E-car study: Germany falls five years behind

Electromobility
Germany falls five years behind – due to policy mistakes

A new electric car study accuses the government and opposition of making serious mistakes in the transition to e-mobility. Expert Dudenhöffer calls for the immediate return of the environmental bonus for electric vehicles.

Germany has fallen five years behind in its transition to electromobility. The blame lies with wrong decisions and misleading discussions in Berlin. This is the conclusion reached by the Bochum-based Center Automotive Research (CAR) in a new study. Institute Director Ferdinand Dudenhöffer says: “Germany is losing touch with the major future issue of mobility.”

In 2022, according to the study, the highest proportion of fully electric cars in new car sales nationwide was 17.7 percent (including plug-in hybrids, the figure was 31.4 percent). In the first half of this year, however, pure electric cars only accounted for around 12.5 percent of all new registrations. Sales figures like those in 2022, according to CAR, cannot be reached again before 2027.

Car buyers react sensitively to political statements

Dudenhöffer calls on politicians to weigh up their words and actions more carefully in the future: “New car buyers react very sensitively to prices and political statements.” The halt to sales bonuses for plug-in hybrids at the beginning of 2023 had already caused sales to collapse and led to a “politically caused renaissance of classic combustion engines.” Attempts were made to declare hybrid drive technology a sham for electromobility.

The sudden end of the environmental bonus for purely electric cars at the end of 2023 has further exacerbated the uncertainty in the market. The main culprit is the Greens led by Economics Minister Robert Habeck – “of all people, the party that wanted to achieve the opposite”.

But the German CDU politician and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen contributed to the slump in sales by questioning the planned EU-wide ban on combustion engines by 2035 in October 2023 “with great media power”. Dudenhöffer: “The ‘saving of the combustion engine’ became the industrial policy slogan of the FDP, AFD, CDU, CSU and BSW.” It was noticed that this could win votes. Synthetic fuels, on the other hand, were hyped, “although there were no well-founded and reliable facts on the production side or on the cost side.”

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Combustion engines are celebrating a small renaissance

Internal combustion engines are gaining ground again. In the first half of 2024, 56.1 percent of all newly registered cars were petrol or diesel. CAR sees an opportunity that current market developments can help reverse this trend because the price gap between internal combustion engines and electric vehicles continues to fall. Weak demand is causing the cost of batteries to collapse, with lithium-ion iron phosphate cells recently falling by a good 40 percent within nine months. Poor capacity utilization and the EU’s stricter CO2 requirements for new cars from 2025 are also forcing customers to be given higher discounts on electric cars.

Dudenhöffer is calling for the immediate reintroduction of an eco-bonus for electric cars of 5,000 to 6,000 euros, in which the industry will participate. “And the old parties must finally launch a campaign together that clearly states that electric cars are high technology that will lead us into the future. Electric cars have long been on a par with combustion engines.”

The fact that electric cars are too expensive per se is not enough to explain the sales crisis. On average, Germans spend around 45,000 euros on a new car. There are already plenty of good electric cars on offer for that price.