But elsewhere the mood in Stuttgart, the car capital of Europe where the automobile was born in 1886 and where Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and many major auto suppliers have their HQs, is far from confident. All the social, technological and political trends point to a rapid demise of the polluting internal combustion engine, the coming of electric cars and the end to German car dominance.
In the wake of “Dieselgate”, when VW was found to have cheated emission figures, and the arrival on the car scene of digital companies such as Uber, Tesla and Google, all jockeying to introduce driverless and electric cars, the sedate German industry is waking up to the fact that it may be left behind by the US and China and that if it does nothing its cars could soon seem like antisocial relics.[...]
With one in three of all industrial workers in Stuttgart in the car industry, the unions see the coming decarbonised world as dangerous. An internal combustion engine has about 1,200 parts, an electric motor only 200, suggesting far fewer workers will be needed, says Frederic Speidel, head of strategy at IG Metall, Germany’s biggest union with more than 500,000 car workers. [...]
“Electrification is coming fast. I think one in three of all cars will be hybrids, plugins or full electric by 2030,” says Claus Huisgen, director of global marketing at Getrag, part of the Magna group and the world’s largest supplier of transmission systems. “We are definitely in a transition to the electric car. It is being driven by global trends like urbanisation, by CO2 emissions and by China. Electric is the only way to meet CO2 targets.
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