Rob Maetzig.

Here’s a Mitsubishi that points to what’s really happening with the electrification of our vehicle fleet. By

Read the articles in full – you might get the proper story. Right now it seems many are only accepting half the facts on what’s happening regarding the acceptance of electric vehicles into the world’s new car markets.

Fed a diet of such headlines as ‘‘Britain to ban sale of all diesel and petrol cars by 2040’’ and ‘‘Volvo to go all-electric with new models from 2019’’ and ‘‘Oil barons face a slow death by electrification’’, many are convinced that the new vehicle markets of the near future will be exclusively full electric cars.

But the truth is that the scenario isn’t quite that.

What car companies such as Sweden’s Volvo are actually saying is that in the future none of their vehicles will be without an electric motor. That means that while some of them will be pure electric vehicles, others will be plug-in hybrids and even ordinary petrol-electric hybrids.

And that’s what the British government is saying too. It won’t be banning hybrid cars either – it’s just that like many other European countries it doesn’t want any new vehicles on its roads that are powered solely by petrol or diesel engines.

Of course the takeup of fully electric cars may accelerate faster than experts are forecasting – it’s all to do with what’s known as critical mass. So what is happening now is that the car companies are preparing for this eventuality.

BMW is a classic example. Just a few days ago it announced that all its brands and model series can be electrified, with full-electric or plug-in hybrid drivetrains offered in addition to combustion engine