From horsepower to battery power, Ferrari is joining the growing ranks of green carmakers by launching its first ever hybrid vehicle at the end of the year.

The Italian firm, one of the most elite names in motoring, indicated that one of its glitziest products, the Enzo, will be released in a hybrid version.

“At the end of the year, we’ll also be unveiling the new Enzo, a limited series model and our first ever hybrid car,” said Ferrari’s chairman, Luca di Montezemolo.

According to reports on Monday, the price will probably exceed the €660,000 (£527,000) cost of the Enzo and will be the carmaker’s most powerful model – combining two electric motors with a 12-cylinder gas engine, allowing for a 40% cut in fuel use.

Average new car emissions in Europe are 138g of carbon dioxide per km, but the European Union has set a target of 95g per km by 2020. There are, however, exceptions for niche manufacturers such as Ferrari. Even if the new Enzo halves its CO2 emissions, it will be at the upper end of the greenhouse gas emitters on the roads. Its emissions are currently 545g/km.

In general, cars are getting greener. A recent report by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said a new car now emits 28% less carbon dioxide than a new car purchased 15 years ago. Nonetheless, car emissions need to be cut substantially for decades to come. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the government’s advisory body on tackling greenhouse gas emissions, believes that UK surface transport emissions – of which cars account for 60% of the total – must reduce by 91% from 2008 levels to meet wider emission reduction targets by 2050.

Along the way to meeting those benchmarks, the CCC expects the UK market for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids to grow from just over 1% of sales currently to 16% by 2020.

The oil company Total started pumping heavy mud down its leaking well in the North Sea on Tuesday in an attempt to stop an escape of gas that has lasted nearly eight weeks and could deprive Britain of nearly 6% of its supply this summer.

“The well intervention operation got underway at 8:20am with the pumping of heavy mud into the well from the main support vessel,” the oil and gas major said in a statement.

The work, at the Elgin platform, 240 km off the coast of Scotland, is expected to last several days before engineers can determine whether the leak has been stopped, Total said.

The leak is costing the company around £1.8m a day in relief operations and lost net income.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change, which gave the go-ahead for the “well kill” work earlier this month, said it was monitoring the situation closely.

The company said last week the amount of gas leaking from the platform had shrunk to a quarter of the original quantity and that parallel work to drill a relief well continued.

In the meanwhile, a nearby gas field run by Royal Dutch Shell has had to be closed, initially as a precaution and now for maintenance. Other operations on smaller fields have also been affected.

The total loss in gas production from Elgin and nearby fields could cut British gas production by as much as 6% this summer, Britain’s energy network operator has warned.

Environmental impact from the leak appears to have been small, according to the Scottish government, with fish and water samples from just outside a two-mile exclusion zone around the platform have not shown any signs of hydrocarbon contamination.

Total has said it saw a possibility for production at Elgin to gradually restart later this year.