Volkswagen to hit 1m electric cars milestone two years early
Volkswagen has accelerated its push into electric cars, as company forecasts suggest the world’s largest carmaker will produce its millionth battery electric vehicle two years earlier than previously planned.
The core Volkswagen brand will have turned out 1m battery-only cars by the end of 2023 and will reach 1.5m by the end of 2025, the Wolfsburg-based manufacturer said on Friday.
This year it produced more than 70,000 electric cars, and last year 50,000. Volkswagen, which produced 10.8m cars in 2018, said it had produced 250,000 electrified vehicles (including fossil fuel-driven hybrids) since 2013.
Volkswagen and other carmakers are scrambling to increase the number of electric cars they make and sell in the EU. Limits coming into force from 1 January will heavily penalise carmakers with fines for excessive greenhouse gas output. The regulations aim to reduce average carbon dioxide tailpipe emissions from new cars sold in the EU to below 95g per km.
The fallout from the Dieselgate scandal, in which VW engineers cheated emissions tests, has prompted the company to increase its focus on electric cars.
The Volkswagen group will release eight electric or hybrid models in the next year across its brands, which include Audi, Seat and Skoda. It is pinning its hopes of mass-market sales on the Volkswagen ID.3, with its plant in Zwickau, east Germany, aiming to produce 330,000 vehicles a year by 2021.
The ID.3 base model will cost less than €30,000 (£26,000) and be capable of travelling for between 205 and 340 miles on a single charge, depending on the model.
Thomas Ulbrich, the Volkswagen brand board member responsible for electric cars, said: “2020 will be a key year for the transformation of Volkswagen. With the market launch of the ID.3 and other attractive models in the ID family, our electric offensive will also become visible on the roads.”
While Volkswagen’s main market is the EU, it is also expected to face grow
ing pressure in other markets as emissions standards gradually catch up.
The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, told the Financial Times on Friday that the city was considering forcing ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft to use electric vehicles, in an effort to meet a target of zero net carbon emissions by 2050.
options. Teens increasingly rejected gender labels and intersex rights activism blossomed.
There has been a dark side to the progress: unprecedented assaults on LGBTQ+ rights and increasing reports of violence, harassment and discrimination, particularly against trans women of colour. The decade of visibility and backlash has set the stage for continued civil rights battles – with growing movements of trans and nonbinary people organising to fight back. Sam Levin in Los Angeles
Women’s football
A decade of steady quantitive growth for women’s football in England has been studded with qualitative leaps in the sport’s development.
In 2011, the FA launched the Women’s Super League and moved the game out of the shadow of the men’s into the summer. It was a bold step and reaped instant rewards. The average attendance of 550 in that first season was an increase of 604% on the previous season average. At the decade’s close, that average had reached 4,112.
The English national team, the Lionesses, have provided the biggest public window into the game, with consistent showings through the decade. That has generated a surge in the number of women and girls playing football: there are now more than 11,000 registered teams and more than 2.6 million women over 16 playing at one level or another.
This is all a result of multimillionpound investment from the FA and commercial partners. In 2018, the FA announced an additional investment of £50m in the women’s game over six years. A league sponsorship deal with Barclays is believed to include investment of as much as £20m.
There is a real momentum behind women’s football. Professionalism means the product on the pitch has improved dramatically and a home Euros to help start the decade off in 2021 is likely to be another moment that propels the sport forward. Suzanne Wrack
Vaping
The jury is still out on whether vaping will take over from more traditional methods of consuming tobacco but, in terms of pure numbers, it was indisputably one of the trends of the decade.
The first e-cigarette is credited to a Chinese pharmacist called Hon Lik, who said he invented it after his father died of lung cancer. Those that arrived in the UK in 2006 were described as cigalikes, devices heating nicotine to produce inhalable vapour but still masquerading as cigarettes.
Measurement of e-cigarette use began in 2012, at a time when less than half the adult population of the UK had heard of them. In that year, there were 700,000 users (1.7% of the population). In 2019, that had grown to 3.6 million (7.1%). According to ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), just under 2 million of today’s vapers are exsmokers, 1.4 million are current smokers and 200,000 have never smoked. The reason most often given for vaping is to quit smoking. Most public health experts in the UK, with some notable exceptions, think e-cigarettes could save lives. Nicotine is strongly addictive but not proven to do harm, whereas the smoke and tar from tobacco kill up to half of those who use cigarettes.
