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Voting required: Federal Minister Robert Habeck (Economy and Climate, Greens, left) and Volker Wissing (Digital and Transport, FDP)
Photo: Pool/Getty Images
Volker Wissing used his first speech as Minister of Transport in the Bundestag to send a clear message: Dear Germans, if you buy cars in the coming years, please buy cars with electric drives.
That is “the short-term available, climate-neutral mobility in private transport”.
Definite article: the.
Not one among many.
"There is nothing more to discuss or wait for," the FDP politician said to the doubters, of whom there are many in his own ranks.
But Wissing's confession is not quite as clear as it initially seemed.
This was shown in the dispute over the traffic light coalition's goal of having 15 million electric cars on German roads by 2030.
It also depends on the exact choice of words.
In the Bundestag, Wissing spoke of “at least 15 million electric cars by 2030”.
In an interview with the "Tagesspiegel" he had previously labeled the same number of cars as "fully electric" and thus excluded plug-in hybrids that also have a combustion engine.
What now?
At the energy summit of the "Handelsblatt", the minister dodged the specific demand, only spoke of fully electric cars "ideally" and added cloudily: "We should have the ambition to do as much climate protection as possible".
At the request of SPIEGEL, the Federal Ministry of Transport explains that Wissing's formulation chosen in the Bundestag applies.
"A focus on purely electric vehicles makes sense from the point of view of climate protection," the statement only says.
In addition to cars with battery drives, these also included those with fuel cells that burn hydrogen.
And "plug-in hybrid vehicles", which can be operated both electrically and with petrol or diesel, could "make a valuable contribution", assuming a high proportion of electric driving and consistent recharging.
This is not to be understood in any other way than: they also count.
So it sounds very different from the contract of the traffic light coalition, which states: »Our goal is at least 15 million fully electric cars by 2030.« Experts unanimously interpret fully electric as pure battery drive without fossil fuels.
This is the view of the researchers at the German Institute for Economic Research, who are using a coalition agreement tracker to track what will become of the traffic light’s climate promises (in SPIEGEL’s traffic light radar, the target is already softly defined as 15 million electric cars).
This is likely to be the first promise that the federal government has backed away from after a good month in office.
Half speed ahead?
But what follows from this? In any case, the softer target is much easier to achieve. Last year, almost 356,000 all-electric cars and a good 325,000 plug-in hybrids were newly registered in Germany (as well as a total of 464 hydrogen cars with fuel cells). According to the previous definition, they are all grouped together as electric drives, recognizable by the E mark on the license plate. The stock of all-electric vehicles was thus almost doubled. But it does make a difference whether it has to be increased fifteenfold in the next eight years or whether almost half the pace is enough.
The German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) is not angry at all about the lower hurdle. "To achieve the very ambitious goal, mathematically every second car would have to be an electric car from now on," explains VDA President Hildegard Müller. "Of course, the automotive industry can produce these cars - but the customer must also accept them." However, success stands and falls with the expansion of the charging infrastructure. The industry agrees with Wissing, who has already launched the first initiatives for significantly more charging points.
"These 15 million were extremely ambitious from the start," says traffic researcher Barbara Lenz from the German Aerospace Center.
Lenz headed the “Alternative Drives and Fuels for Sustainable Mobility” working group of the National Platform for the Future of Mobility, which drafted plans for a traffic turnaround for the grand coalition of the previous election period.
At the end of 2020, the platform had set a target of ten million electric cars by 2030, while the consulting firm Deloitte thought only 8.5 million were realistic.
By June 2021, this had grown to 14 million in Lenz's working group, and this number was also included in the final report in October.
This included plug-in hybrids, so the leap to Wissing's new goal would not be quite as big.
admission to reality
Seen in this way, Wissing's backtracking could simply be an admission of reality.
The will to change is there, but also the fear of the magnitude of the task.
What is realistic and what is not depends less on the technology than on the market.
In 2021 Norway already achieved a market share of 86 percent for electric cars overall, 64.5 percent of which were battery-only.
In Germany, the proportion of purely electric cars in 2021 was 13.6 percent.
The electric El Dorado in the north has already gone through years of conversion.
In Germany, e-technology is only just beginning to establish itself, and the federal government's purchase bonuses play a major role in this.
"It's not yet entirely clear how well the used car market will work for e-vehicles," says Lenz. It's looking bad at the moment. However, most of the new registrations are for company cars, and they are not driven that long. Private car buyers are more likely to buy cheap used vehicles. Even if almost two million new electric cars were added every year, it would not simply add up to a stock of 15 million. After all, cars that have been sold abroad or that have been shut down must be deducted.
Plug-in hybrids are controversial because they are less efficient than pure battery vehicles due to the double drive technology.
In reality, most of them run on petrol or diesel, but buyers take government subsidies for electric cars with them.
The traffic light coalition wants to at least phase out purchase premiums for hybrids and link future tax advantages to the fact that they are mostly driven electrically.
"Plug-in hybrids are essential for the successful ramp-up of e-mobility," confirms VDA President Müller.
The freedom to manage without a charging station when in doubt makes the switch easier for many people.
"Plug-in hybrids reduce the inhibition threshold," Wissing's house also sees it.
Robert Habeck calculates differently
Wissing's counterpart Robert Habeck (Greens) from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate also expects plug-in hybrids to contribute to the drive turnaround - but in addition to the 15 million battery cars.
In Habeck's climate policy opening statement, three different scenarios are presented in which steps the 15 million target, defined here as "fully electric", can be achieved.
Such plans make the government's success measurable.
Wissing has not yet presented anything of the sort.
Habeck's ministry also concedes: "The necessary measures to achieve this goal do not yet exist."
Even that would only be enough to close about half of the »climate protection gap« in the transport sector.
"Of course that's ambitious," comments the Greens transport politician Stefan Gelbhaar the 15 million target. The decisive factor for him is “that no combustion engines are funded”. The exact definition of whether fully or generally electric is not so important. "But if you make compromises, you have to explain in the same breath where the CO2 reduction will be achieved." One way or another, the 2030 target will be achieved "only with clear signals".
The Ministry of Transport explains that the Federal Government is currently still voting on how the climate targets in transport can be achieved.
E-fuels, which Wissing itself seems to have clearly rejected, also appear again in the ministry's statement.
The electricity-based petrol and diesel imitations would be needed for climate protection: for ships and airplanes, in heavy goods traffic “and of course also in the existing car fleets”.
The impression remains that the traffic light coalition still has one or two mysteries to solve that the Minister of Transport has brought into the world.
Wissing himself is apparently a bit annoyed by the reactions to his often misleading advances.
He wanted "something very fundamental," he said in the Bundestag.
"More understanding of the needs and perspectives of the other, a little less willing to immediately and constantly get outraged."