Sports car manufacturer Ferrari intends to cut its vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half and is working on developing hybrid vehicles, the company president said Saturday.”We want to reduce our CO2 emissions by 40 percent between now and 2012,” said Luca Cordero di Montezemolo told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, in an interview to be published Sunday.

But he insisted that any future hybrid Ferrari would still be “fundamentally a Ferrari.”

“We are currently working on the development of a Ferrari that will use alternative energy sources and which will be based on what we are doing at the moment in Formula 1,” he said, referring to Ferrari’s Kinetic Energy Recycling System (KERS), which is designed to draw extra power from the brakes.

Such a vehicle would be ready to go on the market around 2015.

Asked about the likelihood of fans of the powerful red sports cars buying a Ferrari with a hybrid or electric engine, the boss of the famous racing machines answered: “Yes, of course. It’s the best sports car in the world. It’s still fundamentally a Ferrari.”

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How can a company like Lamborghini be expected to adapt to tightening emissions regulations? It’s a reasonable question, and according to the company’s chief executive Stephan Winkelmann, it simply can’t. In an interview with Automotive News, the supercar exec justifies that its production is so limited and its vehicles are so rarely driven that its overall environmental impact is negligible. As such, Lamborghini will not be switching to downsized engines, like Ferrari has been discussing.Winkelmann also reiterated that Lamborghini is not interested in significantly boosting production, or in developing SUVs or four-seaters. Business as usual, then, for the Raging Bull, and you know what that means: powerful, loud, exotic supercars that you can’t get your hands on… and hopefully, neither will the bureaucrats.

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Mercedes is not slacking when it comes to building concepts and releasing cleaner vehicles. But, in a fairly standard automotive move these days, while the engineers are working, the executives are complaining about patchworks. Speaking in Switzerland, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche said that the variety of environmental regulations around the world are a big challenge to his company and all automakers. Automotive News (subs req’d) cites the EU’s goal of having new vehicles meet a 120 g/km limit of CO₂ while the U.S. is focusing its laws on fuel economy. Zetsche described the situation this way: “Our engineers sometimes feel as if they are forced to play European soccer on an American baseball diamond by Japanese sumo wrestling rules.” Zetsche singled out moving targets and different attribute qualifications as problems areas. “We’re not fighting against environmental regulations. Our ultimate goal is emission-free driving. It’s just that this ‘patchwork quilt’ of regulations doesn’t necessarily support us in getting there,” he said. Of course, Zetsche’s argument would be a lot more convincing if global automakers didn’t already sell different vehicles in different markets. They’ve been working within a patchwork for decades, sometimes one of their own design.

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