It's not just Volkswagen's cutbacks on electric battery production and green Audis, it's green car sales figures that aren't taking off (or implode without incentives), but a bit of news from Colorado should be an eye-opener for the new European Commission on the need for a change of course. The largest retailer in the US state has been forced to set up a car leasing platform to bring back onto the market the huge number of used cars that nobody wants to buy back. It has to be said that Colorado has benefited from a very strong system of green incentives in recent years. This has drugged the electric sector and created the kind of bottleneck that we will see here in Europe in a few years' time. In practice, the used EV market is unsustainable. The American dealer was forced to create an app and rent out Nissan Leafs and other brands for as little as $19 a month. Of course, the price does not include some additional fixed costs, such as car insurance and re-registration fees. Of course, mobility is limited to 10,000 miles per year, but the figures are low enough to make you think twice. The offer would still not stand without the generous subsidy match. The Colorado case should be studied with some attention in Brussels. It seems that not only has not enough thought been given there to the production side and competition from China, but also to what will become of the electric car if the ban on the internal combustion engine really does come into force in 2035. Unless you want to imagine a system for a few hundred thousand wealthy users willing to change their car every three years. And the rest? For now, the only answers are poor mobility and permanence. It is no coincidence that whole sections of the left dream of the city of proximity, where you get around by bike and everything is 15 minutes away. Beyond the sadness of such a life, the problem is the sustainability of GDP. Concentrating sales on niches of the rich will never be the equivalent of mass sales. And that is the basis of any economic assessment.
Finally, there is a third element that Brussels should take into account. Chinese competition is not addressed by tariffs alone. Certainly they are important, because if we look at the table on the page, we can clearly see that the same car sold in China and Europe travels on completely different price lists. A Dacia Spring costs almost 17,000 euros in Germany. In Beijing it costs less than 9,000 euros. The Bmw IX3 goes from 51,500 euros to 74,000 euros. The serious thing is that the difference applies not only to Chinese cars, but also to European cars produced there. And we Europeans are our own hangmen. Our extremist green policies have helped boost the Chinese economy and made us dependent. So much so that Beijing is now ready to move on to phase two of trade penetration. An electricity market expert who has just returned from two former Soviet countries, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, described a dramatic scenario in the car market. These are two essentially poor economies whose governments have made agreements with China to start a rapid development of charging infrastructure. There are no European cars on the roads. In Tajikistan, all taxis will soon be electric, and in Uzbekistan 99% of the (very common) electric cars are Chinese. In practice, having colonised the technology chain and convinced Europe to become dependent on it, Beijing is now reaping the rewards by betting on poor economies in the hope of seeing them grow. The underlying theme of these hours is to understand how the alliances within the Commission will close. Who will support Ursula von der Leyen and who will take control of the two most sensitive portfolios: Antitrust and Environment. There is a risk. Namely that the pattern of the previous Commission will be cloned and the same path of industrial desertification will be followed. Instead, the CAP should be reviewed and expanded, the Natura law, the packaging regulations and the halt to the heat engine should be called into question. The most sustainable model for our country and the old continent is the one based on biofuels. It allows the development of the circular economy and the seamless integration of both current production platforms and the logistics chain. First choose the technology in which we can excel and then build an industrial project. The rest is ideology.
