Tesla’s Factory Threatens To Disrupt German Auto Industry. The Germans are playing catch-up now. Scheiße happens. The innovator always leads.
This is a lucrative business for Tesla. The company made $3.3 billion in the past five years from 11 states in the U.S. that, like the EU, force automakers that can’t meet emissions reduction goals to buy credits from companies like Tesla. But this revenue stream promises to run dry in the coming years as EU automakers ramp up their electric vehicle fleets. But because Tesla’s entire fleet is electric, Birgit Dietze of IG Metall, Germany’s auto workers union, says the company is already ahead of its German competitors.
Right? At least that’s what I’ve been reading in the German media for manyyears now.
But some things you just can’t ignore away. And times change, or something. Looks to me like the German automobile industry just ain’t what she used to be.
Elon Musk’s German Factory Started With Love Letter From Berlin – Musk is taking his fight for the future of transport into the heartland of the combustion engine, where the established players long laughed off Tesla as an upstart on feeble financial footing that couldn’t compete with their rich engineering heritage. But Musk has captured the imagination of the think-different consumer, putting pressure on the Germans to respond.
“We definitely need to move faster than the airport.”
Nope. Sadly, chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced that Germany will not be able to reach its goal of having at least 20 e-cars on German roads by the year 2020.
This extremely ambitious goal, mocked from the start by gas-guzzling German automobile experts everywhere (some 97 percent of the German population), has now been scrapped for a more realistic goal of a nice round non-dirty dozen.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany will likely miss the government’s target of bringing one million electric cars onto the roads by the end of the decade. The sale of electric vehicles (EVs) has remained sluggish in Germany despite discounts introduced last year and granted to buyers of green cars. In 2016, there were less than 80,000 electric cars on German roads. Experts say German consumers remain reluctant to buy EVs because of relatively high prices, limited driving range and restrictions due to the low number of charging stations.
Observing Hermann 