Mercedes Won’t Be Going EV-Only By 2030 After All

Back in 2021, Mercedes-Benz was one of a flurry of European car manufacturers to announce that it’d be going fully electric. It gave the year 2030 as a cut-off date, which even at the time seemed ambitious for a company that was only building one bespoke EV at the time – the EQC crossover.

Despite having massively expanded its range of EQ-badged electric cars since then, with several more in the pipeline, the manufacturer has now rowed back on those plans. This was confirmed last week in its Q4 2023 financial statement, which confirmed that “customers and market conditions will set the pace” of a switch to electric.

While Mercedes says it remains committed to electrification, it cites various economic factors and slowing demand for EVs as the reasons for its reversal. It now projects that around half of its sales will be fully electric by 2030.

The change of heart comes amidst something of a turn in the tides of the EV’s fortunes. Rising electricity costs mean they’re not as cheap to run as they once were, government subsidies have been scaled back, and public charging infrastructure still hasn’t caught up with the growing UK EV fleet. Amidst all this, customer demand is slowing down.

Elsewhere, governments are re-evaluating their own plans to ban the sale of combustion-powered cars. While the European Union ultimately settled on a 2035 cutoff, it pledged to investigate the use of synthetic fuels as an alternative. The UK, meanwhile, moved its own date back from 2030 to 2035 last year.

It wouldn’t come as a huge surprise to see some other manufacturers go back on pledges to go EV-only amidst these conditions. Akio Toyoda, the chairman of Toyota, often perceived as being too slow in its electric journey, recently predicted that global EV sales would only ever peak at 30 per cent of all new cars as other technologies emerged.

It’s all cause for some cautious optimism as enthusiasts, although we wouldn’t bank on the sudden return of thumping great naturally aspirated 6.2-litre V8s in Mercedes’ AMG models. Sorry.