Like the dinosaur, European supercars are in danger of becoming extinct. Currently, Europe’s auto manufacturers are locked in a deadly battle with environmentalists who point out that, with their massively powerful engines, supercars are pumping out as much as 2-3 times as much carbon dioxide as more standard cars.
These spoil sports — sorry, environmentalists — reckon that there is no place for the supercar in a world battling untoward emissions and climate change.
Manufacturers such as Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini are experiencing an uphill fight as they argue that the cars they produce are iconic vehicles that combine classic design with state-of-the-art technology — technology that could even help to save the environment in the long term. Either way, very few so-called supercars are pressed into service as daily drivers, so their overall contribution to CO2 emissions is very small.
However, the EU proposes to legislate for a decrease in CO2 emissions from cars to an average of 120g @ km by 2012 — currently the average is 160 grams.
This is potentially going to harm many supercars, most of which can squirt out as much as 200-500 grams a kilometre.
For smaller manufacturers there is some relief — those that produce less than 10,000 vehicles a year will be allowed to negotiate their own targets with the EU big-wigs. That lets smaller niche manufacturers — such as Lotus and Morgan — off the hook and would also throw a life-line to newly independent Aston Martin.
However, that won’t be much help to Porsche, Maserati, Ferrari and Lamborghini as they are all part of larger auto groups — so, for instance, Ferrari wouldn’t have the opportunity to set their own emission standards as they’d be lumped in with the much larger volume of vehicles produced by their parent company, Fiat.
What does the future hold for the supercar? Electric power? An electrically powered Ferrari would be a bit hard to swallow — the whirr of electric motors isn’t going to stir the blood quite as efficiently as the howl of a petrol-powered V12 at full noise!
In the meantime, the German and Italian auto makers are arguing strongly against these new proposals — let’s just hope that common sense prevails. It would be a less interesting world without Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and Maserati sports cars — we can’t all afford to own one, but we can at least admire them from a distance.
Of course, there is another solution if the worse comes to the worse — ship all the world’s supercars to New Zealand. We’ll look after them for all those well-heeled, supercar-owning Euros — then they can nip down here for a few days every year and thrash them around one of our race-tracks before heading off home. It’s not such a daft idea, ‘supercar resorts’ already exist in the US and Spain for just such activities — so why not here?
The world would be a poorer place without cars like the Ferrari Enzo
