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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: 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.