Oslo looks to a future in which cars will be banned

We've seen various cities announce plans for partial car bans or congestion controls, but Oslo, the capital of Norway, is considering banning all car use in the city centre by 2050.

Speaking to Reuters, the newly-elected city council has said: “We want to make it better for pedestrians, cyclists. It will be better for shops and everyone.”

Previously, Oslo’s city centre businesses had expressed grave doubts as to plans for any city centre vehicle bans, but that opposition appears to be softening. Part of the plan includes a massive investment in the city’s public transport networks, and more than 50km of new dedicated cycle lanes.

There will also be special access granted for disabled vehicles (possibly based around a Google-style autonomous car system) and small delivery vans.

Trials are expected to begin shortly, although the Oslo city leaders have stopped short of a total urban vehicle ban – the proposals only include the city centre itself, and not the suburbs and outlying districts.

Hybrid vehicles

It's starting to look as if the year 2050 will therefore be something of a watershed for cars and private vehicles. Toyota has announced that, by that same date, it wants to cut 90 per cent of its vehicle emissions entirely, vastly expanding its line-up of hybrids, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell power.

Toyota plans to take a major step towards that goal by lowering its vehicle fleet emissions by almost one-quarter by 2022, compared to its 2010 levels.

"You may think 35 years is a long time," senior managing officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters. "But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary."

Zero emissions

It’s not just vehicle emissions that Toyota is looking at.  The company has said it also wants to eliminate any CO2 emissions from its production processes by the same 2050 cut-off.

A major part of that plan will be switching the power sources for its factories to renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydrogen fuel cell power.

Ironically, the plan will kick off in 2016 with the launch of 14 new engines, ranged across petrol, diesel and hybrid power. Toyota claims that all of these engines will “achieve top-level thermal efficiency and fuel-efficiency improvement of more than 10 per cent over current models”.

The company is officially saying it wants the new-generation Prius to achieve 90mpg average fuel economy.

While Toyota has said it will increase investment and research in pure-electric, battery-powered cars, the company doesn’t seem as keen on this technology as others, preferring a short-term mix of hybrid and plug-in hybrid, and a longer-term focus on hydrogen.

Toyota says it will push forward on the hydrogen power plans by “fostering a hydrogen-based society by putting fuel-cell vehicles on the road and aiming to achieve annual global sales of over 30,000 fuel-cell vehicles – a tenfold increase from the planned 2017 production volume – around or after 2020”.

Toyota also wants to increase the recyclability of cars, and is pursuing a programme called the Toyota Global Car to Car Recycle project, whereby it wants to develop technologies which will allow all of a car’s components to be usefully recycled and used again in a new generation of production.