The Volkswagen up! is set to become an electric-only vehicle, after company bosses confirmed that new laws and rising costs will force it to kill off its petrol city-car offering.

Our sister title Auto Express reports that the future of the up! has been bleak for a while, with the car failing to meet Volkswagen’s profit targets. The company’s sales and marketing boss Jurgen Stackman said there would not be “a single business case for cars the size of the up!” if forthcoming emissions regulations are brought into effect as planned.

“The cars are too small to carry high technology and [with] a normal combustion engine [it's] just impossible to reach the required CO2 levels,” he explained. “So in theory you’d have to sell an electric car to compensate for the problem of a [conventional] up! where the margin is already thin.”