Isn’t 2050 rather a long way away?

It is far closer than many people think – only 2 life cycles for the average car. And we have aggressive targets for 2020 and 2030 as well.

To get on the needed path and achieve the 50by50, and our interim targets, we have a window of opportunity of only about 5-10 years. After that it will be very difficult to improve fuel economy at the rate we need to, and still achieve the new car target of 50% by 2030 in order to reach the global stock average target of 50% by 2050 (50-by-50). There is a significant time lag between the development of fuel economy policies and actions and a reduction of CO2 emissions of the global vehicles fleet. For example, it takes 5 to 10 years for the vehicle industry to design and launch new vehicle technologies, and the full turnover of the stock of vehicles takes 15-20 years. There will also be time needed for the wide dissemination of clean technologies, like hybridization of vehicle fleets. Finally, in most countries in the developing world, fuel efficiency policies still need to be developed.