In a 1 October news conference reported inter alia by Reuters, Chancellor Angela Merkel indicated that Germany may subsidise electric car purchase after the country’s next general election in order to meet the present government’s goal of having a million EVs on the road by 2020. “The question of how we will tackle this during the next legislative period (starting late 2013) and whether one needs more incentives – that will be decided when the time has come,” Merkel told reporters on Monday.
Merkel was briefing reporters after a meeting of a group set up to plan e-mobility in Germany, including representatives of the automotive and energy industries, scientists, trade unions and politicians.
The German government has to date pledged €1bn (US$1.3bn) of federal research spending on EV and battery technology R&D, and is considering market interventions, such as 10 years’ exemption from vehicle tax for those who buy zero-emissions vehicles before the end of 2015.
Like some other EU member state governments, the French government, which retains a substantial stake in Renault, incentivises EV purchase in a way that the German government has yet to do. It plans to raise its €5,000 cash incentive to EV buyers to €7,000, and to double existing incentives for hybrid purchase worth €2,000.
Daimler Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche told ZDF TV ahead of the e-mobility strategy meeting on 1 October that he expected no more than 600,000 electric cars to have been bought in Germany by 2020 without incentives such as France’s, but Henning Kagerman, a former Chief Executive Officer of the ERP software group SAP, who heads the e-mobility strategy group, told reporters he did not believe purchase incentives would be appropriate until the development of e-mobility and the availability of affordable, practical EVs had reached a more advanced stage.
Opposition to EV incentives has also been reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from within the German government naming FDP business minister Philipp Rösler and CSU transport minister Peter Ramsauer, who is said to have told the Bild newspaper that where incentives have been offered, as in the US or France, they have “brought nothing.”
A total of 2,272 electric cars were registered in Germany in the first eight months of 2012, representing a 0.1% share of the 2.108 million-unit passenger car market, according to the Centre of Automotive Research (CAR) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Its director, Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, has described the pursuit of the German government’s goal of 1 million EVs by 2020 as “unworldly and naive.”
