THE road to sustainable vehicles likely ends at electric cars, yet the route to this goal isn’t clear. There are multiple ways to get there, and Porsche is looking at synthetic fuels as a potential path.

These so-called eFuels are produced from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Porsche says that this fuel shares properties with kerosene, diesel and gasoline produced from crude oil in its most basic term. If produced using renewable energy, they can help vehicles powered by internal combustion engines (ICE) become more sustainable before the end of their life.

“We are seeing a lot of new regulations coming up everywhere in the world,” Detlev von Platen, member of the executive board, sales and marketing, said at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. “To a certain point of time, developing and producing combustion engines and cars around this technology will become even more expensive than a battery vehicle. Things are moving very fast.”

Governments worldwide are using aggressive regulations to push automakers toward an electric future, though that goal doesn’t address the millions of gasoline-powered vehicles already on the road.

Von Platen said that Porsche sees eFuels as a way to reduce the environmental impact of current and future internal combustion vehicles.

Porsche is in a unique position: 70 percent of the vehicles it ever produced are still on the road. Their owners are generally enthusiastic and unlikely to trade-in their classic air-cooled Porsche coupes for an electric vehicle.

“This technology is particularly important because the combustion engine will continue to dominate the automotive world for many years to come,” said Michael Steiner, member of the executive board, research and development, in a statement released in September. “If you want to operate the existing fleet in a sustainable manner, eFuels are a fundamental component.”

Synthetic fuels were tried in the past and gained little long-term traction. Porsche wants to influence this new breed of synthetic fuel specifications to ensure the eFuels work within Porsche’s performance engines. “When E10 came onto the market, the blend had some disadvantages. It must be different this time. It must have advantages,” Steiner said.

“We started a pilot program to talk about the industrialization of this fuel technology to make it cheaper, as it is still quite expensive compared to fossil fuels,” von Platen said. “If this works in the future, we can have something that will increase the speed of creating sustainability besides battery technology.”

(SD-Agencies)