Green Cars, Ocean Blue
There’s a famous quip attributed to Henry Ford: his customers could have a Model T in any color, as long as it was black. On one small Greek island in the coming years, people will have their choice of any set of wheels they like, so long as it’s an electric Volkswagen.
The German manufacturer has chosen scenic Astypalea — an islet roughly the size of the Bronx and home to some 1,300 people — for a major clean-mobility makeover.
VW aims to substitute all of the island’s roughly 1,500 combustion-engine vehicles with its electric cars, vans and scooters. Wind turbines, solar panels and batteries are going to replace Astypalea’s diesel generators, and VW will install charging stations and set up a car-sharing offering. On Wednesday, CEO Herbert Diess handed over the first EV — an ID.4 crossover — to local police.
“Astypalea will be a future lab for decarbonization in Europe,” Diess said.
Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess with Kostas Fragoyannis, Greece's foreign affairs deputy minister, in Astypalea.
Photographer: Yorgos Karahalis/Bloomberg
VW isn’t the first company to use a controlled environment to work on new offerings. Toyota is building an entire city in Japan to trial its self-driving technology. The area home to a recently shuttered factory at the foot of Mount Fuji will turn into a living laboratory of sorts where hand-picked residents will get to test the company’s autonomous vehicles. When construction of the 175-acre community is completed in 2024, Toyota will seek to offer a blueprint of what urban centers could look like in the future.
Test beds like these are great for scientists and the companies involved, not least because it’s great PR. But convincing the wider public to embrace electric or self-driving vehicles and scaling these sorts of projects in more densely populated places will be no easy feat.
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