One in ten Germans plan to buy an e-car – survey
Clean Energy Wire
A growing number of people in Germany are interested in driving electric cars, a survey by the German Association for Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) has found. Of those surveyed, 11.3 percent said they were activley planning on buying an e-vehicle, up from 9.1 percent in October 2019. At the same time, merely 1.7 percent said they were already driving an electric car. Greater environmental friendliness was the main reason given for wanting to buy an e-car rather than a traditional car model (38 percent), followed by low operating costs (15 percent) and low noise levels (4 percent). The main concerns for prospective buyers were the high purchase price of the vehicles (34 percent), their limited range (23 percent) and the still fairly small number of public charging points (22 percent).
Germany currently has 28,000 public charging points, the BDEW says. Around 280,000 electric cars and plug-in hybrids are registered. The country has seen an increase in total numbers of newly registered e-cars, putting it in third place globally this year, behind China and the USA. However, only three percent of new cars are electric in Germany, compared to Norway, for example, where 57 percent of new registrations are electric.
CO2 emissions from the transport sector are considered the “problem child” of the German energy transition as they have not fallen over the past 30 years. Partly as a result of its powerful car industry, which directly employs more than 800,000 people in the country, Germany is lagging behind many other countries in the shift to green mobility.
