From 2035, all new cars will have to be electric. This not only eliminates any justification for promoting e-cars with billions – after all, there is now no alternative. Other requirements must also be met so that e-mobility does not end in chaos.
It is a kind of green planned economy, which was decided today in the EU Parliament: from 2035 all new cars must be electric. Petrol and diesel cars can no longer be registered because all cars must emit zero emissions. Experts have shown again and again that this is by no means the case with electric cars – in vain: The EU parliamentarians have decided to simply define the carbon footprint of an electric car as zero by law. This effectively means that the ban on combustion engines has been decided. Although there are still negotiations with member states as a final step, this should not change much in the EU’s baseline.
An alternative that is often demanded – synthetic fuels or climate-neutral e-fuels – will not exist, at least in the EU. These technologies are now being developed and deployed in other countries. The decision is also a bitter defeat for the FDP, which had promoted e-fuels during the election campaign, but ultimately mutated from a tiger to a bedside rug out of fear of the Greens in the traffic light coalition and swung fully to the “Electric Only” course is.
What can be said is that the car manufacturers themselves had not expected anything else: For the European markets, VW, Opel, Fiat and Mercedes have already announced that they will only sell battery-powered vehicles in the next decade or, to some extent, already in this decade. Even a technology-open company like BMW has enough electric models to serve the market. The decision of the EU was, so to speak, already priced in by the car manufacturers.
So now the fair has been read and discussions about the topic are pointless – what counts is looking ahead. The traffic light ministers responsible, Habeck, Lindner and Wissing, must put in the electric turbo gear at all levels so that the dream of pure e-mobility does not end in planned economic chaos that endangers the everyday mobility of millions of people. Five demands on politics.
Since there is no alternative to e-mobility by law, as of today there is no justification for promoting it with billions in tax money – which petrol and diesel drivers also have to shell out at record prices at the pump. Especially since this money is distributed unfairly anyway: the numerous electrical discounts benefit those who don’t even need it. Buyers of e-cars are often well-off, according to a study by Deutsche Bank last year. Now it is up to the car manufacturers alone to make their products suitable for customers, because others will no longer be allowed to sell them in the future anyway.
It is also necessary to finally end the “dodging” of e-cars, i.e. to finally let the owners of these cars pay taxes. Because a two-ton electric SUV may not produce any emissions locally, but it still wears down the asphalt and parks in public parking lots.
Most EV drivers charge their cars at home. If you have your own garage, you can also buy a wall box to charge it and you don’t need taxpayer subsidies for it. It would make sense, especially with regard to energy independence, to have (moderately) subsidized solar systems – if the owners then also charge their cars with them and no longer burden the local power grids.
In the meantime, there is an urgent need to correct an undesirable development in the expansion of charging stations: In order to make the number of charging points appear high, politicians and e-lobbyists like to count every “snoring charger” that only dribbles a car with a little more electricity than at home. That’s a complete waste of time: public charging stations only make sense if they’re turbo-fast. Otherwise, valuable parking space is wasted on a single clientele.
In reality, charging stations often do not even deliver the specified current, because either the charging station or the car cannot do it. Thousands of existing charging stations can actually be crossed off the list as completely unsuitable if you are driving an e-car over medium and long distances in practice.
50 kW is therefore the absolute minimum, 150 kW and up is better; especially since the promised charging capacity quickly collapses in practice with many electric vehicles, even with “high power charging” at 300 kW. The expansion of the charging stations is actually not “on the right track”, as politicians like to emphasize, but is only just beginning.
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Even the old federal government included a little-noticed clause in one of its many laws that were declared as climate protection packages: Berlin can oblige all petrol station operators to offer charging stations in addition to petrol pumps by means of a “supply requirement”.
The traffic light coalition must now pull this joker – which, by the way, would offer an elegant opportunity to divert the horrendous profits of the oil multinationals at least a little into a future-oriented investment. If every filling station in Germany were obliged to set up a certain number of fast charging stations within a short period of time, this would of course not solve the charging station problem on its own, but it would make a noticeable contribution to it.
This point may be considered superfluous, as the ban on combustion engines decided by Parliament only applies to new registrations from 2035. However, according to information from Brussels, environmental groups and EU politicians from the Greens are already working behind the scenes on the next step, as is already the case in Spain is being considered: From a certain date, the operation of existing petrol and diesel engines should also be banned, ostensibly for reasons of climate protection. The EU has also ruled out the possibility of making old cars climate-neutral with e-fuels, which the Greens in particular had been pushing for.
Incidentally, this ban on existing vehicles would not even be unattractive for car manufacturers, because they fear the “Havana effect”. The well-known electric car critic Fritz Indra explained what is behind this in an interview as early as 2020: “The customer is completely unsettled and will do the most obvious thing, namely continue to drive his current car. And that lasts, at least when it comes to a classic combustion engine, easily 10, 20, 30 or 40 years and more. The capital employed can be used much longer in a classic car than in an electric car, whose battery dies after eight years and is no longer renewed for cost reasons. The new acquisitions will fail, especially in the current crisis. The new acquisition cycle of usually 7 to 8 years is interrupted, as was the case during the first energy crisis, because customers are keeping their old cars. “
The auto industry, once it has switched completely to e-mobility, will probably support a ban on the use of petrol and diesel because it will promote sales for them. You would then no longer have to keep original spare parts and service for these cars.
But if the EU is really serious about sustainability, it would of course be completely nonsensical to ban a vehicle that has already been produced before its natural lifespan has expired (in Germany it is an average of 18 years from production to scrapping). For these reasons, grandfathering for all vehicles purchased before 2035 must be anchored in law. At the same time, the manufacturers must be obliged to guarantee service and the supply of parts for diesel and petrol engines for a minimum period that is still to be discussed, insofar as this cannot be carried out by third-party providers.
Last but not least, neither politics nor the car industry should sell people the illusion that e-mobility will simply replace the existing car fleet 1:1 and everyone will continue to drive as before. This is not possible because the power grids vary greatly from region to region and can sometimes “endure” more, sometimes fewer e-cars. Some network experts assume that at most 30 percent of the current car fleet would be possible as an e-car In Great Britain, electric car owners are already being prepared for the charging current to be switched off by the hour. In Germany, too, a corresponding law was already being considered by the old federal government.
Such plans are also in the pipeline in Habeck’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, but are not yet being communicated; after all, consumers have more than enough bad news about energy costs and availability right now.
It is therefore the task of politicians to make the consequences of their decision honestly clear. Above all, car owners who do not have their own parking and charging facilities will look down the drain in the world of electric cars. They will have to use other means of transport or sharing models. In any case, affordable entry-level models are no longer included in the product plans of many car manufacturers; Mercedes, for example, will discontinue all models below the C class. The scarcer the battery raw materials become – the industry is extremely dependent on China – the less attractive it becomes for car manufacturers to install the precious battery cells in bread-and-butter cars with a small profit margin.
On our e-mobility portal EFAHRER.com you will find all e-vehicles available on the German market
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