, Columnist
Promises Won't Kill the Combustion Engine
Banning fossil-fuel cars will work only if electric vehicles get a lot better.
Still needs work.
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European governments are making big promises to ban the sale of cars with combustion engines: Germany by 2030, France and the U.K. by 2040. It'll take a lot more than promises, though, to bring about the all-electric future.
The initiatives could become the biggest government-driven revolution in a major market since anti-tobacco legislation -- and a benevolent one, given that car makers get fair warning. But it's easy to tout the end of an era with non-binding promises, and much harder to get enough people to like a genuine zero-emission car (that is, one whose only contribution to emissions is made by the energy industry as it produces electric power).