Is Germany pulling the plug on electric cars?
After the Constitutional Court ruling, Germany had to prematurely end its electric car subsidy scheme. The decision could complicate the objectives – including industrial ones – on battery-powered mobility. All the details
Germany has decided to end its electric car subsidy program earlier than expected. The scheme was supposed to continue throughout 2024 but as of Monday 18 December it is no longer active: requests for subsidies already submitted will be granted, but new ones will not be taken into consideration.
From 2016 to today, the measure has cost approximately 10 billion euros, according to the German Ministry of Economy.
THE NEW BUDGET OF GERMANY
The premature end of the subsidies is a consequence of the new, slimmer budget for 2024, approved last week after the German constitutional court declared unconstitutional the transfer of 60 billion euros of unspent debt from the pandemic fund to the pandemic fund. the climate. As a result, the government of Olaf Scholz – whose economic policy was largely based on this transfer – had to give up some initiatives to accelerate the green transition.
According to the economic newspaper Handelsblatt , the absence of subsidies – an electric car is generally more expensive than one with an internal combustion engine – risks making the German goal of having 15 fifteen electric cars on the road by 2030 impossible. The cancellation of the program could have serious industrial repercussions: Germany is in fact home to a large automotive sector which is having difficulty converting to electric mobility, also due to the growing and economic Chinese competition.
To help achieve emissions targets , from 2035 vehicles powered by petrol or diesel will no longer be able to be registered in the European Union.
HOW MUCH ARE ELECTRIC CARS IN GERMANY
In 2022 there were 3.1 million electric cars on European territory, an increase of 58 percent compared to the numbers (1.9 million) of the previous year. The rate of electric models out of the total number of cars in circulation grew to 76 per 10,000 units in 2021, compared to just 2 per 100,000 in 2013.
Germany is the country in Europe with the most "pure" electric cars on the streets. In 2022, according to data from ACEA (the Association of European Automobile Manufacturers) reported by Euronews , there were 1,089,854, compared to 641,801 in the United Kingdom and 605,791 in France.
At a percentage level, in 2021 electric cars were 1.3 percent of the German fleet: a figure higher than the community average (0.8 percent) but significantly lower than that of the Netherlands (2.8 percent) . In the same year, the percentage of electric cars out of the total in Norway, which is not part of the European Union, was 15.5 percent. In France, again in 2021, it was 1 percent, while in Italy it was 0.3 percent.
In 2022, 356,425 pure electric cars were registered in Germany: it was the highest number recorded on the continent, followed by 190,727 registrations in the United Kingdom, 162,167 in France, 113,751 in Norway and 67,284 in Italy.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/germania-fine-sussidi-auto-elettriche/ on Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:01:38 +0000.