Slovenia to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030

The government has not opted for an outright ban, instead it has put a ceiling on a car's carbon footprint of 50 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which only electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids currently conform with.

The strategy also calls for the construction of infrastructure for alternative fuels to expand the current network of charging stations from 227 to 1,200 by 2020, 7,000 by 2025 and 22,300 by 2030.

The government expects that by 2030, 17% of the fleet in Slovenia, roughly 200,000 cars, will already be either electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids.

Bojan Žlender, head of the sustainable mobility and transport policy service at the Infrastructure Ministry, said the strategy was ambitious but not too ambitious as the government wanted Slovenia to become a green transport nation by 2030 with car-sharing schemes and possibly autonomous vehicles.

The government has committed to act in line with the strategy by means of incentives, subsidies and possibly with restrictions, Žlender said.

Relevant car manufacturers have already declared that 2025 will mark a turning point and are targeting new technological solutions for 2030. "We believe development in the field will be striking," Žlender said.

The strategy extends to cargo transport as well, but the goals are more modest.

Under the plan, 12% of vans and small lorries would be electric by 2030, a third of all buses would use natural gas, and 12% of heavy lorries would use liquefied petroleum gas.

Moreover, by 2025 infrastructure would be built in the port of Koper allowing all ships to either charge their batteries or fuel up with natural gas.

Another goal is to increase the use of biodiesel by increasing the share of biofuel in diesel and having a tenth of lorries use pure biodiesel.

Statistics Office data show 1,470,000 road vehicles were registered in Slovenia at the end of 2016, up 2% year-on-year, of which 1.1 million were cars. About 74,000 new cars were sold in Slovenia last year, a new record.

Sales of electric and hybrid vehicles represent a tiny proportion of overall sales but have been accelerating.

The latest data from car dealers show 900 electric or hybrid vehicles were sold in the first eight months of the year, almost triple the number sold in the same period in 2016.

Slovenia has one of the highest car ownership rates in the world, 523 cars per 1,000 population as of the end of last year.