Former Formula 1 Driver Prost Calls Electric Obsession Stupid

Worries gas and diesel ban will hurt the European auto industry.

Alain Prost, like so many of us, is a person with opinions. Some of them strong. The former Formula One driver, one of the winningest ever, has just shared a number of them with Motorsport.com. And while we have great respect for monsieur, we not only disagree with parts of his points of view, we think some of them are ill-informed. 

Prost is concerned about, among other things, the survival of the European auto industry. It appears to be his view that the increasing restrictions on internal-combustion engines by various government entities will eventually lead to Chinese automakers dominating the sector.

“I don’t care because I’m not part of the industry but I really hate that. It is stupid, stupid regulation.”

That’s right: keep plans in place to ban gasoline and diesel burners by 2040 and Volkswagen, Renault, Daimler, etc will wane, the roads of Europe will be crawling with electric autos from the likes of Geely, BYD, and Dongfeng Motor Co., and a million people will lose their jobs.

“We’re going to lose I promise you, one million people [employees] in the next 10 years in the automobile industry if we don’t change that. Today, if you had a big car with a diesel engine with the nice [pollution] filters, it should not be a problem.”

And if that future’s not scary enough for you, he raises the specter of slow and difficult to locate charging infrastructure. Or perhaps the encumbrance of not having a universal charge connector. All this regulation and change for naught, he opines. It’s his view that there isn’t a significant environmental advantage to electrification. This, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

“We ban diesel but at the end I’m sure that we are not going to reduce the CO2 with these measures. We could do it differently.”