France to ban sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040

Offer of incentives to motorists who support drive to be carbon neutral within a generation

FRANCE will outlaw all petrol and diesel vehicle sales by 2040, new environment minister Nicolas Hulot announced yesterday.

It will also ban any “new project to use petrol, gas or coal” as well as shale oil by that date.

The radical measures were unveiled as part of French president Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to “make the planet great again”.

Mr Hulot, a former wildlife television presenter, added a pledge to make France carbon neutral by 2050. “The carbon neutral objective will force us to make the necessary investments,” he added.

The French will in the meantime be offered financial incentives to scrap their polluting vehicles for clean alternatives, he said.

To start with, “the government will offer each French person a bonus to replace their diesel car dating before 1997 or petrol from before 2001 with a new or second-hand vehicle,” he said.

The move was, he said, a “veritable revolution”, adding that reaching the target would be “tough”, particularly for carmakers, but that France’s car industry was well equipped to make the switch.

Peugeot, Citroën and Renault ranked first, second and third on a 2016 list of large car manufacturers with the lowest carbon emissions, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said.

Mr Hulot cited the example of a “European maker” that had already decided to take the plunge. That was a reference to Volvo, which on Wednesday announced plans to build only electric and hybrid vehicles starting in 2019, making it the first major automaker to abandon cars and SUVS powered solely by the internal combustion engine.

“The solutions are there, our own makers have in their boxes the means to fulfil this promise,” said Mr Hulot, calling it a “public health” issue.

Paris, Lyon, Grenoble and other French cities have a chronic smog problem.

France is not alone in seeking to ban combustion-powered cars. Germany wants to do away with 100 per cent combustion-powered vehicles by 2030, as does India.

The Netherlands and Norway wish to do so by 2025.

Diesel and gasoline vehicles represented about 95.2 per cent of French new car fleets in the first half of the year, while electric vehicles held 1.2 per cent of the market. Hybrid cars made up about 3.5 per cent.