But e-cigarettes have developed a bad name in the US, at first because of Juul, a stylish device looking like a USB stick that took off among high-school pupils. It contains three times the level of nicotine permitted in Europe. A panic among parents and teachers became a national scare when reports began to pile up of adult vapers with lung diseases. As of mid-November, the authorities have reported 2,172 cases of lung injury and 42 deaths.
If e-cigarettes can weather the storm and irrefutable data is collected to show they are a big help in quitting smoking, they could still have a bright future. But after such reputational damage, the adolescents of 2030 may be asking: “Vaping – what was that?” Sarah Boseley
Smartphones
The technical specification says it all. In 2010, the top-of-the-line iPhone 3GS had a 480-pixel-high screen, 32GB of storage and a 3-megapixel camera. Going into 2020, the equivalent iPhone 11 Pro has a 12-megapixel camera, 512GB of storage, and about 17 times the pixels in the screen. We’ve dropped the “smart”, too, and the “mobile”. It’s just a phone now and it lies at the heart of everything.
It also costs £1,400. That, more than anything else, shows the real change that smartphones have wrought over the past decade: from an optional extra, sold to boost the value of phone contracts, to the core of modern life. Apple can charge such a price because phones are firmly established as central to productivity, to entertainment, to communication and to education.
The proliferation of phones across the globe is one of the stories of the decade. There are an estimated 3.2 billion smartphone users worldwide, a penetration rate of 42%. That spread – overwhelmingly on Google’s Android operating system – has let countries leapfrog previously essential stages of development: from sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile internet is crucial to economic development even though fixed lines are still scarce, to China, where cashless stores are more common than in the US despite a 10th of the take-up of credit cards.
In the developed world, phones have killed the concept of “being online”. Once, the internet was a place you sat down to connect to. Now, we’re all online all the time, and the realitydistorting effects are bleeding over into meatspace. Misinformation on Twitter makes the front pages; CGI-Instagram influencers are licensed for fashion ads.
That change will last. Phones may alter unrecognisably over the next decade, with smart glasses, voice assistants and wearables taking more of the interactions, shrinking the phone down to an always-on and always-onyou hub. But the blending of realities is here to stay. Alex Hern
Social media
In 2010, the traditional media ecosystem was fraying but largely intact: television still attracted big ratings, print newspaper sales were struggling but had yet to fall off a cliff and many people still used traditional phones that could do little more than call and text. Although we were spending increasing amounts of time online, people still generally accessed Facebook through the site on a desktop computer. Instagram was in its infancy. Twitter was still quite niche.
But as smartphone usage took off in the early part of the decade, everything changed. Suddenly, checking a social network turned from something that took place a maximum of a few times a day, perhaps on your lunch break when the boss wasn’t looking, into an addictive habit. With people constantly checking Facebook, new ways of communication – and new formats of conveying news – took hold. As hundreds of millions spent more time on these networks, the advertising cash followed them. By the end of the decade the social network that started as outsiders had grown into lightly regulated behemoths. Their algorithms exerted enormous influence over commerce, the media, and politics. They were credited with anything from allowing small businesses to flourish to undermining journalism and helping extremists to gain power.
Whether the same social networks continue to exert the same amount of influence in 2030 depends on two things. First, whether governments have the political will to regulate or break up these companies. And, second, and potentially more damaging, whether they can convince the public to keep using them and not spend their time elsewhere. One scary lesson for Mark Zuckerberg is that no one is talking about the risk MySpace poses to democracy. Jim Waterson
Fracking
The shale revolution has made the unthinkable inevitable. In the blink of a decade, fracking has transformed the US from an energy-hungry importer to one of the world’s most important energy producers. The US is poised to enter the 2020s as a net exporter of oil and gas for the first time since records began.
At the centre of the boom in shale oil and gas was a technology breakthrough. Across the US shale heartlands in Texas, North Dakota and New Mexico, hydraulic fracturing unlocked vast reserves of oil and gas trapped in unyielding layers of shale. It was an engineering feat that has upended global energy markets and rewritten the rules of geopolitics.
The impact has been profound. By declaring its energy independence, the US has claimed its right to step back from the instability in the Middle East in favour of a US-first diplomatic policy. It has ignited a surge in manufacturing, which has helped fuel trade tensions with China. It has hardened the stance against the climate agenda, oiling the US exit from the Paris climate agreement. Since 2010, the amount of shale oil and gas produced has increased sixfold.
Within the first half of the decade, the rise of North America’s upstart frackers triggered the start of the most severe oil market downturn on record. By the second half of the decade the Opec oil group determined its production policy around the prospects of US frackers. Today, the world’s biggest oil companies have staked multibilliondollar investments on their claim to the next phase of the US shale era.
