Launched on international markets in 2000, the Japanese Toyota Prius is the first car with mass-production hybrid propulsion that caught on with the public. It was advertised as a fuel-efficient car, but it quickly became a status symbol. In the USA it was also seen as a symbol of energy independence. It was only in 2008 that the American start-up Tesla launched on the roads what became the pioneer of modern electromobility, the elegant and expensive Tesla Roadster, a fully electric car with high autonomy capable of traveling on the highway. But it took an enormous scandal for European governments and the entire auto industry to embrace or accept electricity as the next step in the evolution of the car.
Dieselgate began in 2015 in the US, where authorities discovered that Volkswagen, the world’s largest car manufacturer, had cheated on pollution tests with its cars, which at the time had petrol and diesel engines. The scandal shook and transformed the European industry, and the changes in trend produce cascading economic and social effects. For example, several European states have closed the access of city centers to internal combustion cars, the EU will ban the sale of new diesel and gasoline cars in the near future, and Hungary and Poland, with the help of foreign investments, are turning into European manufacturing superpowers. of batteries for electric cars. But electromobility is not limited to automobiles only.
Europe is currently experiencing a boom in electric scooters, scooters, bicycles and buses. Bulgaria has become one of the biggest European exporters of electric bicycles.
Globally, the electric car market is valued at $193.5 billion (2022) and could reach, according to most estimates, $694 billion by 2030. Currently, more than half of all electric cars on the road on the world’s roads are in China, a country that has been fighting air pollution in cities for a long time. Europe and the USA are the second and third largest markets. In the first quarter of this year, the US overtook Germany to become the second largest individual market for electric cars worldwide. In Europe, the ultimate electric model is Tesla Model Y. Dacia Spring is in the top 5, where VW is also present with two models. Sales are accelerating, encouraged by government subsidies, and the share of electric cars in the total is increasing. The trend is given by the drivers’ preferences, but also by the orientation of car manufacturers. Or the desire to wash away one’s sins.
The Dieselgate scandal broke out in the fall of 2015 after, under pressure from the American authorities, VW admitted that it had cheated on pollution tests so that they showed that the engines of the German car manufacturer emit less nox than in reality. The US has tougher anti-pollution standards than Europe. The scandal spread to other European car manufacturers and shook the entire industry, costing VW no less than 31 billion dollars in fines and damages. And the amount keeps increasing.
Some say it’s still too small a price for the 580,000 cars with “false” diesel engines sold in the US (the number of cars with this problem sold worldwide is in the millions). The fine with which the US threatened the German company was so large that there was even talk of its bankruptcy, with devastating effects on the German economy: mass unemployment and recession. But VW found itself under siege from accusations and negative publicity. He had become the most sinful of car builders. The executive of the VW brand and then of the group Herbert Diess, a character known for various controversial outings, some with a Nazi tone, was indicted.
It didn’t take long for the company’s executives to realize that they had to change something quickly. In October 2015, just a month after Dieselgate broke out, under Diess executives met at the headquarters of the iconic Wolfsburg plant to authorize the development of a series of components to serve as the basis for a larger range of electric models, as The New York Times mentions. It was about creating a standardized platform that could also be used by other brands of the company, such as Audi. The strategy should have allowed VW to exploit the big advantage it had over Tesla, seen as the winner of the Dieselgate scandal: the size of the car manufacturer – 665,000 employees and almost 10 million cars sold annually. The costs of developing new technologies could be divided into millions of cars, which would have been seen in the final price. VW will beat Tesla on price. The strategy put in place when sales of electric cars were minimal and Tesla was still a start-up seems to be paying off now, with VW producing electric cars that are more attractive than petrol and diesel variants. And, analysts predict, by 2025 the company will be able to produce electric cars at lower costs than those with internal combustion. VW, like other European car manufacturers, is accelerating in the electromobility sector, but being too sure of their power they took a late start in this race. Tesla has a significant lead in battery technologies and software for autonomous driving. VW plans to invest 35 billion euros – the cost of Dieselgate – to build more battery factories, install a global network of charging stations for electric cars and hire 10,000 software engineers to develop new technologies and autonomous driving solutions. VW can thus become the second largest software company in Europe. The change to electromobility was not received with open arms by Euro-European companies. Renault stepped into this realm as early as 2009, but others, now forced by circumstances to adapt, tried to resist, warning that the switch to the production of electric cars would mean huge job losses. Because they lost the start, Chinese electric cars became a threat to them.
2023-08-10 21:18:56
#years #Dieselgate #scandal #destroy #forced #Europes #automakers #embrace #electromobility
