Tesla doubles its e-car production – and VW?
In the first half of 2023, Tesla sold 889,000 cars – 100 percent of which were e-cars. In the same period, Chinese carmaker BYD sold 1,250,000 passenger cars, 49 percent of which were e-cars.
Mercedes sold only ten percent of its car production as e-cars in the same time, BMW 14 percent and VW just seven percent. Tesla is the world’s largest e-car maker for a long time to come and has just announced that it will increase production of its e-cars in Grünheide from the current half a million per year to one million. This announcement is a clear challenge to all German carmakers. And how are they reacting?
Just at the same time, VW announced that it will cut back its e-car production at the Emden plant. In China, an electric car is already cheaper than a gasoline or diesel. In Germany, it’s still the other way around. Life punishes those who are too late. This development could be dangerous for Germany as a business location and for our prosperity in the medium term. And for the environment anyway!
China expert Felix Lee writes in his book “China, my father and me – About the rise of a superpower and what the Lee family from Wolfsburg has to do with it”: China doesn’t need VW, but VW needs China. And he asks, “Isn’t the VW Group almost a Chinese company based in Germany? … If Volkswagen were to lose the Chinese market, the Wolfsburg company would at a stroke no longer be competitive internationally. It would be the end of VW.” This end can only be stopped if these Wolfsburgers finally understand that the future is electric driving. But German politicians and drivers must also understand this.
Chancellor Scholz already demanded at the beginning of the year that Germany put up five wind turbines every day. In July 2023, one wind turbine will be erected per day. The approval process for a wind turbine still takes seven years, for a wind farm up to ten years or more. An acquaintance of mine spent 15 years litigating in German courts to be allowed to reactivate an old hydroelectric turbine on his own property.
Angela Merkel once told me after a trip to Africa that she had asked the president of Senegal: “Why do you always build railways, schools and roads with Chinese companies, we Germans could do that, too?” His answer: “By the time you Germans have handed in the plans, the Chinese have already finished building.”
Yesterday’s successes are our biggest obstacle to the future today. Nothing will damage the German economy in the future as much as a lack of renewable energy and an appetite for the future.
Source
Franz Alt 2023 | Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
