Leading European carmaker BMW said it is planning to increase production of electric vehicles. BMW Chief Executive Oliver Zipse said the electric car push will gain further momentum between 2021 and 2023.
"We are significantly increasing the number of electric vehicles. Between 2021 and 2023, we will build a quarter of a million more electric cars than originally planned", Zipse told told German daily Augsburger Allgemeine, Reuters reported.
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BMW wants roughly every fifth car it sells to be powered by an electric engine by 2023, Zipse said, compared to about 8% this year.
The manager also reiterated his call to speed up the expansion of charging infrastructure.
"15,000 private and about 1,300 public charging points would have to be put into operation every week as of today. Unfortunately, we are a long way from that", he told the paper.
Transport & Environment Report in October
In early October, an analysis by the NGO Transport & Environment (T&E) showed that electric vehicles made up 8% of car sales in Europe in the first half of 2020, putting them on track to triple their market share this year.
While the novel coronavirus pandemic has seen overall car sales plummet, sales of electric cars - which T&E defined as both battery and plug-in hybrid models - have increased.
This saw electric cars more than triple their market share in the European Economic Area (EEA), compared with the first half of last year, T&E said.
Outright sales of such vehicles are expected to roughly double this year, to one million units, it said.
T&E attributed the sales increase to tougher European Union car emissions standards, which took effect this year, and post-pandemic purchase incentives in Germany and France.
The NGO expects carmakers to meet the 2020 emissions standards, which would see electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles triple their market share in 2020 to 10% of EEA car sales.
(With Reuters Inputs)
