D The blue bus on line 371 whizzed through the curves. We were in Cassis on the Mediterranean and on the way to the train station. For the narrow streets up the mountain we took the bus early in the morning – or rather: the rocket. Because the bus full of tired commuters was just flying along the street. Silent, fast, you could tell the bus driver was having fun behind the wheel of his electric bus. I held on tight and remembered the agonized jolting, shaking and clattering of other city buses polluting the world with diesel. And I thought: Why isn’t anyone who wants to promote e-mobility actively advertising with this momentum, this dynamism and this joy in humming along quickly and silently?
In any case, the federal government has just put the brakes on this idea again. Instead of the fun of driving and the joy of climate protection, the argument is based on the fat wallet: Now there are three billion euros in tax money again for e-car funding. Families with an annual income of up to 80,000 euros can receive up to 6,000 euros to buy a car. You can do it if you have too much money.
But you can also argue about whether electric cars have to be so expensive. Whether they should be built in Germany in order to maintain jobs, taxes, added value and appreciation here. And whether these metal boxes with an electric motor have to be SUV monsters and fast lane slingers like their dirty brothers and sisters. Or whether e-mobility wouldn’t be an opportunity to downsize in terms of displacement and horn capacity and develop smaller, lighter models that would be lighter, faster and cheaper? But these are just the crazy thoughts of a walking, cycling transit user.
Something else is really absurd: Why do we actually have to spend a lot of tax money supporting something that is clearly the better alternative? Electric cars are faster, cleaner, without that stupid, repair-prone combustion engine, independent of sheiks, Trumps and Putins and soon cheaper, in any case with access to cheap electricity or your own solar system. Where is the responsible consumer that we always hear about? We don’t have to convince people with free money to buy a smartphone instead of a rotary dial telephone, to use a laptop instead of a mechanical typewriter, or to walk in comfortable shoes instead of wooden slippers that we carved ourselves.
But we praise these awesome electric sleds like stale, lukewarm beer. All they are missing is the roar of the engine, the black plume of exhaust fumes, the smell of burnt hydrocarbons and climate change – and the awareness that when they refuel, they are financing the deadliest threat to our lives. If you want that – here you go. For everyone else, we should just treat ourselves to a 20-minute ride in friend Thomas’ ID3 along winding Alpine roads to our mountain hut in Vorarlberg. If you still want to go back to your panting, squeaking, groaning manual petrol engine after this low flight through the mountains – here you go. We’ll never have to bribe everyone else who still has their money’s worth in their cupboards with billions in taxes when buying a car again.