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Comment by dillz | Hacker News Reader

Blatant and obvious lobbying by the extremely powerful German car industry. The subsidy includes premium brand plug-in hybrids such as BMW 330e and Mercedes C class - i.e. typical company cars that will very rarely use the electric engine. As gibolt mentioned, it also helps VW selling their new models.

Why not subsidize public transport instead? Why has the German government been unable to make (useful) climate protection laws in the past years, but these odd subsidies are no problem?

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> typical company cars that will very rarely use the electric engine

This is backwards, plugin hybrids rarely use their gas engines. BMW 330e 2020 has a 20 mile electric only range (about the same as Prius Prime). Average German car trip distance is 11 miles [0] Even if the trip is longer than 20 miles, it will only use the gas after the electric runs out.

[0] Large PDF, average car trip distance on page 50 https://setis.ec.europa.eu/system/files/Driving_and_parking_...

It should be that way, in a perfect world. I believe there was a study/survey in the UK. Business owners take the extra subsidies to get a cheaper fleet. They found that only a tiny portion had even unwrapped the charging cables, treating them just like an ICE vehicle.

Can't seem to find the link :/

My brother has one. He always uses electric first.

While that's unfortunate, I'm wondering how long these fleets keep cars before they're sold? It seems like this would improve availability of plug-in hybrids on the used car market.

If I understand that correctly, the survey includes all kinds of trips, including short daily drives grocery shopping and commutes. I think typical business trips in Germany are significantly above that average, but I might be wrong.

edit: Anecdotal: My father-in-law is a typical German field staff. Average daily driving distance is ~60 miles. And he certainly would not charge the car at home over night, from his private electricity bill. I doubt many people would.

Do you have any numbers that back up what percentage of German driving is covered by what you are talking about? I gave numbers for average German driving, therefore more than 50% of German driving trips can be handled with no gas by a plugin hybrid. This cannot be considered "rarely" as was your original contention. Even your 60 mile example, 1/3 of the distance being covered by electric is not "rarely".

Do plugin hybrids or EVs solve all current transportation problems for all transport distances? No. Is there a issue with subsidizing luxury vehicles? Yes. But I wanted to correct your incorrect statement about plugin hybrids.

You are right, the average car trip is covered by plugin hybrids. I was referring to business trips, i.e. the typical clientele of the car types in my OP. The average business driving distance (not commute) is twice the average of all drives. (source: Chapter 3.2 in [1]) If only businessmen/fieldstaff/etc. are taken into account and no craftsmen/tradesmen numbers would be even higher. (read: drivers of said premium hybrids vs. box wagons)

[1] https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/statistik_mobilitaet_in_deutsch...

I stand by my contention that 1/3 of a 60 mile trip being run on electric is not "rare".

The German auto industry is 5% of their economy, employing nearly a million people. Imagine the fire (no pun intended) Tesla is setting under them, as the premium (most profitable) sales plummet across the industry.

They decided to subsidize the industry to drive growth and help their big players quickly get to scale where they can make a profit. The alternative is they cease to exist and Germany suffers.

I'm all for public transit, but people there won't stop buying cars. Might as well buy local.

There is some truth to that but they already do make insane profits. This is just another icing on the cake that primarily tries to incentivize people that are already well off (as anyone that buys an electric cars right now).

While they certainly have deficiencies in the software department compared to Tesla and Germany not being the best place to test autonomous vehicles, they had electric cars for years now. The produced few because the market isn't really convinced yet.

Companies are the primary customers. Some of our workers use electric vehicles because they got a company car, but nobody owns one.

Apart from a nuclear apocalypse I don't really see the large manufacturers ceasing to exist anytime soon. They have enough capital to invest in development.

"They had electric cars for years." Yeah sure bro! You wanna buy our ugly looking i3? Nah too crazy design do you like the looks of any our 184 diesel models? havent really had much choice for evs

Germany is like Houston but worse...

But on the other side. Evs have an henn and egg problem. People need charging stations. Firms need an incitive to build them.

And I think even hybrid are shitty all around. They create the demand for charging stations without being 100 percent depend on them. So they can be build and get used..

True. On the other hand, at least VW is partly owned by the state.

Also, I think it's good to get into renewables for the climate and to cut the monarchs and autocrats off from their money in the long run.

Looks like VW is actually more owned by Qatar than any part of the German state:

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/InvestorRelations/shares/sha...

Edit: Saxony does get more voting rights than Qatar.

You mean Lower Saxony. Saxony is a different state on the other side of Germany, that has no voting rights in VW.

It should be noted that all the profit from state owned shares ends up in the independent Volkswagen Foundation (promoting science), not the state budget.

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