The car industry has to work more closely together with politicians to find a solution to the global megatrends that are shaping society, Karl-Thomas Neumann, boss of Opel and president of GM Europe told a pre-show conference.
Urbanisation is creating traffic jams, energy prices are increasing, society is ageing and markets continue to fragment, he said in his keynote address at Future Summit, a conference organised by Die Zeit magazine in collaboration with Opel.
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“People want smaller cars that are inexpensive and attractive,” he said, adding that the basic requirements 25 years from now will not be much different to today.
People will still want to buy cars that are safe, affordable, comfortable and sustainable. Priorities will change as urban mobility becomes the driver of vehicle development. “There will be limitations to personal mobility and we will see more and more car sharing,” he said.
And he called on politicians to act now to address the issues. Private mobility and public transport must be better connected “and we need the political framework to do that now, not in 10 years.”
Neumann, who joined GM in March this year after a career at Volkswagen and Continental, called on politicians in Brussels to “stop playing poker” with the industry and said he was ready to work with both sides to develop a new order based on fair play across industries and sustainability. “It’s not right that one car maker can be fined for missing CO2 targets by 1g while other industries can trade ‘green’ licences,” he said.
Opel has set a target of reducing CO2 emissions across its fleet by 27% by 2020 and was spending EUR4bn up to 2016 to produce 23 new models and 13 new engines as part of its Drive 2022 programme, he told the conference.
