Italian Supercar Makers Look To Sidestep EU’s Planned Internal Combustion Engine Ban

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge

Perhaps that’s why Italy is now lobbying the EU to shield automakers like Ferrari and Lamborghini from the area’s planned phase-out of combustion engines, which is set to take effect by 2035.

Roberto Cingolani, minister for ecological transition, said in an interview with Bloomberg that “in the gigantic cars market there is a niche, and there are on-going discussions with the EU Commission” on how new rules could affect supercar makers.

Cingolani continued: “Those cars need very special technology and they need batteries for the transition. One important step is that Italy gets autonomous in producing high performance batteries and that is why we are now launching the giga-factory program to install in Italy a very large scale production facility for batteries.”

The EU announced the plan to phase out new combustion vehicles by 2035. The timeline is far tougher for supercar automakers whose entire business models revolve around advanced engineering of engines that are far more powerful than average vehicles. They sell far less units and experience fewer benefits from economies of scale.

Cingolani said: “This is something we are discussing with other partners in Europe and I am convinced there will be not be a problem.”

Ferrari sold just 9,100 cars in 2020 and Lamborghini sold about 7,400.

“This is a global policy problem. There is a clear awareness about the need of a transition toward the electric mobility. On a century scale transformation this is not a problem, ” Cingolani concluded. 

This article (Italian Supercar Makers Look To Sidestep EU’s Planned Internal Combustion Engine Ban) was originally published on Zero Hedge and is published under a Creative Commons license.