Europeans cannot afford to buy enough electric vehicles, the European Union budget cannot afford to hand out subsidies, and the carmakers cannot afford to pay penalties. Ondřej Krutílek, Member of the European Parliament for the European Conservatives and Reformists, proposes a way out of the woods.
The stick-and-carrot policies that the European Commission heads towards when it comes to the continent’s automotive industry are not working. Penalizing the manufacturers for missing strict emission criteria while subsidising them is not the right way forward, says Ondřej Krutílek, MEP of the ECR group, who joined the freshly launched podcast EU Perspectives on Tuesday.
The issues are hiding in plain sight: the lack of competitiveness, poor sales of EVs, fierce competition from China – and regulation which many in the industry view as too restrictive. “The issues are interconnected. We have a lack of competitiveness. But we find ourselves within the transformation of the entire sector, and for some issues we need to have a quick fix,“ Mr Krutílek said before Thursday’s start of the strategic dialogue on the topic announced by the European Commission.
Penalties are unhelpful
One of the issues in question is the emission criteria that recently entered into force. “We need to make sure this year that penalties (for missing the criteria) will not be paid. The intended three-year period is not enough. Five years would be better, providing everyone with a much safer port,“ asserted the conservative member, who is one of his parliamentary group’s automotive experts.
The stakes could hardly be higher. “We have to think how to keep the automotive industry in Europe in the future,” Mr Krutílek warned. We can see, he added, that “so far people haven’t been ready to buy electric vehicles”.
Sigrid de Vries, Director General of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, who participated in the podcast, identified a number of reasons for the lack of European enthusiasm. “We’ve seen early movers and early adopters, people who can afford it or really want it because they believe in the green transformation. They have the infrastructure available, being able to charge their cars at home or at work,“ the automotive industry representative said.
„But we need the large majority. We need the masses to go for a plug,“ Ms de Vries mentioned what she saw as a principal obstacle to a livelier continental growth of EV sales.
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No friends of incentives
Opinions differ on how to achieve that goal – and the approach currently favoured by the European Commission does not enjoy much support from ECR’s Mr Krutílek. “I’m not a friend of any subsidies,“ he said emphatically when asked about the recent suggestion made by Teresa Ribera, vice-president of the Commission. “It has been correctly pointed out that the European budget is not ready for that. And I don’t think that the new financial perspective starting in 2028 will introduce any changes to the volume of the budget.“
MEP Jens Gieseke from the EPP, who joined the EU Perspectives podcast, shared Mr Krutílek’s dismissive view of subsidies and incentives, which in his native Germany in the past amounted up to EUR 8000 on a single car. „The reality was that some people bought cars – for example Teslas – and owned them for six months. Then they sold them within Europe, preferably to Denmark, because they could make the most profit there. So this is something where the incentive scheme does not fly at all.“
Mr Gieseke, who is his political group’s chief negotiator in the upcoming strategic talks, also opposed the idea of introducing unified Europe-wide subsidies on the grounds of impracticality. “The truth is, you may come from the Czech Republic, or from Luxembourg, or from Germany. In Luxembourg, a monthly net income of ten thousand euros makes you an average earner, whereas in the Czech Republic, you are much better off with ten thousand euros. So you cannot have a proportionate incentive scheme,“ he asserted.
The only way of reaching a realistic solution to the quandary, in the conservative view Mr Krutílek and his political group espouse, leads through customers simply buying more new electric cars. That requires affordable prices. “All the better if the cars have a longer range – but I think the price is crucial,“ he stressed.
Car, infrastructure, energy
Mr Gieseke agreed in principle, while adding other factors dampening the appetite for electric vehicles across Europe. „This podcast is the EU Perspectives, so let’s have the European perspective. Sixty-one percent of the existing European infrastructure – the charging points – is built in France, Germany and the Netherlands. If this should be a European success story, we need to have the loading infrastructure all over Europe, not just in three countries,“ he said.
The German MEP also mentioned prices in a wider context. “In Germany, if you load on the highway, it will cost you almost one euro per kilowatt. That is not a cheap solution. We need the cheap car and the infrastructure, but we also need energy prices going down.“
