Twenty-four countries and a group of car manufacturers including Ford, Volvo and Mercedes signed an agreement last week to stop selling internal combustion-engined cars by 2040 at the COP26 climate change conference. But not BMW—or, to be fair, a couple of other brands including Toyota and Volkswagen—which has been quite vocal on explaining its reasoning ever since: poorer countries need to hold up their end of the deal.
There's a bunch of completely fair reasons that you can argue combustion would still be necessary after 2040, especially in developing nations and ones less easily able to build out a charging infrastructure. Mothballing combustion machinery has its own environmental cost and if a combustion engine fails it's not trivial to drop in an electric motor as a replacement.
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