It’s not any sort of news that the top German auto manufacturers have been slow to embrace electric vehicles to date — well, basically all major auto manufacturers have been. The German manufacturers have largely opted to spend the last decade promoting diesel cars instead (and all that they entail), through legal means and otherwise.
The Tesla Model S was designed to be the safest car in its segment, going by comments made by company execs including CEO Elon Musk. Its NHTSA crash test ratings were the highest in history — with 5 stars in every single category and a combined score of 5.4 (unofficial since official scores don’t go above 5). Going by its performance in the real world to date, the goal and the rating seem to have lived up to the hype.
Nuclear reactors running on thorium are widely held to be inherently safer than the awful pressurized-water reactors we have today. So why don’t we have thorium reactors?
I recall that Germany used to build 7 GW of solar a year under a market-based feed-in tariff. Now we get close to nothing.
This doesn’t make any sense. Cost of new solar has gone down. Why stop now? And isn’t there some sense of urgency about global warming?
The top auto manufacturers in Germany — BMW, Daimler, and VW — are in discussions with the prominent Autobahn service provider Tank & Rast about a possible nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations, according to a story published by Bild Zeitung.
Despite efforts by authorities in Germany (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt) to claim that the name of Tesla’s “Autopilot” self-driving features suite is misleading, and that it encourages reckless, dangerous vehicle operation, it appears that the actual owners there don’t agree.
Volkswagen’s supervisory board chairman and former chief of finance, Hans Dieter Poetsch, is now under investigation by authorities in Germany, in addition to Volkswagen-brand Chief Executive Herbert Diess and former Volkswagen-group CEO Martin Winterkorn, according to recent reports.
One of the background factors related to German auto manufacturer inaction with regard to electric vehicles, a factor that isn’t often publicly acknowledged, is that if the companies in question did make a rapid transition to electric vehicles, then there would be huge layoffs as many jobs and core skills became unnecessary.
In the latest attempt of the German auto industry to assuage its collective, highly defensive ego, the business paper Handelsblatt has published a new article titled “The Germans Are Coming for Tesla Motors.”
Construction work has begun on Daimler subsidiary ACCUMOTIVE’s second electric vehicle battery production facility, which is being built in Kamenz, Germany, the same town where the first one is located.
