Thanks to incentives, the automotive sector can breathe. He would do well to take the opportunity to take a pause for reflection, to rearrange the ideas that have become a bit tangled in the last two / three years. Between fines, pandemics, microchips and a stop to 2035 it seems that the manufacturers have gone into confusion.
Let’s rearrange the facts. Consumption in 2021 grew as it did not since the economic boom and is recovering again this year. Italians want everything back, except cars: why? Answer: it’s not that they don’t want them, it’s that those who order a car are given deliveries of up to 66 weeks, one year and three months on the Gregorian calendar.
One wonders: what do you do with incentives if you can’t make cars? Not only that: taking advantage of the lack of products, they raised the price lists and eliminated the discounts. Okay, the market has its own laws, but how do you reconcile incentives and price increases? They reconcile because the real embarrassing and annoying point is that customers aren’t buying the cars they should, electric or plug-in hybrid, at least not in enough quantity to prevent the Commission from imposing million-dollar fines on manufacturers. Since these cars are expensive compared to normal ones, a little help is needed.
Therefore, the Commission would like only electric cars to be sold. Manufacturers, who are producing in fits and starts due to lack of chips, have supinely accepted while customers do not, they do not buy enough. So why not ask the government to have the fines removed, so the taxpayers save the incentives and everyone is happy? For the energy transition. But that doesn’t depend on the cars, based on the numbers. Emissions would drop by about 1% if the electricity were all from renewable sources and if the 220 million cars circulating in Europe were all electric. If, from 2035, only electric ones started to be sold, it would take another 20 years to change them all. Meanwhile, other growing economies, China and India in the lead, will have increased their CO2 emissions so much that that nearly 1% will have become 0.5. Are you sure it is worth annihilating an industry with 3.2 million direct employees plus related industries?
In conclusion, the automotive is in a labyrinth of which it is difficult to find the exit. Brussels tries to frame it on a transition with imperceptible benefits but with enormous costs, on the verge of survival. The builders, evidently suffering from Stockholm syndrome, shared this policy believing that customers would follow. Since they don’t, they turn to the government. But not to deny the stop to 2035, which would be the solution to the problem, but to have public money to sell cars that few want. Nothing, you need a time out and a deep breath.