emissions-cutting goals for the next decade. After long discussions, the block agreed to aim for a 55-percent reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 from 1990 levels, as it strives to become carbon neutral by 2050. The previous target for 2030 was a 40-percent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels.

Europe’s truck manufacturers are already working on alternative technologies. Daimler, for example, unveiled in September a Mercedes-Benz fuel-cell concept truck. The Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck, a fuel-cell truck with a range of up to 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), is expected to start customer trials in 2023, while the beginning of series production is currently set for the second half of this decade.

Last week, Daimler Truck AG and industrial gases and engineering company Linde said they would jointly develop the next generation of liquid-hydrogen refueling technology for fuel-cell-powered trucks. The new fueling process will be implemented in the Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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