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Merkel’s climate strategy called into question at last visit to motor show

No German leader's diary would be complete without a visit to the venerable IAA motor show, which welcomes Angela Merkel on Tuesday for the last time in her chancellorship.

Merkel's climate strategy called into question at last visit to motor show
Chancellor Angela Merkel opens the biennial IAA car show in Frankfurt to the public on September 12th, 2019. Photo: Tobias SCHWARZ / AFP

But the biennial celebration of all things auto-related is mired in controversy this year as Germany struggles to adapt its flagship industry to the electric and digital revolution.

Merkel, who is quitting politics after an election on September 26th, has been a regular at the show over her 16 years in power – even earning the sobriquet the “car chancellor” for her efforts to shield German carmakers from tougher EU pollution rules.

The German leader will give a speech when the fair opens to trade visitors on Tuesday in Munich, a new location as part of efforts to rebrand itself as a “mobility fair” with a spotlight on electric cars.

But there is little chance of the chancellor herself arriving in an electric vehicle, since they make up only 2.4 percent of the government’s 25,000-strong fleet, according to official figures from January.

The figure rises to 5.6 percent when taking into account hybrids and cars that run on clean fuels.

Even so, it is a stark reflection of the blind spots in state support for the German automotive industry, which has received billions of euros in funding in recent years but without any meaningful focus on clean mobility.

‘Depressing and incomprehensible’

The 2015 “dieselgate” scandal spelled the beginning of the end for diesel. That was when Germany’s biggest carmaker Volkswagen admitted to fitting 11 million vehicles with illegal emissions-cheating devices.

Until then, Diesel was favoured by German and other governments as an efficient and more environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline.

Merkel expressed anger at the scandal.

But in Brussels, her government sought to slow the shift to e-mobility by watering down toughened emissions regulations that German carmakers would struggle to comply with, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung said.

On the eve of Merkel’s visit, the boss of Volkswagen even blamed her government for slowing down the electric revolution by incentivising diesel engines even after his company was seeking to make the switch following the emissions scandal.

READ ALSO: German climate groups plan legal action against car giants

“A car company cannot do this transition (alone) because you need the right environment,” Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess told AFP in an interview. “If you keep diesel cheap… nobody will buy an electric car, it’s impossible,” he said.

Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen, called the government’s diesel strategy “depressing and incomprehensible”.


Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, an expert in the automotive sector, thinks Merkel’s strategy for the car industry is “depressing and incomprehensible”. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Roland Weihrauch

“The state fuelled a diesel boom through tax breaks, and now diesel passenger cars are practically unsellable,” he told AFP.

“Scrappage schemes, incentives to buy electric cars, subsidies for battery production, aid for recycling, short-time working allowances – this has been the strategy for 16 years. This alleviates short-term economic problems, but does not build a new structure,” Dudenhoeffer said.

“The government has had to balance short-term economic concerns with the interests of industry and the unions,” he said.

READ ALSO: German public transport slammed as ‘failure’ as half of users switch to car

Merkel’s government has always treaded gingerly because of the 800,000 jobs at stake in the industry.

But the Sueddeutsche Zeitung lamented in August that “with her overly generous attitude towards the car industry, the chancellor has helped neither the companies nor the country in the medium term”.

“Valuable years have been lost in the battle to phase out the combustion engine,” it said.

Existential crisis

With the momentum for greener mobility growing, and with tougher anti-pollution guidelines in place, Germany’s car manufacturers are now no longer able to put off the inevitable.

The decline of the combustion engine is proving to be an existential crisis for the car industry, which accounts for more than 12 percent of jobs in the industrial sector in Germany.

READ ALSO: Is Berlin set to become car-free in the next few years?

In late 2019, Audi said it was planning to cut 9,500 jobs in Germany by 2025, while Daimler announced it would cut 10,000.

While Germany’s large manufacturers have the resources to weather the transition, the ecosystem of equipment manufacturers and smaller businesses in the supply chain may not be so resilient.

By Sophie Makris 

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‘Città 30’: Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna has faced heavy criticism - including from the Italian government - after introducing a speed limit of 30km/h, but it's not the only city to approve these rules.

'Città 30': Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna on January 17th became Italy’s first major city to introduce a speed limit of 30km/h on 70 percent of roads in the city centre under its ‘Città 30’ plan, first announced in 2022, and initially set to come into force by June 2023.

The move made Bologna one of a growing number of European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Brussels, and Bilbao, to bring in a 30km/h limit aimed at improving air quality and road safety.

But the change was met last week with a go-slow protest by Bologna’s taxi drivers and, perhaps more surprisingly, criticism from the Italian transport ministry, which financed the measure.

Matteo Salvini, who is currently serving as Italy’s transport minister, this week pledged to bring in new nationwide rules dictating speed limits in cities that would reverse Bologna’s new rule.

Salvini’s League party has long criticised Bologna’s ‘Città 30’ plan, claiming it would make life harder for residents as well as people working in the city and would create “more traffic and fines”.

OPINION: Italians and their cars are inseparable – will this ever change?

Bologna’s speed limit has sparked a heated debate across Italy, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of such measures in many other cities in Europe and worldwide in recent years.

While Bologna is the biggest Italian city to bring in the measure, it’s not the first – and many more local authorities, including in Rome, are now looking to follow their example in the next few years.

Some 60 smaller cities and towns in Italy have adopted the measure so far, according to Sky TG24, though there is no complete list.

This compares to around 200 French towns and cities to adopt the rule, while in Spain the same limit has applied to 70 percent of all the country’s roads since since May 2021 under nationwide rules, reports LA7.

The first Italian town to experiment with a 30 km/h speed limit was Cesena, south of Bologna, which introduced it in 1998. Since then, the local authority has found that serious accidents have halved, while the number of non-serious ones has remained unchanged.

Olbia, in Sardinia, also famously introduced the speed limit in 2021.

The city of Parma is planning to bring in the same rules from 2024, while the Tuscan capital of Florence approved five 30km/h zones in the city centre earlier this month.

Turin is set to bring in its first 30km/h limits this year as part of its broader plan to improve transport infrastructure, aimed at reducing smog and increasing livability.

READ ALSO: Why electric cars aren’t more popular in Italy

Meanwhile, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, has promised to introduce the limit on 70 percent of the capital’s roads by the end of his mandate, which expires in 2026.

In Milan, while the city council has voted in favour of lower speed limits and other traffic limitations on central roads, it’s not clear when these could come into force.

Milan mayor Beppe Sala this week said a 30 km/h limit would be “impossible” to implement in the Lombardy capital.

And it’s notable that almost all of the cities looking at slowing down traffic are in the north or centre-north of Italy.

There has been little interest reported in the measures further south, where statistics have shown there are a higher number of serious road accidents – though the total number of accidents is in fact higher in the north.

According to the World Health Organisation the risk of death to a pedestrian hit by a car driven at 50 km/h is 80 percent. The risk drops to 10 percent at 30 km/h.

The speed limit on roads in Italian towns and cities is generally 50, and on the autostrade (motorways) it’s up to 130.

Many Italian residents are heavily dependent on cars as their primary mode of transport: Italy has the second-highest rate of car ownership in Europe, with 670 vehicles per 1,000 residents, second only to Luxembourg with 682, according to statistics agency Eurostat.

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