According to Autoblog, the CEO of Lamborghini, Stephan Winkelmann, isn’t all that worried about any impending emissions regs coming out of Europe.
You would that think that, on the face of it, a company like Lamborghini would have a lot to worry about. Their cars are really inefficient, last time I looked, a Diablo got around 9 miles per gallon. But that never struck me as a problem, because if you’re going to spend that kind of money, you’re not really going to worry about how often you’re going to have to fill up.
Of course, a modern automaker has to worry about appeasing various legal entities, like governments, not just the well-healed and exhibitionist buyers of yore.
World car makers could be faced with monetary penalties for producing cars that produce too much carbon or do not get high enough mileage. Fair enough, if we’re going to get serious about climate change, and we’re going to have to deal with it, car companies can’t be dinking around producing hundreds of thousands of iterations of a product that makes the problem worse.
And that, is part of Winkelmann’s answer.
For starters, even in a good year, Lambo doesn’t make very many cars, so their overall impact on x or y climate problem is going to be negligible in comparrison to, say, coal burning power plants without CO2 scrubbers.
More importantly, things will not, in the foreseeable future, get Draconian enough where the EU is going to say, ’sorry, we cant let you make that car because it pollutes 25% more than the standard.’
What they’ll do is probably just hit the cars with a tax of some sort, kind of like the U.S.’s gas guzzler tax. The EU will end up saying, ‘OK, fine, but if you do that, you’re customers will have to pay 25% more.’
To which, most prospective Lamborghini owners will barely blink. Because I bet that percentage increase in their new Lambo will be about half of what they just spent on their third wife’s boob job (to put it in terms they can identify with).
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