It looks like Ferraris will be screaming through the Italian countryside for decades to come.
The European Commission has agreed to demands from Italy and Germany to allow combustion engines to continue to be made as long as they run on carbon-neutral e-fuel.
Europe was set to ban the sale of new combustion engine vehicles in 2035, but will now rewrite the regulations to carve out an exemption.
E-fuels are made from carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and combined with water to create combustible fuels that work like gasoline or diesel and emit only as much carbon when burned as was used to make them.
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When produced using zero emissions power, like wind or solar, the fuels contribute no additional greenhouse gases.
Porsche is among the companies that have invested in the technology and has demonstrated one of its gasoline-powered 911 sports cars running on fuel produced at a wind-powered plant in Chile.
The current production cost at the pilot plant is $45 per gallon, but Porsche expects that to be down to $8 by 2026, which would put it close to par with gasoline in Europe.
Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna told a Reuters Newsmaker event on Monday that the company still plans to electrify 80% of its lineup by 2030, but that the rule change opens up new opportunities.
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“The good news for us as a company … is that on top of electric cars, we’ll also be able to go on with our internal combustion engines ones,” Vigna said. “We don’t want to tell clients which car to use. We want to make three kinds of propulsion available for them — hybrid, electric and ICE — and they will chose.”
Rival Italian exotic sports carmaker Lamborghini, which is a sister company to Porsche as part of the VW Group, is about to begin transitioning all of its models to hybrid powertrains, but has no current plans to offer an electric car.
CEO Stephan Winkelmann has said the brand’s customers enjoy the sound and performance of a combustion engine that synthetic fuels could be one way to keep them alive.
A hybrid replacement for the Aventador that uses a V12 engine is set to be revealed on March 29, and it’s already sold out.
“We already have 18-19 months waiting period for a new car,” Winkelmann told FOX Business.
“We are selling more cars than we are able to produce.”
Italy is also lobbying for biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel to be exempted, but the commission has not yet indicated if they will be included in the updated regulations.
