The debate about cars and engines has only just begun

With the vote in the European Parliament to end the combustion engine in 2035, the debate about the future of the car is only really beginning. From the point of view of the Association of the German Auto Industry (VDA), the switch from combustion engines to electric drives cannot be achieved in twelve years – mainly because politicians pay too little attention to prerequisites such as charging stations, sustainable energy or battery raw materials. For environmental activists, the chosen date of 2035 is too far away: From their point of view, it would be best anyway to trip up the car manufacturers and thus restrict private transport in general.

The tangle of facts about the car drive of the future, climate and industry leaves a lot of room for ideological interpretations. Even the starting point of the enthusiasm for electric cars is a partial truth: If you put a fueled combustion car and a fully charged electric car next to each other, it is true that the electric drive is much more efficient. But this picture is just incomplete. Because for the electric car, batteries have to be built with a lot of energy, and this in turn requires rare earths, also from sources that are difficult to demonstrate. Immense investments are required to charge millions of electric cars, not only for charging stations and the power grid, but also for the provision of sustainably generated electricity. Charged with today’s usual mix of German power generation, electric cars are currently still indirectly powered by coal.

Populist resolutions by parliamentarians fall short

For the big automakers, all of that is secondary. The Volkswagen Group wants to make people forget the sins of the diesel scandal by switching towards electric cars. Mercedes argues that you cannot afford to develop different drive technologies and put everything on one card. Only BMW is trying to remain open to technology. However, no car manufacturer wants to buck the trend that the start-up Tesla has established in the luxury segment. Nobody wants to be seen as backward-looking. But car manufacturers have it relatively easier with the changeover, they can order other supplier parts for their vehicles – and batteries in Asia. However, a supplier like Mahle, which has 71,000 employees and made a name for itself with pistons for combustion engines, is in trouble.

In terms of technology, electric cars have recently made good progress. The best get from 20 to 80 percent battery charge in half an hour, for 200 to 250 kilometers. But before e-cars can replace the world of combustion engines, development work for several model generations is still necessary, along with the economies of scale of millions in production. At the same time, however, the raw materials for batteries, for example, have become so expensive that it is taking longer and longer for the price of electric cars to drop to the level of combustion engines.

Even if millions of electric cars were registered every year by 2035, by then half or two-thirds of Europe’s vehicle fleet would still consist of used cars with internal combustion engines. Strategies that were not accepted by the majority in the European Parliament could also help at this point: Cars should no longer be fueled with fossil fuels, the CO₂ from the depths of the earth’s crust into the atmosphere. This is exactly what can be avoided with so-called e-fuels, because this type of gasoline is produced with sustainable energies by generating hydrogen, which is then combined with additional energy CO₂ added from the air.

The European Parliament does not want to recognize the fact that combustion cars can be driven in a climate-neutral manner, for fear that this will provide an excuse to simply stick with the old technology. Of course, many hundreds of square kilometers of solar cells are still needed for e-fuels – but this does not require expensive battery technology and no additional power grids, because transporting climate-neutral petrol is easy.

Both e-cars and e-fuels for combustion engines are needed to protect the world’s climate. From 1990 to 2019 the CO₂-Emissions from the transport sector in Germany shrunk by 0.8 percent, but grew by around 80 percent worldwide. Germany’s emissions are 1.9 percent of global emissions from the transport sector, those of the EU 9.7 percent. However, all options must be used for the global climate and 1.5 billion vehicles around the globe. Populist resolutions by MEPs fall short.