Paris wants to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2030

Paris wants to get gasoline-powered cars off the city’s roads by 2030, the latest bet by officials that electric vehicles are the cars of the future.

“We have planned the end of thermic vehicle use, and therefore of fossil energies, by 2030,” Paris deputy mayor in charge of transport Christophe Nadjovski said Thursday on France Info radio, according to The Associated Press.

{mosads}

Paris City Hall issued a statement Thursday emphasizing that officials plan to keep discussing the idea with residents and carmakers in the coming months, but called the tentative 2030 deadline “a feasible and realistic” goal, according to the AP.

The development comes after France announced this summer that it would end the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2040 as a way of reducing pollution and reaching its emissions targets under the Paris climate agreement.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has also announced plans to ban all diesel cars in the city in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics, which Paris is hosting.

Meanwhile, Volvo announced this summer it would stop manufacturing vehicles with conventional engines by 2018, producing instead only all-electric and hybrid vehicles.

France is the leading manufacturer of electric vehicles sold in Europe, according to the Agence France-Presse, though hybrid and electric cars accounted for only 3.6 percent of new cars registered in Western Europe in 2016.

In the United States, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projected that sales of electric vehicles would overtake those of cars with traditional internal combustion engines within 20 years.