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  • I really wonder what the car manufacturers are thinking. In Germany, this industry is currently exerting its influence to water down the ban on combustion engine models planned at EU level for 2035.

    The reasoning behind this is obviously that the industry has completely lost touch with state of the art technology, but what is the goal?

    Do they also want to slow down the expansion of the charging infrastructure so that there are still arguments in favor of buying combustion engine models? I can't really explain it any other way, because with a decent charging infrastructure, there is actually no longer any argument for combustion engines – at least not in Germany, where gasoline is much more expensive, which means that electric cars are still significantly cheaper to run despite the comparatively high price of electricity.

    Or is the aim even to impose import bans on electric cars from China? I mean, in a free market, combustion engines don't really stand a chance against electric cars -even from a purely economic point of view.

    I don't really understand what the established manufacturers are trying to achieve by resisting the development of electric vehicles. It's almost like focusing on the production of fax machines in the age of the internet.

    • There are a bunch of issues here. First of all EVs are a mass market now. We are at the point were EV production is no longer just added to ICE production, but is replacing it. Often that means building up new factories and closing old ones. For some companies making combustion engine parts, this means they are dead as companies. Within the large car makers it similarily leads to departments and factories being closed. That is also why the fight against EVs is lead by parts manufacturers and not the large automakers themself.

      The other very obvious problem are oil companies. The EU is currently at about peak ICE cars in its car fleet and cars make up a huge part of oil consumption.

      • Yes, I realize that, but the problem remains: namely, that everything points to EVs being the future.

        Attempting to artificially halt this development in favor of short-term profits for outdated industries only serves to massively damage the future viability of the country in question.

        It's obvious that manufacturers and the oil industry are willing to accept this, but you'd think they'd at least come up with some decent bogus arguments. I mean, job losses are a particularly poor argument, as the world does not stand still and, in the medium term, more jobs will be lost due to the delay in introducing future technologies than will be preserved by artificially maintaining technologies that are no longer competitive.

        However, I have not yet heard any other arguments than that, which simply does not convince me.

  • Do not under any conditions bail out these pathetic companies when the time comes that they are not ready for the future.

14 comments