Germany extends e-car purchasing support to 2025
Clean Energy Wire
The government “innovation premium” for e-car buyers will be extended until 2025, the German energy and economy ministry (BMWi) has announced. In a press release, the BMWi said that the support payment, which was launched in 2016 and topped up in July 2020, has given e-mobility in Germany a “big boost” and the number of applications continues to be at a record level. More premiums (1.25 billion euros to help purchase some 273,000 vehicles) were claimed in the first half of 2021 than in the whole of last year. Since the start of the premium programme in 2016, a total of 693,601 vehicles have applied for funding as of 1 July 2021.
Since 2020, buyers of electric vehicles costing less than 40,000 euros (net list price) can apply for a premium of up to 9,000 euros; for hybrid cars it is 6,750 euros. For purely electric vehicles costing more than 40,000 euros, up to 7,500 euros is available and up to 5,625 euros for hybrid cars.
Throughout the past decades of the energy transition, emissions from the transport sector have stagnated and little has happened to green the vehicle fleet. E-car purchases only picked recently, meaning the government target of having 1 million electric and plug-in hybrid cars on the roads by 2020 was achieved six months later in mid 2021.
