The European Commission’s targets for electric driving are still far from reality, according to the European association of car manufacturers ACEA.
The European Commission wants to have at least 30 million electric cars on the road by 2030. “Bold,” says ACEA, because only a fraction of passenger cars in Europe are electric, 615,000 out of 243 million. To achieve the European targets, almost fifty times as many electric cars will need to be on the road in ten years, said ACEA chairman Eric-Mark Huitema.
The European Commission presented a plan to stimulate sustainable mobility on Wednesday. The ACEA fully agrees with this, the association writes, since the car industry says it spends a large part of the more than 60 billion euros in research and development funds on sustainability.
Infrastructure
At the moment, according to Huitema, the conditions are not yet good enough to be able to make the envisaged giant leap in electric driving. The number of refueling and charging points for both passenger cars and freight traffic is mentioned as a major pain point. The committee wants 300 million public charging points in ten years, but according to ACEA only 200,000 charging points have been realized in the EU last year. That would mean that fifteen times as much infrastructure would have to be built in the coming years if that goal is to be achieved, the association calculated.
Europe should therefore push national governments to invest more in electrical infrastructure, the association believes. “Experience shows that a voluntary approach does not pay. Some countries are very active, others are not”, says Huitema, who wants binding rules for member states. Other measures can further the transformation of the automotive industry, such as making carbon more expensive, constantly renewing the fleet and retraining and retraining employees.
Consumer costs
Another tricky point, according to ACEA, is what Europeans have to spend on cars. The fleet is getting older, new cars more expensive and the market for used cars is growing strongly. According to ACEA, the average European car is eleven years old. As a result of sustainability, new cars are becoming even more expensive. Because people have less money to spend due to the corona pandemic, the affordability of sustainable mobility is being jeopardized, which means that it can take longer before people buy a new car.