Diesel vehicles to still rule Paris Auto show

Major focus will be on the rollout of luxury electric sports- utility vehicles

Paris, Sept. 30: Diesel is in the doghouse. There’s a global fight over trade. Brexit is looming. Tighter vehicle emissions rules are on the way.

Those are among the challenges facing auto executives as they gather this week at the Paris Motor Show to unveil new vehicles and talk about the industry’s future.

A number of carmakers, including Volkswagen and Ford of Europe, are skipping the event, which alternates years with Frankfurt as Europe’s major auto exhibition.

Still, the shiny new models, ranging from sleek supercars for wealthy collectors to hatchbacks for urban millennials, are a powerful draw for the public, with the last show in 2016 attracting 1.1 million people.

Here’s what to watch out for at the show, which opens to media for previews on Tuesday and to the public on Thursday:

A major focus will be the rollout of luxury electric sport- utility vehicles from the established automakers competing with Tesla’s all- electric Model X SUV.

Daimler’s MercedesBenz has the EQC and Volkswagen’s Audi will show off the e- tron. The launches by two major luxury brands represent a notable endorsement of EVs, but will they catch on? Pure EVs had only 0.6 per cent of the European market in 2017 and remain relatively more expensive, which is why the focus for now is on the higher price range.

And there are questions over when carmakers can match Tesla’s proprietary network of Supercharger fast- charging stations.

Daimler, Audi, Porsche, BMW and Ford have formed the Ionity joint venue to build 400 fastcharging stations on highway routes across Europe by 2020. But the Ionity website shows only seven stations so far, with 12 under construction in comparison to Tesla’s 1,344 stations.

Diesel cars have seen a steep fall in sales in the wake of Volkswagen’s 2015 scandal in which it was caught rigging engines to cheat on emissions tests. Diesel’s market share fell from 50 percent on the eve of the scandal to 36 percent in Europe in July.

Yet automakers will still be offering plenty of new diesels, especially when it comes to SUVs. They get better mileage, and fuel is expensive in Europe. In Germany, gasoline costs about $ 6.30 per gallon.

Automakers will also need that better mileage performance to meet the EU’s CO2 emissions standard. Diesel still faces opposition from environmentalists who want faster progress to electrics and have exerted pressure on cities with high levels of air pollution to ban older diesel models.