Just in time for the federal election, the responsible federal ministries announced that the federal government had “reached a decisive milestone with one million e-cars on German roads”. To be honest, the second headline of the press release says: “More than 50 per cent of these electric vehicles are purely battery-powered.” Almost half are hybrid vehicles.
The IfW World Economy Institute Kiel has criticized the German government‘s Covid-19 stimulus package, saying some elements of it are “harmful.” A mid-August IfW analysis titled “Incentive boom thanks to Covid-19?” found that the “one-sided, massive incentivization of all-electric vehicles” is pushing other car markets to the sidelines. Its authors suggest eliminating EUR 4.4 billion from the stimulus package approved on June 3 “without replacing the funds with other incentives.”