Geneva:Although scarce on the road today, battery-powered cars and chargers are everywhere at the Geneva Motor Show.There are chargers, cars and endless advertising for a fossil-free and emission-free future.
"Finally, we are here. The year of the electric car, I think. We're seeing a lot of full electric cars being launched, we're seeing a lot of plug-in hybrid cars," says Jim Holder, the editor director of British motoring magazine 'Autocar'.And it's not just smaller cars that are going electric.
German automobile startup Piëch, named after a VW executive, is showing a fully-electric hyper car at the show."This is definitely the year where we're seeing the most production-ready EVs that we've ever seen at Geneva before. A lot of cars that are coming out over the next 12 or 24 months," says Tim Stevens, editor-in-chief of Roadshow.
Volvo Car Group's Polestar brand is showing off the Polestar 2, a battery-driven compact vehicle that claims 500 kilometers of range under the European range test (275 miles under the different U.S.standard).It's intended to compete with the Tesla Model 3.
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"I think what's exciting is that electric cars can be exciting in their own right. They bring something new to the equation," says Holder.
"Whether it's a performance car, a manufactured car using electric to get more performance from their car, you know, these motors have instant torque, from a standstill you get full power. So, they can be really quite exciting as well, of course, as being used to make the cars more efficient."
Carmakers originally bet on diesels, which are more efficient than gasoline engines, to help them cut emissions.But diesel sales plummeted in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal in 2015.
Analysts say more electric sales will have to fill the gap.
Yet that raises its own questions, not least consumer reluctance to buy electrics because of higher prices and concerns about the limited range and lack of places to charge them.But that might be changing, says Stevens.
"The infrastructure is getting there slowly," he says."There are a lot of initiatives to bring charging networks together, to make it easy to pay for these things and make easier to find the chargers that are out there already. Over the next one or two years, we'll see an explosion of new chargers being released."
The annual Geneva International Motor Show opens to the public on 7 March and runs until 17 March 2019.More than 900 models will be shown, including over 150 world and European premiers.
(Inputs from AP)
