The dam has broken. Automakers, especially in Europe, have gone from: EVs are a pipe dream, to gas-powered cars are dead, and now finally to: Gas-powered cars aren’t going away anytime soon. The cracks started to form last year, as companies started pushing back their all-EV plans by a few years. At least one automaker has pushed that back to eternity.
I do these little news roundups every day, and it always pleases me when The Morning Dump has a coherent theme that weaves through all the stories. Today, it’s electrification. Electrification isn’t going away, even if the transition to fully-electrified cars isn’t happening on a predictable timetable.
For BMW, that means one senior exec saying that the timetable is now “never” for combustion-powered vehicles. Bentley is following suit, mostly because it relies on Volkswagen platforms that’ll be shared with Porsche. Volvo, too, is invested in hybrids, although Jeep is killing at least one of its PHEV platforms before it even goes to market.
At least Jeep’s deciding not to make that car by choice. JLR is going to go a full month without production against its will.
‘ICE And Combustion Will Never Disappear. Never’ Says BMW Board Member
The quote above has been working its way around the web this weekend, and I thought it was worth approaching, both for what I think is being said and for the context I think is being missed.
From a macro perspective, it’s important to restate the obvious: Automakers were unrealistic with their electrification goals. Why? It’s probably a mix of things, and that mix will depend a lot on the specific automaker.
Right up front, I want to grant that automakers are made up of individual decision-makers, and my optimistic view is that most of those decision-makers want the planet to survive. Cars are a part of the global warming problem, but they’re not the only cause. I’d argue that we focus disproportionately on the cars themselves and not the infrastructure and building patterns that make us reliant on cars.
Urban planning is a hard, long process, and just swapping out gas-powered cars with electric ones is an easier pill for automakers to swallow than, say, trains. Just keep making cars, but make them electric. Get credit for saving the planet and rake in a lot of money.
There’s another reason. The massive valuation given to Tesla made it seem like EVs were imminent, and that anyone still making gas-powered cars would be a dinosaur by the end of the decade. Unfortunately, the adoption rate started leveling off. Most automakers led with expensive EVs, which was already a market saturated by Tesla. Automakers no longer got a stock boost by just saying they were going to electrify.
Regulation was the last piece, with many parts of the globe setting higher and higher standards that could only reasonably be achieved with an extremely high percentage of electric cars.
With the market turning, regulation being revised/reversed, and the insane valuations disappearing, automakers are realizing very late that something has to change.
That’s the background for this quote, from an Autocar India article:
With governments retreating from ambitious 2035 all-EV targets and demand patterns varying sharply across regions, the German automaker is pursuing a dual-path strategy that keeps internal combustion engines (ICE) firmly in play while investing heavily in pure EVs.
“ICE and combustion will never disappear. Never,” said Jochen Goller, member of the board of management of BMW AG for customer, brands and sales, underscoring the company’s belief that electrification will coexist with conventional drivetrains in the foreseeable future.
Goller’s emphatic comment frames BMW’s strategy: Instead of betting on a single technology to define the 2030s, BMW is investing in multiple ones but simplified into a leaner, more scalable structure.
The context is that he’s saying this in India. Electric cars require a lot of new infrastructure to be built, and it’s not clear that the economics justify that kind of infrastructure everywhere. Where there are developing nations that use a lot of hydroelectric energy, like Nepal, EV adoption may be quick. In other areas, where even keeping the lights on is an issue, it’s likely to be slower.
BMW’s plan is not to get rid of gas-powered cars, though BMW has made a huge investment in EVs. BMW’s plan is instead to offer the widest range of powertrains possible, fitted appropriately to each market. Compared to VW, at least, the Bavarian automaker has been a little better about being flexible.
The reality is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, and car execs should have known that all along. Forever is a mighty long time, just ask Prince (or Big K.R.I.T.). It’s possible that either through the sheer force of will or some kind of technological advancement that everything will become an EV in my lifetime.
It’s also possible that what will happen first is the electrification of everything. This means almost everything becomes a hybrid, a PHEV, or an EREV.
Bentley Can’t Go Full EV Either
As a part of the larger Volkswagen Group, Bentley shares platforms with Audi and Porsche. This means that as those companies walk back their EV plans, so must Bentley.
Per the UK version of Autocar:
Bentley CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser told Autocar that as the three brands share platforms, drivetrains and other key components, decisions and investments in Stuttgart and Ingolstadt have had direct consequences in Crewe.
[…]
As such, pure-petrol successors to the Bentayga, Continental GT and Flying Spur are set to remain part of the line-up, reflecting demand from key markets such as the Middle East and North America. They were originally expected to be offered only with PHEV or EV powertrains.
Backing the decision, Walliser said: “There is a dip in demand for luxury electric vehicles, and customer demand is not yet strong enough to support an all-electric strategy. The luxury market is a lot different today than when we announced Beyond100.
