The Automotive Dilemma

The Automotive Dilemma: What If the World Stopped Making Cars for One Year?

Imagine a global pause button. For twelve months, the automotive industry stops producing new cars. No new petrol cars, no new EVs. Instead, governments, manufacturers, and suppliers redirect their full capacity to one task: retrofitting existing cars with electric motors and batteries. It sounds like a thought experiment, but the numbers behind it reveal a startling dilemma.

Each year, the world builds around 90 million new cars. Manufacturing them is enormously energy-intensive. Producing a single internal combustion car emits roughly 10–11 tonnes of CO₂, while a new electric vehicle emits even more—around 13 tonnes—mainly due to battery production. Retrofitting an existing car avoids most of this “manufacturing debt” by reusing the chassis, body, and interior. Scaled globally, a one-year production halt combined with mass retrofitting could avoid an estimated 500–700 million tonnes of CO₂. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, this is roughly equivalent to the total annual emissions of global aviation.

The financial implications are even more dramatic. Consumers worldwide spend close to 2.7–2.8 trillion US dollars every year on new cars. If, instead, 80 million vehicles were retrofitted at industrial scale—at an estimated 10,000–15,000 dollars per vehicle with government support—the total cost would fall to around 1 trillion dollars. The difference is staggering. Humanity would keep roughly 1.5–2 trillion dollars in a single year, money not absorbed by new inventory but retained by households and redirected into energy, services, or local economies.

On top of this come operating savings. Electric vehicles, including retrofits, are significantly cheaper to run. Fuel and maintenance costs drop by 40–60 per cent, translating into global savings of 500–600 billion dollars per year once the retrofitted fleet is on the road. For individual drivers, the break-even point for a retrofit is typically four years, compared to eight years for a new EV purchase.

And yet, this is where the dilemma becomes unavoidable. The global automotive manufacturing sector is worth nearly 3 trillion dollars annually. Halting production for a year would represent an economic shock of historic proportions. Factories would close, supply chains would fracture, and millions of jobs would be at risk unless the entire industry were rapidly reorganised around circular models such as retrofitting, remanufacturing, and battery reuse.

So the question is not whether the planet and consumers would benefit—they clearly would. The real question is whether the automotive industry, as it is currently structured, could survive such a transformation. This is the automotive dilemma: massive climate and consumer gains on one side, systemic industrial disruption on the other.