Diesels Take Back Seat, Electrics Up Front At Paris Car Show

Carmakers are finding the Paris auto show , held in a city whose mayor wants to ban diesels to reduce pollution, to be a fine place to show off new zero-emission electric vehicles.

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Most prominently, Volkswagen will unveil a small electric car as part of its pivot from diesel to more electric models as it struggles to recover from its scandal of rigging more than 11 million cars to evade diesel emissions tests.

And Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz will unveil a luxury electric SUV aimed at warding off competition from, among others, all-electric upstart Tesla.

Showing electric cars will help avoid a faux pas in a city where the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has campaigned against pollution from conventional autos. The Sunday before the show opened, 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 from Saturday through Oct. 16.

I SING THE AUTO ELECTRIC

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

Volkswagen has admitted 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 that 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 but its buzz and rising sales to rich customers appear to have been noticed by German automakers.