“Change at full throttle”

Unions want to push car industry managers to speed up the transition to emission-free mobility, reports weekly magazine Der Spiegel. Powerful metalworkers’ union IG Metall plans to publish a paper on “Cutting CO₂ pollution in individual transport”, write Sven Böll, Horand Knaup, and Gerald Traufetter. Unions fear the shift to e-mobility will put hundreds of thousands of jobs in the car industry at risk in Germany but IG Metall demands carmakers go on the offensive to lead the transformation. “Technical finesse to reduce emissions won’t get us any further. It’s about a system change at full throttle. It’s about a transport transition – we won’t be able to avoid it,” Frank Iwer, head of the union’s planning, told the magazine. The IG Metall paper recommends diesel driving bans in cities to push e-mobility and a faster roll-out of charging infrastructure, among other suggestions.

Read the article in German here.

For background on the struggle of Germany’s automotive industry to shift to decarbonised mobility read the CLEW dossier The Energiewende and German carmakers.