Electric cars rule at this year’s Paris auto show

The Sunday before the show opens, she held a second "Day Without Cars." About half the city was off-limits to private cars for seven hours.

Here's what to expect at the show, which runs Saturday through Oct. 16.

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I SING THE AUTO ELECTRIC

Volkswagen has vowed to launch more than 30 fully electric new vehicles by 2025 and to sell 2-3 million of them a year. Its new electric car is billed as a "design study" for future models.

Volkswagen has admitted to equipping diesel cars with software that illegally helped them pass lab tests of their emissions. In normal driving, the cars emitted as much as 40 times the U.S. limit of nitrous oxides, pollutants that can harm peoples' health.

Separate reports have shown other automakers' diesel cars also exceed emission limits in normal driving, although without resorting to cheating.

Mercedes-Benz is expected to show off an SUV that would compete with other luxury carmakers, in particular Tesla and its Model X. Tesla loses money at present but its buzz and rising sales to rich customers appear to have been noticed by German automakers.

General Motors Co.'s Opel division has the Ampera-e, the European version of the Chevrolet Bolt, which attracted attention when US regulators said it had a range of 238 miles on a full charge.

Now for the reality check: Not many people buy electric cars, due to limited range and higher cost, and when they do it's often with a fat tax break. And they're not really zero emissions, either, if coal or natural gas are burned to generate the electricity to charge them.

Only 4.2 percent of all passenger car registrations in the European Union last year were alternative-fuel vehicles. Yet automakers need to sell at least a few electrics to help meet increasingly tough government requirements.

The EU is lowering its limit on average carbon dioxide emissions in 2021; the U.S. will require fleetwide average mileage of 54.5 mpg by 2025.

"You have to come with something new. With dieselgate, the world understood that diesel is last year's model, that the environmental problems are too big and that a change of course is needed," said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

"It makes little sense to make a big deal about diesel in Paris. You will only get disdainful looks."

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