“Buyer’s premium for e-cars steers transportation transition into an impasse”

Germany’s buyer’s premium for e-cars is obstructing energy transition in the transportation sector, as it fosters the sale of private cars rather than sustainable mobility concepts, a study commissioned by Greenpeace has found. In order to ensure that e-mobility will play a sustainable role in the future, the government “ought to focus on subsidising the shared use of e-cars and ban new registrations of combustion engines by 2025,” Greenpeace writes in a press release. “The best e-car is not the one you own but the one you share,” said the conservation organisation’s mobility expert Tobias Austrup. Germany began offering 4000 euros to buyers of fully electric cars and 3000 euros for hybrids in July, with the aim of getting a million e-cars on the roads by 2020, up from around 50,000 at the end of 2015.

Read the study in German here.

For background on the Energiewende and mobility, read the CLEW dossier The energy transition and Germany’s transport sector.