How much influence does the car lobby have on the EU?
Many Europeans are driving older and older cars, at the expense of the environment. The EU Commission does not like this at all and announces Euronorm 7 as the standard for 2021.
"Missed opportunity," headlines the news channel NTV and brings the dilemma to the proverbial point: Europeans and especially Germans shy away from investing in a new car and prefer to drive their older cars. Road safety in particular could suffer from too many old cars on the roads, as a study by the Duisburg CAR Institute has now shown. According to this study, Germans drive vehicles which are on average almost ten years old - almost a quarter of the cars registered here are even 15 years or even older.
"The car nation has become a classic car nation," study director Ferdinand Dudenhöffer aptly states. Only in Eastern Europe is the average even higher than here. According to current statistical surveys, the number of classic cars on German roads is over half a million - an impressively high figure! Critics complain that the promotion of electromobility has meant that almost 90 percent of the actual car market, i.e. the combustion engine, has not been taken into account and has simply been neglected and ignored. Even the reduction of the value-added tax for the period of the next six months had little positive effect on the automobile market and the willingness of Germans to buy, the study continued. The battered car industry is suffering massively because if we drive our cars for longer, new ones are bought less frequently. One might consider it a strange coincidence that at this time of all times the EU Commission wants to introduce the Eurostandard 7 as early as 2021. What this means and what drastic consequences this could have, the Germans know very well. With the Eurostandard 4 came the first green environmental zones in Germany. There are now more than 60 of them and no diesel vehicle with Euro 3 or worse is allowed to enter. With Euronorm 5 and 6 came the diesel driving ban zones, because suddenly the Euro 4 and 5 vehicles had a nitrogen oxide problem. Not entirely innocent of the NOx problem, the introduction and the subsequent driving bans for older Euronorms resulted in rising sales and significantly more vehicle purchases. Hand in hand with bans also go the fines. Anyone who drives into the wrong zone with a car that is just 5 years old has to pay a lot of money - and this again benefits the cities' and local authorities' tired coffers.
Officially, representatives of the mobile industry are vehemently resisting new standards, as the technical changes to the engine and exhaust system are very costly. At the same time they are the biggest profiteers and every new standard, with every new driving ban and the de facto compulsory expropriation of older vehicles, washes a lot of money into the coffers of the car industry. It is already a perverse and symbiotic system of the car industry, lobbying, the EU and the individual towns and cities that is running around just to take money out of the pockets of ordinary citizens.
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