bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

A senior official of the German government stated that all new cars registered in Germany will need to be emissions-freeby the year 2030.

If the Germans hope to cut 80%-95% of their carbon dioxide output by 2050, as they've pledged in the past, they need to radically reduce transportation pollution, according to Deputy Economy Minister Rainer Baake.

"Fact is there's been no reduction at all in CO2 emissions by transport since 1990. We don't have any answers to cut truck emissions right now but we do have answers for cars."

One clear solution would be to expedite the adoption of electric cars, as it would certainly help the country's commitment to reducing emissions by 40% before the year 2020 - compared to those 1990-levels. Chancellor Merkel's government will attempt to speed emission-free sales this year within the automotive industry, with cash incentivesproving to the be best solutions thus far in other markets such as China, Norway and France.

According to the Environment Ministry, this program would help automakers sell around 500,000 electric cars within the next 4 years alone.

In terms of purely electric cars, they might hold down about 8% of the market by 2025, as opposed to just 0.6% today - with the government planning to put 1 million hybrid and battery plug-in vehicles on the road by 2020, a number that should grow to 6 million by 2030, as reported by TheGlobeAndMail.

Only 130,000 hybrids and 25,000 full-electric cars were registered on German roads by January of this year, in contrast to 30 million gasoline cars and 14,5 million diesels.

http://www.carscoops.com/2016/06/ger...s-free-by.html

4TehNguyen

iTrader: (1)

no sorry silly electric car pundits, you only shifted the emissions towards the manufacturing and power generation

UDel

So German politicians plan on destroying the German car industry in 14 years? Did the people of Germany want this or is another hairbrained idea by their politicians. What do the car industries think of this? As long as their highways are full of trucks and other equipment with diesel engines it won't make much difference. Diesel's are the problem in Europe, not the gasoline IC engine. Going all electric will just shift the problem elsewhere and likely create more problems and what about the fact that hybrids and electrics are poor sellers. Good luck with that, German politicians have been on a roll the past few years with some really stupid policy and decisions that have hurt the country.

Aron9000

Electric cars just shift the air pollution problem over to the electric grid. That means more power plants, more windmills(I know I'd hate to live next to those stupid things), more nuclear plants, more coal plants, etc. I don't know how green Germany's power grid is, but if you want to cut emissions, that is the place to start. And stop subsidizing diesel fuel for cars, as that policy has led to fouling Europe's air more than anything else in the past 20 years. Get your fleet back to running on gas, we have much cleaner air in the US due to this fact alone.

Also I agree with Udel, I don't see how this is possible without destroying the German auto industry. Hydrogen fuel for cars, we still haven't cracked the nut on how to make the fuel affordable, so I see the internal combustion engine staying around for A LONG TIME. Electric cars, unless the tech changes significantly in the future, are going to continue to be a novelty(keep in mind that the range with current batteries in freezing temperatures is cut anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2). Guess what, Germany is freaking cold in the winter, its not a paradise like California where it never gets cold and the batteries in your Tesla are a lot more effective.

Vladi

Norway is even colder so no worries

In order to free up the grid and electricity comming from region centralized plant we should go ahead and seek the autonomous energy production. With right subsidies for not only single household but for brand new residential towers and communities could generate their own energy to power up cars. That is the future and it could be done today.

spwolf

it is just a click bait article :-).

In reality, Germany keeps successfully lobbying delaying new EU fuel/emission measurement standards to protect their own industry, I believe latest talk is 2019 at earliest... thats despite all this VW drama... in reality, nothing is changing.

Och

iTrader: (3)

I wonder what choice of words Jeremy Clarkson would use to describe this "senior official".

mmarshall

And we wonder why Angela Merkel's party just got clobbered in the German elections.

Sulu

If they are serious about reducing emissions, it will have to be a society-wide effort; the auto industry cannot do it alone. Discourage petroleum-burning cars and encourage electric vehicles, while investing in cleaner sources of electricity generation. With vision and the will to do it, it can be done. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy articulated the vision of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth", and 8 years later, it was accomplished.

The German auto industry will get through it, and if any automaker does not, it deserves to die. They are all working on EVs now (just look at what Mercedes-Benz, BMW and VW are showing at all the recent international autoshows), and with appropriate government policies, there will be growing demand for hybrids and EVs. Just look at Norway.

Petroleum-burning cars have greatly outsold hybrids and EVs up to now because the governments have been encouraging (and even subsidizing, in various ways) petroleum-burning while not encouraging hybrids and EVs. But governments can encourage EVs by building the different infrastructure needed for EVs. Private industry alone will not build this infrastructure with government vision and policies.

mmarshall

As was pointed out in earlier posts, though (and those posters were correct) all-electric cars, in most cases, simply shift the pollution-load from the vehicle's tailpipe to the electrical-generating plant, where one still has to deal with nuclear waste or coal/oil burning. Only a small minority of electrical plants operate by solar, wind, water-power, or other non-polluting sources.

LeX2K

All petrol burning cars pollute and always will, the electric car can be charged from clean sources so which solution do you think is better going forward.

mmarshall

............Such as?

Yes, you have wind/solar/water-power, but these sources have limitations, and can't be depended on. Winds die down, water-levels can drop from drought, and the sun sets at night....cloudy days can also limit how much of the sun's energy reaches the gerund.

LeX2K

You named some of them. All power sources have limitations if we wait for the perfect solution by then we'll have run out of oil. Battery and solar tech improves every year, cars and home battery storage preserve daytime captured energy. But okay let's say all of that is crap so what's your solution to getting away from burning oil.

peteharvey

We will progressively phase out of petroleum.
What can't be replaced by EV, will be replaced by hydrogen.
But it may take some time though; even a little beyond 2030.

mmarshall

There's some truth to that. But, at the same time, my point was that you can't feed a herd of elephants with only a handful of peanuts.

Well, I'm not necessarily saying it's crap.....just pointing out that their limitations (at least right now) would probably hamper them as potential petroleum replacements.

Right now, to save petroleum, I like the idea of ethanol. In addition to a gas/alcohol mix, Brazil has been running all-ethanol (E100) vehicles, with a good infrastructure to support it, for years. The closest we have to that in this country is the E85 fuel in the Midwest, and not all auto manufacturers produce engines that will run on it. I like ethanol because, even though it doesn't have as much energy as gasoline (resulting in the need for bigger fuel-tanks for the same cruising range), it runs clean, with virtually no pollution or deposits inside the engine, and can be produced/distilled from a number of sources......sugar cane, corn, wood, and even processed garbage in some instances. Ethanol, though does have the disadvantage of burning with a very light, almost invisible blue, almost smokeless flame....so, if the car catches fire for any reason, the flames will be much harder to detect at first than the bright orange and heavy black smoke of gasoline. But, in general, on a large scale, IMO the benefits of ethanol outweigh the disadvantages and risks.