In an interview, the German chancellor said he believes the ban is 'wrong,' as Germany's auto giants struggle to stay competitive against Chinese electric carmakers.
  • Lucy :3@feddit.orgEnglish
    48·
    26 days ago

    Please literally replace any instance of “German’s Merz” with “Coal, Gas & Car lobby”

  • Localhorst86@feddit.orgEnglish
    15·
    25 days ago

    I am so fucking fed up with every right wing numbnut calling it a combustion engine ban. It does not ban combustion engines.

    All manufacturers need to do, is make their combustion engines clean, then they can continue selling them 2035 and beyond. But it’s obvious, they are incapable of doing so, combustion engines have been pretty stagnant, almost as if they have reached their limits…

    • gian English
      41·
      26 days ago

      Hmm, I wonder if there’s a coordinated effort by lobbies to have this kind of plans scrapped. Knowing the car and oil industry, probably.

      I like to think that finally they realized that even this, like most of the green target approved with the past years to please the Green Party, is nice in theory but completely impracticable in the timeframe they set. And the problem are not the car manufacturers, but all the infrastructure you need to set up even before starting to phase out ICE cars.

      But even if somehow (in the form of “somehow Palpatine return”) you would be able to convert all the car production infrastructure, which means to convert a lot more industries that the car manufacturers, you have the problem to set up all the support infrastructure for the EV cars, like a lot more public charger (ideally one for every gas station), how to solve the problem to install charger in places like historical inner center of cities, in condos which have not the space to install them and things like this.

      Not to mention the need to produce a lot more electricity and upgrade the grid so that it can transport a lot more energy also to every little small village in the nation (big cities have public transports, but most of the people do not live in big cities)

      So yes, switch to EV cars is a nice idea, but to set a deadline to produce ICE car without starting to plan how to make the transition is stupid.

  • Matengor@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    26 days ago

    No paywall: https://archive.is/SUJqL

    “We made the wrong decision, and we will correct it,” said the German chancellor at a conference of his SME association in Cologne. He would “put a spoke in Brussels’ wheel.”

    It’s insane how they fetishize fossiles.

    • gian English
      1·
      25 days ago

      Or it is just the realization that even if the cars manufactures are ready to switch (which they are not), all the remaining infrastructurea are not even remotely ready and need a lot more time.

      • Kornblumenratte@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        24 days ago

        Giving more time will not change the infrastructure. Under capitalism, you need financial pressure to force change. And loosing money because you cannot sell your cars any longer is financial pressure to achieve change.

        • gian English
          1·
          24 days ago

          Correct. And the financial pressure is not setting a date and then let the others sort out the thing. The financial pressure that EU applied is not the financial pressure the manufacturer understand, they can simply reduce the number of people.

          A smarter way to do it would be to create the condition to have the transition to EV, not to impose it.
          Set up a way to directly give money to who install recharger at home, force the states of the union to make laws that made mandatory to have charger for every new construction and make easier install them in the already present houses, things like this.

          Then you have a request for EV cars that manufacturers cannot underestimate and, more importantly, they are relatively sure that if they start to build EV cars they will sold them.