Gérard Le Puill
Figures published in the press in December 2024 indicated that sales of new electric vehicles would reach 13.4% market share in Europe in 2024. Hence announcements of massive job cuts at Volkswagen and the departure imposed on the CEO Carlos Tavares by the shareholders of Stellantis while awaiting massive relocations of production.
Our article published yesterday provided official figures on the insufficient decline in greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and in the member countries of the European Union. In the latter, according to a decision approved in February 2023 by a majority of deputies in the European Parliament and validated by the Council of member countries of the Union in March of the same year, the European regulation published on April 19, 2023 indicated new vehicles equipped with a thermal engine will be banned from sale from 2035. According to the Commission already chaired by Ursula Von der Leyen, this decision should allow Europe to achieve neutrality carbon in 2050, and thus be well placed to curb ongoing global warming. This calculation was based solely on the observation that by consuming electricity, cars and trucks do not emit CO2 while driving.
But before putting a new vehicle on the road, it must be built. Calculations have shown that a car equipped with a low-power electric motor must drive at least 40,000 kilometers before its carbon footprint falls below that of a gasoline or diesel vehicle of the same power. If you buy an SUV, it’s more like 60,000 kilometers due to the weight of the vehicle and its battery. But it will also be necessary to increase the production of electricity to supply this vehicle fleet, the consumption of which will increase from year to year. However, many member countries of the European Union, including Germany, produce a large part of their electricity from gas and coal, two fossil fuels that emit a lot of greenhouse gases.
Volkswagen will cut 35,000 jobs in 5 years
During the last three weeks of 2024, several national dailies spoke of the excitement of the managers of multinational automobile companies who are converting to the production of electric vehicles. In The Echoes of December 23 we read that “Volkswagen wants to cut 35,000 jobs by 2030 in Germany.” According to figures provided by the management of the group which includes 12 automobile brands, these job cuts spread over five years “will reduce labor and production costs by more than 4 billion euros per year”. Little information has filtered out on production relocations. But Les Echos indicated that production of the gasoline Golf currently carried out in Wolfsburg will be relocated to Mexico with the aim of conquering new markets, since the ban on the sale of new vehicles with thermal engines is only planned in Europe. of 27 from 2035.
At the very beginning of 2024, Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis, which brings together a multitude of automobile brands including Citroën, Opel, Peugeot, Fiat, Chrysler, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, was praised by part of the press for having force-fed the shareholders, who had thanked him by offering him the sum of 100,000 euros per day between his fixed salary, his variable salary and his free shares. At the end of 2024, these same shareholders refused to extend his contract. This refusal earned us a comment intended to be neutral in the same article from December 23 in The Echoes: “But the crisis goes beyond Germany, as evidenced by the sudden departure of Carlos Tavvares, the boss of Stellantis: overcapacity in Europe, slow start of electric vehicles, low-cost competition from China and declines in sales in certain key markets such as China for Volkswagen ».
The astonishing incompetence of President Von der Leyen
In The Echoes of December 24, the article by Guillaume Guichard, titled “Electric cars: the revolt against CO2 rules intensifies” began with these sentences: “The closer the end of the year approaches, the more pressure increases on the European Commission and its President Ursula Von der Leyen. Car manufacturers and member states are calling for a relaxation of the rules for decarbonization of the automobile industry. Next year (in 2025, editor’s note) these imply a 15% reduction in the average emissions of new cars sold, which mainly involves an increase in sales of electric cars. As this is not the case, especially because of their selling price significantly higher than that of vehicles with diesel or gasoline engines, Guillaume Guichard’s article cited this reaction from Luca de Meo, general director of the Renault group : “The automobile industry risks losing up to 16 billion euros in investment capacity by paying penalties, reducing production, joining forces with foreign competitors or selling electric vehicles at a loss.”
To escape these penalties, it would have been necessary to increase sales of electric cars by 20% instead of 13.4% in 2024. This reasoning is held by Ursula Von der Leyen, whose incompetence in economics is increasingly astonishing.
