You know the electric vehicle era has arrived when even oil execs are giving up their gas-powered cars for battery-powered cars. Royal Dutch Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden just announced that his next car will be an electric Mercedes-Benz S550e. Beurden will be ditching his diesel car when he purchases the plug-in hybrid this September. When Beurden goes electric, he will be joining Chief Financial Officer Jessica Uhl, who already drives a BMW i3.

“The whole move to electrify the economy, electrify mobility in places like northwest Europe, in the U.S., even in China, is a good thing,” Van Beurden said on Bloomberg TV. “We need to be at a much higher degree of electric vehicle penetration — or hydrogen vehicles or gas vehicles — if we want to stay within the 2-degrees Celsius outcome.”

Related: Electric cars could reach cost parity with conventional cars by next year

Shell is moving into the EV market, announcing in February that it will start installing chargers at its gas stations this year. Britain and the Netherlands are the first two countries that will see electric vehicle chargers at Shell gas stations with the battery charging infrastructure eventually being deployed at all of the 25,000 Shell-branded gas stations in the world.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that a third of the world’s cars will be plug-in by 2040, the same year that both Britain and France plan to ban the sale of new diesel and petrol cars.

Via Autoblog

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