11:00 am, September 9, 2025
Europe won’t be ready to go electric-only in 2035, one of Skoda’s key bosses has said.
Speaking to Car Dealer at the launch of the brand’s new Vision O concept in Munich, Germany, Martin Jahn, head of sales and marketing, said that a position on electric-only vehicles should be ‘left for the market to decide’.
‘I don’t think Europe is ready to go electric-only in 2035 and that has to change,’ Jahn said. ‘People are different and the regions are different, so I don’t see 2035 being realistic.’
Under current plans, all new cars and vans in the EU must be zero-emission vehicles from 2025, with the UK following the same timeline.
‘It’s difficult to prescribe – to be prescribed by politics. People still have their own preferences. It’s like with everything else – so I think that should be left for the market to divide, and to the customers. We want to offer whatever the customer wants.’
Skoda is one of the few brands to offer a broad range of powertrains, including electric, plug-in hybrid, petrol and – bucking the trend – diesel.
‘We are now becoming almost number one in Denmark because our electric cars are huge sales hits, and we are still number one in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as close to number one in Poland with combustion engines. So there are different interests of the customers and you want to follow them.
‘We are very much appreciated for having diesel, because there are still customers who want it and the customer usually knows what he wants.’
He added: ‘We were never a brand that said we wanted to do only EVs. We wanted to make them what the customer wanted.’
