Delivery vans with electric drive: The SPD would rather promote electric cars instead of impose diesel driving bans. (Image: Werner Pluta / Golem.de)
Electric taxis instead of driving bans for diesel vehicles: The SPD wants to change companies electric cars with a bigger incentive to make tasty.
By increasing the purchase premium, the SPD wants to promote the transition from a combustion vehicle to an electric vehicle. This does not apply to all buyers. So the SPD wants to increase the premium for commercially used vehicles, especially taxis and light commercial vehicles. The Social Democrats believe that, for example, taxi companies or delivery companies will switch their fleet faster from diesel to electric cars.
Cities should become cleaner without a diesel ban
SPD and CDU have agreed such an increase in the coalition agreement. How high it will turn out is unknown. The SPD had demanded a doubling. “We want to avoid clean mobility in the cities and driving bans for diesel vehicles,” said Sören Bartol, deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, the news agency dpa.
The federal government had the 2016 Introduction of a purchase premium for electric cars decided. Who buys an electric car, gets 4,000 euros. For a hybrid vehicle there are 3,000 euros. The premium comes half each from the federal government and the car manufacturers. In total, 1.2 billion euros will be made available over a period of three years. The scheme ends on 30 June 2019.
The premium is not used
However, the effect is not very big: the premium was requested just under 50,000 times. It was paid 168 million euros. The proportion of electric and hybrid vehicles in Germany is still low: at the end of 2017, it was 1.6 percent, but it has doubled compared to the previous year,
A recent study by the research institute International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) concludes that Electric cars are more environmentally friendly than cars with internal combustion engine, After three years at the latest, the electric car should have a better climate balance than a combustor. The carbon dioxide emissions during the production of the batteries were also considered. For their study, authors have evaluated the ICCT researchers eleven studies.