“The governments have made the scientific decision to ask the manufacturers to move towards the electric one, this instruction is very clear, it is visible in the C02 targets imposed on us by the European Union,” said Carlos Tavares. Saturday on France Inter.For the boss of PSA, “it is quite normal and desirable” that standards are hardened because “it is necessary to move towards mobility totally clean”.
But he points out that “what is debating today is the speed at which the entire automotive industry in Europe has to be transformed (…) to reach particularly severe targets by 2030” .
Objectives for 2030
“The mutation proposed to us is a mutation with far-reaching consequences,” says Tavares.
He notably pointed out the cost of “clean mobility”. “It’s like organic food, it’s more expensive,” he said. “As citizens, we either agree to pay more for our own mobility, or we put the European car industry in trouble,” he said.
The European Parliament is due to take a decision on CO2 standards for 2030 on 3 October, the PSA leader said. Another subject is batteries, which account for 40% of the cost of an electric car and “today are an Asian monopoly of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese,” he said.
“We, the PSA group, are an ardent supporter of (the) process of creating a European battery champion to balance the dominant Asian situation,” he said, adding that “there is ten years that should have been launched. The issue of batteries is also posed by the president of the Automotive Platform (PFA), Luc Chatel, who points “the risk of a shift of a very significant part of the value chain to Asia”.
Travel to Asia
“Can we keep the know-how in Europe or embarking on a collective suicide of the European automotive industry?”, He asks, in an interview Saturday at Le Figaro.
It is “all the stake of the R & D efforts that the Europeans must agree to work on a new generation of batteries”, adds Luc Chatel.