Daimler: “We have to tackle climate change, we can’t wait any longer”

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Daimler:

Daimler boss Ola Kallenius has the same concerns as almost every other boss of a car brand that primarily makes sales with large and heavy vehicles: From 2020 you have to reduce the average consumption of the new car fleet to less than 95 grams per kilometer in order to meet the EU requirements to be able to fulfill. Failure to do so could result in fines, in the case of Daimler it would be around 200 million euros a year.

Of course, Kallenius would rather book this money on the credit side and comply with the EU’s CO2 limits. Like almost every other head of a car brand that primarily makes sales with large and heavy vehicles, he wants to do it with pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids. “In passenger cars, we will focus on the battery in the next ten years,” he said, according to Automobilwoche at the industry summit of the Institute for the Automotive Industry (IFA) in Nurtingen.

Production in the European Mercedes plants should be climate-neutral by 2022. By 2039, the new Mercedes passenger car fleet is to be completely CO2-neutral. But not just to please the EU. In view of the looming climate crisis, the Daimler boss is certain that sustainability will become a criterion for awarding contracts in the future. “We have to tackle climate change, we can’t wait any longer,” he said at the industry event. Those who do not act sustainably will “be thrown out at some point,” said Kallenius.

The fuel cell does not play a major role at Daimler for passenger cars. However, it could “become particularly interesting for commercial vehicles,” says Kallenius. The Daimler boss also has synthetic fuels on his radar. If they are scalable at an acceptable cost, Mercedes also wants to use this technology to reduce CO2 emissions in the existing fleet, the manager promised.

“We can’t know that, it will be very crisp”

Kallenius does not want a specific exit date from combustion technology, as some countries such as France, Denmark, Great Britain and India have already defined and as the Greens are demanding in this country. He thinks the market economy takes care of that all by itself. And should synthetic fuels actually be available in sufficient quantities in ten years, abolishing combustion technology would have been fatal, says Kallenius. “The planned economy doesn’t work,” he criticized the exit plans.

However, he thinks it is right that fossil fuels should be taxed higher in the future in order to be able to subsidize sustainable alternatives such as the expansion of cycle paths and the promotion of public transport and electric cars. “We’re evaluating what the Federal Government has initiated with the climate package, as positive,” says Kallenius.

Whether Daimler’s measures can range to achieve the EU’s CO2 goals for 2020/21, Kallenius could not say, “We can not know that, it will be very crisp,” he said to the automotive week. For the time until 2030, however, it should work, according to the manager. Because the then valid, even stricter CO2 limits, are feasible with the adopted model range.

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2 thoughts on “Daimler: “We have to tackle climate change, we can’t wait any longer””

  1. The marketplatin

    The market should judge, says Kallenius. An old mantra, a totemist admiration formula revealing the stone-time religious thinking of our economic coryparents.
    A few examples of how “the market” works:
    In World War II, US electronics companies developed photovola and solar thermal cells for home use, so that oil, coal and gas could be available to the military and could decide the warfare against Japan and Nazi Germany faster for themselves. After the war ended, the fossil-fuel companies, like Rockefeller, saw their market disappear, and they influenced the policy of only granting building permits in the new suburbs if the builders committed themselves to connecting to the coal-fired power grid. GM also bought up the entire streetcar network in Los Angeles, including the vehicle fleet, had everything scrapped and thus created its own “market” for cars. (From the documentary “The Earth Destroyers”)
    Sigmar Gabriel (SPD), as Economics Minister and Vice Chancellor, passed a law that made private PV systems from 10KWp and/or with a feed-in connection to the grid subject to trade tax and self-consumption of PV electricity subject to VAT, so that self-sufficiency is no longer profitable – for example Liked by RWE. That’s how you do “market” (Volker Pispers said: “Can you use the word asshole even more?? Yes, Social Democrat.) Democracy thus degenerates into a neo-medieval feudal state (lat.feudum, association of persons to protect their own interests). Not to be forgotten: In this decade, the large car manufacturers in Germany were sold with almost a billion.€ subsidized (source: bundestag.de) as investment aid for combustion-related research. How to make “market”.
    We see: We normal citizens are not “The Market”. The market is a projection surface for the market dominators, and that’s exactly how, as a projection, the planned economy worked in principle, only worse in real terms. However, the functionaries are not party figures, but corporate managers and their lobbyists.
    Where the economy builds on projection and on a substitute religious mission (advertising industry), you can degrade them with the means of Feuerbach religious criticism: religion as a childlike essence of man, God as external displacement of internal wishes, so “the market” is the projection of powerful and greedy.

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  2. …. sounds very different from Daimler than it did approx. a year.
    (and also a bit in opposition to research reports from the Fraunhofer Institute … e.g.B. regarding hydrogen cars)

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