A further step towards electric. The U.S. government on Wednesday introduced stricter standards on auto emissions, a measure aimed at ensuring that two-thirds of cars sold in the country in 2032 are electric.

This goal goes beyond the ambitions unveiled by President Joe Biden two years ago, namely that half of the cars sold in the United States by 2030 will be emission-free (electric, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen). This time, the administration does not set a precise quota of clean vehicles to be sold.

But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to gradually restrict the average amount of pollutant emissions of new vehicles produced by each manufacturer, encouraging them to integrate more and more electric vehicles into their fleet. These new standards "should avoid nearly 10 billion tons of CO2 emissions (by 2055), more than double the total CO2 emissions in the United States in 2022," the EPA said in a statement.

The private sector invests $120 billion in the sector

The EPA estimates that the savings from the new standards will exceed the costs of at least $1 trillion. It will be up to manufacturers to choose which technologies they adopt to reduce their emissions. In the past, they have been able to lighten their vehicles or improve the efficiency of their engines. They could adopt new particulate filters.

But to the extent that many manufacturers are now well engaged in the transition to electric, the agency is counting above all on an acceleration of this movement: according to its calculations, with the new standards, electric vehicles could reach 67% of sales of light vehicles (city cars, sedans, SUVs, pick-ups) in 2032, 50% of sales of buses and garbage trucks, 35% of proximity trucks and 25% of long-haul trucks.

The slope is steep for manufacturers: even if they have increased a lot in the last two years, sales of all-electric cars in the United States represented only 5.8% of vehicles sold in 2022, according to the firm Cox Automotive.

In addition, in addition to the many public aids intended to promote the emergence of the electric car since the arrival of Joe Biden to the presidency, the private sector has invested $ 120 billion in the manufacture of electric vehicles and batteries, he argued: it is enough to observe "what is built and how fast".


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