Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Friday October 23 2015, @11:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the give-them-a-battery-of-tests dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @06:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @06:04AM (#253925)

    the vehicles actually work, the fuel is widely available and they can compete on price

    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.