Polestar electric car
Photo: AFP
Some car dealers aggressively advertise their special offer – and almost word for word.
“Drive a Tesla for free for six months” is the promise.
Some also have Polestar or Fiat in their portfolio.
The holding period is six months, after which an electric car subsidized with a purchase premium of up to 9,000 euros can be resold.
The vehicle purchased at a discount can then be sold at a profit in Scandinavia, for example.
Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) now apparently wants to remove part of the basis for the legal but controversial business model.
As the "Wirtschaftswoche" reports, the holding period for subsidized new electric cars is to be increased from six to twelve months.
According to this, the loss in value after one year is significantly higher, so that the calculation of a quick resale no longer automatically works out.
However, the adjustment could not come into force until next year.
"We want to promote the switch to clean mobility," the ministry told SPIEGEL.
»To this end, we have initially extended the current innovation bonus for electric vehicles by one year.
At the same time, we are working on the new concept for funding for 2023.«
But there is another reason for the planned reform.
“We also need a used market for e-cars in order to continue to help e-mobility make a breakthrough.
Used e-cars can represent an attractive entry point into electromobility, especially for buyers with lower incomes," says the ministry.
“In fact, it is not the purpose of the funding and the rules on the minimum holding period that subsidized cars are regularly resold to other European countries after the minimum holding period has expired and that this becomes a business model for dealers and buyers,” said a spokeswoman.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs has recognized this problem.
One should therefore take the “topic of the minimum holding period into account”.
The special offers have long been available on car portals and internet forums.
Recently, however, an increasing number of media reports about the practice have increasingly caused criticism.
The tenor was that the tax-financed purchase premium to reduce emissions in Germany would be misused if the cars went abroad after a short time.
30,000 disappeared electric cars
It is known from some neighboring countries such as Denmark that the number of young, used electric cars imported from Germany is so high that they have a noticeable impact on supply and thus prices there.
The extent of the damage to the German state budget can only be estimated so far.
»With the current funding practice for electric cars, we are subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles abroad with a three-digit million amount.
That can't be in the interests of the German taxpayer," said Stefan Bratzel, director of the Center of Automotive Management (CAM), the SPIEGEL.
Around 30,000 of the almost new electric cars were sold abroad between January and September 2021 alone, according to a CAM calculation available to the “Wirtschaftswoche”.
In the year as a whole, every eighth newly registered electric car could have been exported later.
The figures result from the difference between newly registered electric cars and the current stock.
The large gap cannot be explained, for example, with cars pulled out of traffic after accidents.
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