“Germany drags behind”

The breakthrough in e-mobility has once again not happened in Germany in 2016, Holger Holzer and Matthias Breitinger write on Zeit Online. “Even in Europe, Germany continues to perform below average: between January and November, only 0.7 percent of newly registered cars had an electric engine,” they explain. While in France and Britain, for example, the figure stood at 1.4 and 1.3 percent respectively. This laggard performance of German carmakers posed “a high risk for the future profits of the industry”, automotive industry expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer told Zeit Online. Car companies like VW and Daimler will not bring e-cars on the market before 2020, making the government’s goal of having one million electrified vehicles on Germany’s roads by that year seem “more dubious than ever before”, Holzer and Breitinger write.

Read the article in German here.   

Read more on the automotive industry and energy transition in the CLEW dossier The Energiewende and German carmakers.