This is one of my open-ended essays on the topic of battery cars/e-cars, and how the desire just isn't there for them. And I'm going to suggest five things to reverse that trend along the way.
1. Cost. Lets be honest.....the German pricing of the Tesla 3 model is around 54,000 Euro (with the VAT, as of spring of 2019). You can buy the Nissan Leaf for around 36,000 Euro (VAT included), which is still a fair amount of money. There is a no-name German brand out there in the 15,000 Euro (VAT included) range, but it's also a low range vehicle and not likely to interest that many people.
So for the typical middle-class guy, the basic brands are pricey and not going to really interest the majority of Germans.....unless you clear more than 30,000 Euro a year after taxes.
So a credit is necessary? More or less, you need to approach Germans and offer them either a 8,000 Euro cash deal on the car purchase, or a year-to-year tax credit of 1,000 Euro a year on your income taxes. You'd have to stage this for a minimum of five years....maybe even ten.
2. Public charging stations. A year ago (Sep 2018) in Germany.....there were a total of roughly 18,000 charging public 'points' in Germany (some were a single station with five to ten chargers). Some grocery stores are putting up the chargers, along with autobahn restaurants going on this trend as well.
Today, the coalition government said in a bold way that they were aiming at a million charger points over the next two to three years.
To be honest here, you'd have to go and plan at least half-a-million of these along the autobahn routes of Germany.....alone. Just in the city of Wiesbaden, there'd probably have to be in the range of 500 public charging points.
But this brings up the cost of the public charging points....will there be serious profit-measures built into this, and turn off the general public?
3. Private charging stations. If you add up the charger itself, and the professional electrician required....it's upward to 1,200 to 1,400 Euro involved....to put one single charger onto a German house. If you rent out an apartment in the house (often common), then your effort will have to include a charging station for your renter. If you offer two parking spots for the renter, and he wants another 2nd charger for his deal? That's probably another cost item.
The government needs some kind of tax credit sitting there for enticing people to put the charger units into their house.
4. Adding solar panels onto a house and connected to the charging stations. This is another point where some kind of tax-credit incentive needs to be created, and offered for at least five to ten years....getting people onto more solar energy.
5. Finally, in present-day Germany.....the electrical rates compared against all of the European countries is awful high. Tossing out nuke-energy and coal-energy? Well, it just sped up the cost-rate for electrical power. Even if you convinced people to go onto solar, the cost factor of installation, and the lowering of normal-grid users.....it will simply drive power costs up even more.
You need someone with authority in the German government to come up to the front of the room.....lay out the grid, and start talking about the cost, and where it's going for the next twenty years. If the talk suggests that electrical costs will continue along this line and keep increasing.....you need to bring the government to change, and force reality upon them.
If you end up owning an electrical vehicle (costing more than a gas car), and the mileage-to-electrical costs is more than gas.....then why would I ever go and buy an e-car? It makes no sense. If you've got a stupid electrical grid policy....fire that crew, and start looking for someone who can resolve this mess, and make the whole ownership thing worth the effort.
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