Italian marque’s CEO hints that e-fuels will enable it to sell combustion cars after the EU’s 2035 ban
Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna has suggested the marque could keep selling combustion cars after 2035, in line with the European Union’s plan to allow e-fuel-powered cars to remain on sale.
In March, the EU announced that some cars running exclusively on e-fuels would be allowed to remain on sale after 2035, when new combustion-engined car sales in the region will be banned. That has raised the intriguing possibility of low-volume marques such as Ferrari continuing to build and sell non-electrified cars.
Speaking at the Financial Times’ Future of the Car conference in London, Vigna said the brand remains on track to meet its goal of carbon-neutrality by 2030 and it will launch its first electric car in 2025 as previously announced, but the ability to continue selling combustion-engined cars is a boon because “ICE still has a lot to do”.
He explained that the e-fuels narrative is playing out at a faster speed than earlier anticipated, which has opened up new possibilities for Ferrari in terms of its future product and technology roadmap.
Vigna said: “The discussion that was happening a few weeks ago about the adoption of e-fuel – I thought that this would happen in 2025 or 2026. Now it has happened two years before.
“This is very good for us because you can run a thermal [combustion] car with fuel that is neutral, because you take the CO2 from the atmosphere and you merge it with other things. So I think that the two are very much compatible, and this is a reinforcement of our strategy, if you want.”