There is yet to be a convincing successor to the US shale boom elsewhere in the world and with good reason. Environmental concerns, densely populated areas and fierce public opposition have kept frackers at bay across Europe. Efforts to ignite a US-style shale boom in Argentina have been slow to gain traction but may soon take off. Jillian Ambrose
Austerity
Austerity has defined the decade. Trillions of dollars may have been pumped into the banks to reboot global growth across the developed world but cuts to public spending and welfare benefits, rather than Keynesian stimulus, was the remedy adopted by western governments battered by the worst economic shock since the great depression.
In Britain, cuts imposed by the Conservatives determined the 2010s, fuelling political dissatisfaction that led to the Brexit vote. But the austerity drive spread around the world. Greece was at the centre during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, as markets feared contagion for other euro-area nations, known together as the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
Austerity was the condition attached to international bailouts to stop the rot. Cutting the way to prosperity was all the rage. The belief was that governments could mend their finances while central banks rebooted economic growth by cutting interest rates to zero and firing up the quantitative-easing money press.
The trick worked to a degree, stopping the last recession from turning into another great depression. The US has enjoyed the longest uninterrupted stretch of growth in modern history.
But austerity dismantled the mechanisms that reduce inequality. The 2010s mark the weakest economic expansion on record, wage growth has stalled, the public realm lies in tatters, improvements in living standards are stagnating, politics has shattered into extremes and the world economy remains on life support. A third of young people are still out of work in Greece, where the economy remains a quarter smaller than in 2007. More than 14 million in Britain are struggling in poverty.
Austerity dogma is fading and increasingly regarded a mistake. But after defining the past decade, it will still influence the next. Government spending is starting to rise to repair the damage, but trust in establishment politicians to deliver is shot. The 2010s incubated more radical ideas that will colour the 2020s, while the consequences of austerity will continue to be felt. Richard Partington
Migration
In 2010, migration was much less visible on the global agenda, other than in central America and parts of southeast Asia. Today it is a pressing issue on most continents.
There are currently more than 272 million people around the world living outside their country of birth–3.5% of the global population.This is an increase of 51 million since 2010. It shows that the rise in the global number of migrants has outpaced the increase in the world’s population but perhaps not by as much as political rhetoric suggests. Forced migration – meaning refugees and asylum seekers – has risen much faster than voluntary movement of people seeking better opportunities. One in seven migrants is younger than 20.
Despite the global compacts on migration and refugees adopted last year – and despite the broad benefits that migration often brings – the issue is arguably more politically sensitive than at any point since the end of the second world war. Governments across Europe and in the US and Australia have put up fences and forced back people seeking refuge.
Migration patterns are tough to predict since they reflect evolving crises and instability but also longer-term societal changes in demographics, economic development, transport access and connectivity.There is every indication, though, that rising population, climate pressure, food insecurity and conflict mean migration will remain as potent an issue through the 2020s. But evidence does not support a dramatic rise in either the number or proportion of migrants.
The latest UN projections suggest zero net migration between now and 2050, which would mean migrants would remain at about 3.17% of a global population of 9.8 billion. Lucy Lamble
Populism
When G20 world leaders gathered in London in April 2009, only one politician – Silvio Berlusconi – could justifiably have been called a rightwing populist. Fast-forward a decade, and three of the four largest democracies on the planet now have far-right populists at the helm: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US.
In Europe, radical-right populist parties are rarely winning elections but they are securing more votes, more seats in parliament and more powersharing roles in coalition governments than at any time since the second world war. In the two western countries that arguably suffered most under the rule of 20th-century fascists – Germany and Spain – far-right parties using populist rhetoric are the third-largest parties in parliament. And they control the government in Poland and Hungary – the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has gone a long way toward his goal of transforming the EU country into what he hopes will be an “illiberal democracy”.
Political scientists do not agree how we got ourselves into this hole, and are even less sure about how we can scramble out. Many explanations for the “causes” of the rightwing populist wave point to the effects of financial crisis of 2008, the September 11 attacks (and the security clampdown that followed) and, in Europe, the so-called migrant crisis in 2015, which brought into focus long-simmering unease over mass migration.
Others point to the dominance of a neoliberal economic order – implemented not just by conservatives but also those who identified as centreleft – and paving the way to rampant globalisation and inequality. But no one should discount the impact of a technological era, which has rewired the entire information ecosystem, eroding trust in institutions and rewarding the kind of angry, tribal, divisive and sensational political debates in which rightwing populist thrive. Paul Lewis
What will be the great trends of the 2020s? Let us know your thoughts by emailing theupside@theguardian.com