Europe’s cars are getting older. Older on average, that is. Lasting longer. Perhaps being used a little less wearingly, so aging sparingly.
Yet, the numbers of cars produced and registered each year continues to climb inexorably.
Despite there being wall-to-wall advertising for electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, the actual numbers of sales remains minuscule.
Let’s just take the figures for one country, the United Kingdom, still, until 11pm GMT this evening, a member of the European Union.
ACEA Vehicles in Use – Europe 2019 : United Kingdom : %share : 2018
| Petrol | Diesel | Hybrid electric | Battery electric | Plug-in hybrid | LPG + Natural gas | Other + Unknown | |
| Passenger Cars | 58.5% | 39.7% | 1.4% | 0.2% | 0.2% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Electric (Battery electric + Plug-in hybrid) | |||||||
| Light Commercial Vehicles (vans) | 3.6% | 96.2% | 0.0% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% | |
| Medium and Heavy Commercial Vehicles (trucks/lorries) | 0.6% | 99.3% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.4% | 0.2% | |
| Buses | 0.5% | 98.8% | 0.0% | 0.4% | 0.3% | 0.0% |
Clearly, liquid vehicle fuels will be with us for some time yet to come. The imperative then becomes, how to reduce their net carbon dioxide emissions ? Planting trees will probably not measure up to the task.