“Electrification is still our goal, but we need to take our customers with us.”
I like that last line. Also, I still think Walliser should be the next Porsche CEO.
Jeep Kills The Gladiator PHEV, Volvo Plans To Build Hybrid XC90 In The United States
There’s a way to look at the PHEV Stellantis vehicles as compliance cars, built primarily to avoid having to pay carbon penalties and take advantage of tax credits (and to be sold in CARB-aligned states). While they’re good vehicles if they’re always plugged in, it’s not clear how often they are plugged in, and there have been lingering questions about quality.
The Jeep Gladiator is also, in its own way, a compliance vehicle, in that it complied with the requirement that every large automaker offer some sort of mid-sized pickup truck. I like the Gladiator, but low sales volumes already make the fitting of a PHEV system a questionable move.
Now that Congress and the White House have effectively killed fuel economy penalties by setting them to $0, it seems entirely unnecessary. Stellantis, for that reason or another, seems to agree that it’s not necessary, according to a statement given to The Detroit News:
“As customers’ propulsion preferences for battery-electric trucks continue to evolve, Stellantis is reassessing its product strategy and will no longer include an electrified Gladiator variant in the Jeep lineup,” said a company statement sent by spokesperson Andy Bowman.
Bad news for the suppliers, but I’m not expecting a lot of customers are going to care. I am generally supportive of PHEVs, it’s just that they need to have more than 10-20 miles of range to be effective.
Volvo, for its part, will reportedly build an XC90 hybrid in South Carolina at the end of this decade. While Volvo didn’t specifically say it’ll be an XC90, that’s the best guess at the moment, and it seems to conform to the company’s statement that it’s “designed to meet the specific demands of the U.S. market.”
JLR Can’t Build Anything For At Least Another Week
Jaguar is still planning to go all-EV so far as I can tell, though Land Rover definitely plans to keep building combustion-powered cars well into the foreseeable future. For the moment, no one at JLR is building anything as the JLR Cyberdisaster is now stretching production delays until the end of the month, as Automotive News Europe reports:
Jaguar Land Rover is extending the closure of its factories until Oct. 1 following a cyberattack that has left its operations paralyzed and smaller suppliers struggling.
“We have made this decision to give clarity for the coming week as we build the timeline for the phased restart of our operations and continue our investigation,” JLR said on Sept. 23.
JLR’s factories in Britain produce about 1,000 cars a day and the automaker is said to be losing tens of millions of pounds, with many of its 33,000 staff told to stay at home.
It’s possible that, even if JLR gets production started next week, disruptions could last through the end of the year.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
For no reason at all, The White Stripes have been in my head all week. Specifically, “Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine.”
Acetaminophen, you see the medicine
Oh girl
The Big Question
Which major, non-EV automaker will be the first to actually go 100% BEV?
Top photo: BMW
“‘ICE And Combustion Will Never Disappear. Never’ Says BMW Board Member”
How close is that board member to retirement?
“Bentley Can’t Go Full EV Either”
Not if they give their EVs an ugly face like that.
“Which major, non-EV automaker will be the first to actually go 100% BEV?”
My guess is Hyundai-Kia.
Source? A great many of my trips are under 20 miles, and those 15 mile trips are the ones where my ICE is the least efficient. I’d be willing to put money on a 20 mile PHEV dramatically reducing my vehicle emissions.
Would love to buy a Gladiator 4xe (PHEV). C’mon Jeep. You already developed most of the tech for the Wrangler 4xe.
Those last words are problematic. This course change is driven solely by a lack of business case for BEVs. Cars are fantastically expensive to make. BEVs especially so. Legacy automakers weren’t making any money on BEVs, and the only way to soften the blow to their bottom line was to make the big luxury versions that they could slap a higher MSRP on. Market gets saturated with those, supply outstrips demand, so the industry must revert to making products that are profit pillars to stay afloat (ICE). Those of us in the industry watching the sausage get made saw this coming years ago.
Not all new cars should be EVs.
But most of them should at least be electrified. Don’t tell me you love the sound of the 1.5 3cyl in your greyscale CUV.
Leave the fossil fuels for times when you want the hair on the back of your neck to stand up.
So basically now everyone is saying what everyone was mad at Toyota for saying all along? That tracks.
With my very limited patience for reading about hybrids, and without writing a furious anti-hybrid manifesto, I offer my basic opinion. “Disappear?” No, it would be unlikely that any category of vehicle would disappear.
So, instead, I say that there will be fewer gas stations within the foreseeable future.
Not every vehicle needs a “power plant” when reliable, plentiful electricity can be made from almost anything, and delivering tankers of fuel regularly to so many locations will no longer be justified by the number of vehicles that need individual fueling.
