Setting European Union targets for reducing cars’ greenhouse gas output that are too ambitious could backfire with the loss of 100,000 jobs, Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess said.

If ministers aimed to slash carbon dioxide (CO2) output by 40% between 2020 and 2030, “around a quarter of the jobs in our factories would have to go in the space of 10 years – a total of 100,000 posts,” Diess told daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

EU governments agreed Tuesday (9 October) to aim for a 35% reduction in CO2 output by 2030 rather than the 30% hoped for by manufacturers, Berlin and eastern European governments.

While Chancellor Angela Merkel called the compromise “acceptable”, the head of the VDA German carmakers’ federation Bernhard Mattes labelled it “overambitious” and “gambling with jobs”, according to Euractiv.com and AFP.

Diess went into more detail, saying that a more gradual reduction in CO2 emissions would make for a slower ramping-up of electric cars – which take many fewer man-hours to build than comparable vehicles powered by internal combustion.

A faster decrease, by contrast, would be “barely manageable” as “by 2030 more than half of vehicles would have to be all-electric” with knock-on effects on jobs, he said.

“Such a drastic reduction means a painful revolution rather than a manageable transition,” he warned, adding that “there would no longer be affordable small cars built in Germany”.