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Comment by benjaminsuch | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "fucks over"? People want to reduce CO2, they want a greener Germany, a greener world and more importantly reach the climate agreement. Subsidizing electric cars is one step towards it.

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No disagreement there, but this should have happened over a decade ago.

Instead, we got DieselGate, not just one, but at this point, several of them [0] and the responsible parties, even government agencies who knew but tried to hide it, just shrug their shoulders and nothing changes.

Now they can celebrate themselves for putting EV on their agenda when everybody else is already miles ahead. Which is a common theme with German politics and any kind of tech innovation [1]

[0] https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2019/10/abgase-dieselsk...

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/merkel-neuland-...

> German politics and any kind of tech innovation

I came to believe that German politics still associates "high tech" with the cog wheel: more cog wheels, more tech.

Since that doesn't apply to IT, it completely falls by the wayside. And since EVs have less of them than an ICE car, they're also lower tech than regular cars.

So far that's the only way I could make sense of it all.

That would also explain the tendency to still bet on "rare metals" aka copper as a transmission medium for the Internet.

I think that has more to do with Projekt Opal by the Bundespost (see https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Die-Glasfaser-in-ihrem-Lauf... from 2001): An early fiber network project that tanked and cut off entire villages from any newer technology than 33.6kbps modems for a decade or so.

Related to that, it surprised me how spotty the Internet was when I drove from Salzburg all the way to Strasbourg via Karlsruhe a few weeks ago (my gf who was riding shotgun used a more explicit word to describe it). Supposedely those are the best developed regions of Germany (we passed close to Munich and Stuttgart, i.e. the hometowns of BMW and Merecedes). The highway itself (the A8) is in need of further improvements especially the part between Salzburg and Munich.

> People want to reduce CO2, they want a greener Germany, a greener world and more importantly reach the climate agreement. Subsidizing electric cars is one step towards it.

They could have done that for years, but it happens the day Volkswagen decides to finally build them.

The money put in subsidizing electric vehicles is more well spend in public transportation. An 30 electric cars are not as green as a single bus.

Subsidizing public transportation will never happen at scale in Germany, this piece should be proof enough for that.

A better way is to put a big tax on CO2 making driving ICE cars less attractive. They can then use the money from this tax to build bike paths and give tax breaks for electric vehicles. Preferably bicycles and light vehicles which use less resources to produce and operate.

Yes, but that could have been done in this form earlier, and not suspiciously close to VW's EVs' release date.

Since half of the money come from automotive, they were involved in making that arrangement, too. It's quite possible that some VW managers delayed the process for a few weeks to get it all lined up.

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