PHEV everthing! When the automakers finally realize this, they will finally provide what we all know is needed, Sprinter-scale PHEVs. Local delivery, longer deliveries, and what I know I need, a camper. Gas/electric to get there, battery for boondocking with gas backup. Come on, make it happen automakers!!!
If I try to be optimistic about it, I think it’s better to have overambitious goals that you are willing to scale back, than it is to barely try. Automakers hands’ were forced by regulation and stock market pressure as stated. I think hybrids and EREVs are the perfect case of not letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.
Really, no amount of consumer restrictions or things we give up will matter in the long run. That just allows the large polluters, the ones that really matter, more slack to take up.
Yeah, this is the key thing that is missed by all the “I told you so” crowd we’re hearing so much from these days.
Targets are meant to be ambitious. It’s rational to revise them based on real world conditions.
There’s still going to be a tipping point where EVs are better in every way for an overwhelming majority of consumers. If technologies of the past are any indicator, once we’re past that tipping point, adoption grows quickly.
Citroën.
“Never” is a long time.
Not strictly the question, but it boggles me that BMW is ignoring the tech they developed for the i3 & i8. Like, OK, a range-extender EV with a carbon fibre tub on an aluminum chassis was never going to be a volume vehicle, but—the tech is *right there*. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
See also: GM and Voltec. Umm, guys…? [Knocks on screen]
This website and its commenters are huge fans of range extenders (for a ton of good reasons) but I think automakers know what they’re doing and don’t see a market for it, at least in the US.
You read The Autopian and still think automakers know what they’re doing? 😀
These manufacturers are just handing their futures over to Chinese companies.
Down here in Costa Rica EV sales are breaking record after record. I think they now account for more than a quarter of new cars sold. Electricity is cheap, from sustainable sources, most houses have garages (meaning convenient charging) and the country is tiny so range is less of an issue.
Since a lot of mainstream manufacturers are pulling back on EV models or moving them upmarket, cheap Chinese cars have taken over and dominate sales. You can’t drive a mile without seeing several BYD Seagulls.
Some countries will become almost fully electric sooner than we think and China is taking full advantage of it.
Horse and carriages will NEVER disappear from the roads!
Well, they still haven’t. Depending where you live. 🙂
yeah, I feel like this is “Never” is still “Never*”, where one day they’ll find that ICE is very low-volume in certain markets to the point that they’re at the level of horse and carriage or hobbyist vehicles, but never truly gone.
Literally saw a horse drawn carriage going down the street on Sunday while having lunch at a restaurant in the main road on our town so…, yeah, so far still correct.
I’m pretty sure Mennonite and Amish people won’t be accepting autonomous vehicles anytime soon. Unless, maybe, all the buttons are removed and everything is painted black. Oh, wait…
They still exist, but they’re a novelty and special infrastructure is no longer provided for them.
I don’t know if combustion vehicles would become that rare, but they will at least lose much of their currently-ubiquitous infrastructure support eventually. There won’t be a stable on every block.
I thought VW especially as they spun off their commercial vehicles and trucks. But now I think it’s more of question of who can survive it. No US manufacturers. I dont think any of the Japanese. Combustion in full size trucks and bigger isn’t going away anytime soon hybrid is way more likely. That really just leaves some Europen OEMs. Small Bev trucks make sense and work but once you start towing like a lot of Europeans use theirs for it starts to fall apart. Though maybe the distances are close enough that it won’t matter as much as other markets. If you count Chinese oems that have produced ice vehicles take your pick except for dogfang. If Fiat didn’t brand have vans I would say they would be a sub brand contender.
This bit from BMW (and Bentley) is what happens when corporations chase quarterly profits over long term plans. The charge to EV-only (while sometimes driven by government regulation) were short sighted and chasing that “Tesla Bump”. Now that the winds have changed in a regulatory sense in many places, combined with the plateau that many figured would be there after early adopters got their EV, “ICE… will never disappear.”
Internal Combustion (especially in regards to the fossil fueled kind) is going to go away, one way or another. It’s not going to happen by 2030, 2035, 2040, maybe not even 2050. Global warming is a thing, and transportation will have to change to deal with it. Many things and industries will need to change. However, that makes for a terrible sound bite for a CEO looking to keep their job.
For which non-EV automaker to go 100% first, probably none of them because you can’t cheat physics but I’m gonna ramble anyway. Companies that sell vehicles in NA, any developing nation, or sell commercial trucks are automatically out, which probably leaves a few EUDM and Chinese brands left. China seems to be one of the major regions still aggressively pushing BEVs compared to other parts of the world (don’t quote me on that), so my guess is…
…uninspiring drumroll…
Hongqi
The real push to announce that EVs would become mandatory did not come from environmentalists, accelerationists or concerned governments. It came from Wall Street.
