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The pollution-cheating scandal that has engulfed auto giant Volkswagen is turning up the heat on the German government to make more determined headway in its self-declared "electromobility" goals, analysts say.
The "bitter irony" of the scam that has rocked the automobile sector around the world and plunged the once-respected carmaker into a major crisis, is that the billions of euros VW could potentially face in fines "could have been used to finance an entire electric car programme," complained Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks recently.
Over the past six years, Berlin has put up 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) for research into an electric car, the minister pointed out. And her ministry is looking into a series of measures to promote the electric car, such as tax incentives and purchase subsidies.
Her colleague at the Economy Ministry, Sigmar Gabriel, has said he was ready to support financial incentives, without specifying what form they should take.
And he is in favour of introducing quotas for electric vehicles in the car fleets of public authorities, with the aim of boosting demand.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a turning point for organized labor in the United States. It looks like the Diesel scandal is shaping up to have similarly wide-ranging repercussions for the car industry in Europe.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday October 24 2015, @03:50AM
Of course if VW thought they could sell electric and make a profit they would already be doing it. Diesel is a much easier sell, the vehicles actually work, the fuel is widely available and they can compete on price. Everything was just peachy until the governments decided to pull a new lower emissions target out of their butt, one they couldn't actually hit. And apparently nobody could do it either; i.e. it really was impossible. So rather than quietly close up that entire division somebody decided to just cheat.
Bottom line is electric is still a fantasy. Unless heavily subsidized by a government you can't sell the things and a pure electric is a hard sell even with massive subsidy although hybrid is almost to a point it might could sell into a few niches unsubsidized.
They are now willing to promise anything since governments are out to kill them to make some sort of example of them, any outcome short of bankruptcy is a win at this point. Doubt they anticipated this situation, guess they figured all that lobbying and contributing had bought em some leeway. Devouring one of the bigger industrial concerns in a fit of green pique does seem like an 'interesting' way to stimulate economic activity in the midst of an economic depression, but nobody ever said Europe still had the best and brightest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @06:04AM
Electric cars have been around since the 19th Century [telegraph.co.uk] (and hybrids since 1911 [wikipedia.org]). I often see people driving them. If you're trying to imply that they don't work, clarification is needed. Are you just saying that their range isn't enough for your needs or your liking?
Electricity is widely available in developed countries, not so much in the Third World, I must concede.
As for price, the price of petroleum is manipulated by OPEC and the price of electricity is generally manipulated too. In Norway, electric cars were subsidized [reuters.com] and there's been [nytimes.com] a fair uptake. The country has plentiful hydropower, so people there can keep motoring so long as there's enough snow. In some places, the fossil fuel industry has also enjoyed subsidies--as much as $548 billion [iisd.org] in 2013--and so have auto companies that produce internal-combustion cars.
Also about the price of driving, the air pollution from diesel engines comes out of numerous tailpipes, often in the midst of cities, and as the firmware fiasco shows, it's not cheap to mitigate. Air pollution creates an externalized cost to other people's health. That isn't "just peachy". Even with a coal-fired power plant, the pollution is being made at one place, often away from heavily populated areas, and the possibilities for trapping it are better because it's being made by a single, stationary source.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 24 2015, @09:04AM
I'm not sure that's still the case. It certainly was, though.
So do electric vehicles.
Actually electricity is widely available, too; indeed, it's available at more places than Diesel. What is missing is the infrastructure. You don't want to ring at a private house and ask "could I use some of your electricity to recharge my car?"
That's one problem. The bigger problem being storage: It's just not possible up to now to get energy per mass comparable to hydrocarbon fuels.
Which type of car wins probably depends on what we manage to do first: Develop a battery whose energy density competes well with liquid fuels, or find an efficient way to use renewable energy to produce fuel from atmospheric CO2.
Given the huge interest (and corresponding availability of research money) in better batteries from the mobile computing industry, my bet is on the batteries,
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.