Still plan on driving a car with an internal-combustion engine? You may be running out of time if you live in Europe, where a number of countries are instituting measures to ban the sale of new gasoline- and diesel-fueled automobiles in the coming years. And the latest is Ireland.

According to Raidio Teilifis Eireann (RTE, the government of Ireland is proposing a new law that would ban the sale of new vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines by 2030. That's just ten years away now, if you can believe it. And the Emerald Isle isn't the only country undertaking such measures, either.

Similar initiatives have been undertaken in recent years in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark. However the latter country run up against opposition from the European Union, which determined that the Danish measure violated European regulations. It remains unclear whether the other countries – including Ireland – would run into the same problems. Of those countries, all but Norway (and potentially soon the UK) are EU members.

The ban is being proposed by Richard Bruton, Ireland's Minister of the Environment and Climate Action, and would ostensibly need to pass both the Seanad and Dáil – the two houses of the Oireachtas (Ireland's national legislature) – before being enacted into law.

This latest measure forms part of the Irish government's comprehensive Climate Action Plan, which aims to make the country carbon-neutral by 2050. By 2030 when the internal-combustion ban would take effect, the government of Ireland plans to have nearly a million electric vehicles on the road.

That would form nearly half of the 2.1 million passenger vehicles on the road in Ireland. Among the most popular are the Hyundai Tucson, Nissan Qashqai, Ford Focus, Toyota Yaris, and Skoda Octavia. Though Fiat, Ford, and Renault all once had assembly plants in Ireland, none are still operating, and all automobiles are imported to the island nation, primarily from other European Union countries.