“Get honest at last!”

The electric car will eventually take over as the dominant type of vehicle in Germany and this shift is going to cost the country jobs but clinging to the combustion engine would nonetheless be a big mistake, Christian Hochfeld, head of transportation think tank Agora Verkehrswende*, writes in a guest article for Zeit Online. Most political parties have by now reached consensus on Germany’s energy transition and the aims of the Paris Agreement for climate protection, but “without a transition in transport there won’t be an energy transition”, Hochfeld says. At the upcoming diesel summit, carmakers need to get honest and offer an actual retrofitting of cars equipped with emissions manipulation software, while politicians need to get honest and acknowledge that the combustion engine’s lifetime is finite, Hochfeld argues. “It’s not that all challenges posed by e-mobility have been overcome”, he concedes, “but the structural change in the car industry, which will topple its business model that has been optimised for 125 years, has long begun on the international stage”. 

Read the article in German here.

For background, see the CLEW article Why the German diesel summit matters for climate and energy and the CLEW interview with ICCT managing director Peter Mock.

*Like the Clean Energy Wire, Agora Verkehrswende is funded by Stiftung Mercator and the European Climate Foundation.