The mistake does not lie in the decision for the electric car; the mistake lies in the politics!

Germany, what has become of you? One thing is clear: The goal is to meet the Paris climate targets. By 2035, in just eleven years (!), vehicle fleets could gradually be converted to electric. In Norway, one of the countries with the most oil in Europe (from which, by the way, many other great things can be made!), electric cars reached over 94% market share in August 2024. In Germany, they have plummeted to under 13%! These are the facts that did not come out of nowhere.

Because the politicians of the current government and opposition wander aimlessly, announce subsidies, abruptly end them, issue bans, then want to retract them... But as if that wasn't enough, Jens Spahn of the CDU is not ashamed to join the fray.

Let's return to the facts: The internal combustion engine as a vehicle drive is dead. The CO2 targets cannot be achieved with it. And not with e-fuels either, by the way, because they require six times more energy to produce than an electric car needs to drive. As recently as the IAA Mobility, the future Daimler Truck executive Karin Rådström calculated once again that the E-Actros, with its 100 kWh/100 km electricity consumption, would NOT consume 10 liters of diesel from an energy equivalent perspective!

Clearly, this hurts, because the perfected "explosion engine construction" was the reason for the decades-long technical superiority of the German manufacturers. VW was able to sell its cars expensively, almost half of them in China, by the way.

Except: China is buying fewer and fewer combustion-engine VWs. Instead, they are now buying electric cars. Because they are better, more environmentally friendly, and more enjoyable to drive. This hurts a lot because due to a lack of software understanding, some German car manufacturers have nothing to counter the invasion from the East (and also the West). The car has fundamentally changed, much like the shift from button phones to full-screen smartphones. A cautionary example, by the way, because once in Germany, people primarily chose between Nokia and Siemens phones. Where are these brands in telecommunications today?

The mistake doesn't lie in the decision for the electric car; the mistake lies in people like Spahn, who, as progress refusers, encourage their surroundings to remain stagnant. He wants to steer VW onto the Nokia path. But dead products will still die. What is the whining about gasoline and diesel vehicles that no one buys anymore? Regardless of how many jobs in Germany depend on the combustion engine industry: they will all be gone in less than ten years.

What does that mean?

Even a developing country like Ethiopia has already enacted an import ban on combustion engines because they no longer want these outdated CO2 emitters. Does Germany really need to line up behind one of the poorest countries in the world?