They all wanted the returns Tesla was getting. Until wages are raised and more infrastructure investments are made by governments, some countries will never have massive EV adoption.
The returns Tesla was getting.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of getting better at engineering has been learning most issues aren’t actually technical problems. I have limited hope for the future. 🙁
I think Ford will probably be the first with an all EV lineup, if only because the Corvette will be one of the last vehicles to transition.
And you think the Mustang won’t?
There’s already been EV mustangs, just as race cars. I don’t think it’s as tied to the identity of combustion as the corvette or a 911. At its core, the mustang is cheap fun car, closer in ethos to an American Miata than it is an aspirational car like the vette.
Which major, non-EV automaker will be the first to actually go 100% BEV?
None in the US. The US government is 100% focused right now on baseload electrical generation. For now that means natural gas turbines. In the future more nuclear, then someday fusion. EVs, wind, and solar (although great), are a distraction from building out baseload capacity. Every policy decision we’re seeing right now (EPA, EV credits, trying to defund charging infrastructure) reflects this. Every bit of that generating capacity is going to AI data centers so throwing more EVs on the grid is not directionally correct. We’ll get to EVs eventually but right now we are in energy triage mode.
I never actually thought of that with these giant AI data centers going up. Amazon is building an 11 billion dollar one in my neck of the woods outside South Bend Indiana and the damn thing is going to use as much power as half the states residential use. I wonder where they are going to get the power and what the hell is going to happen to my electric bill?
If you want to go down a rabbit hole, the amount of electricity these consume is staggering. The number and speed at which they are being built is equally staggering. They are only limited by chips and energy. Consequentially Taiwan makes the chips, and China is ramping up energy production WAY faster than we are….We are suddenly very concerned with protecting Taiwan’s ‘democracy’ (also known as TSMC)….which is why the US doesn’t care much about EVs or the environment right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wish I had invested more into TSMC when I did about 2 years about I knew they would shoot up since they were the biggest fab company out there. And yeah the rate these data centers are going up is ridiculous is is just like the warehouses.
It’s so much electricity that their capacity isn’t even measured in a computing unit. It’s measured in power consumption, i.e “OpenAI asked US to approve energy-guzzling 5GW data centers, report says”.
Totally undermining any gains from shifting the grid to renewable energy as a side effect.
For comparison, a typical nuclear plant is about 1GW of output. It took 7 years to build the last one that came online in 2024…The one before that came online in 2016 I think…
Yeah and the thing with nuke plants that isn’t just something you can just willy nilly build like these data centers but for good reasons as you need to make sure all the safety protocols are followed. The Amazon data center I mentioned has already had some fires during the building process with people getting hurt but the construction has just continued on if that was a nuke plant that thing would be shut down for month with investigations.
The question is, what happens when we hit the Trough of Disappointment in AI and how long will it last? Model collapse and dissatisfaction with the slop content it generates are an ever bigger part of the conversation around AI.
It almost doesn’t matter as long as there is the perception that the US is behind on energy and China is behind on chips. This creates a perpetual loop of trying to catch up with each other.
BMW Exec goes on to mention other things that will never disappear:
Land Line phones
Beepers
Typewriters
VHS Tapes
iPod
Chrysler
Company that makes most of their money from making internal combustion cars doesn’t want internal combustion to die off. Next up you’ll have Elon Musk lobbying the EPA to kill off internal combustion.
I’ve seen two of the new BMW CUVs, now (iX? iX3? i3X? iM3X MPower MDrivei5650?) and I have yet to form a firm opinion on this new “slab side” design language shown off by the Jaguar concept, the TT Concept, and whatever that Bentley thing is. It’s striking, sure. But it feels too…brutalist for my liking.
I expect my “beauty” from the luxury segment. Though I will say that it’s definitely better than the cut up, vents everywhere LOOK AT ME AND HOW MUCH MONEY I SPENT styling of the performance models of various European cars.
Amen. “Cut up, vents everywhere” should be reserved for Group B homologation specials and the like.
This is how I find out BMW has given up their cloaking program?
Does anybody know what specifically happened at JLR? I can’t imagine what kind of hack could take down an entire company for over a month across all continents and divisions it has from service centers, to factories, to engineering work.
It happened to British airways about ten years ago. That wasn’t a cyber attack but an error made internally. They bricked their entire infrastructure.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/20/jaguar-land-rover-hack-factories-cybersecurity-jlr
This Guardian article infers that it’s a ransomware attack.
If they’re using a big ERP system like SAP or Oracle across their entire business it’s entirely possible. I’ve worked in businesses where an “internal cyberattack” (borked upgrade) on such a system ground everything to a halt for a few days.
I’m a fan of older Land Rovers, and the joke is just hanging there for me to grab.
Lucas Computers let too much of the smoke out.