Electric passenger cars are being given too much focus as a way of reducing carbon emissions, analysts at Deutsche Bank Research said in a paper, titled ‘E-mobility: Without subsidies (still) a niche’. The paper says that “e-mobility remains a very expensive way of avoiding CO₂. Government support for e-mobility is another example of the lack of focus on cost-efficient climate protection,” according to
Clean Energy Wire.

The structural shift towards e-mobility, Deutsche Bank notes, has been driven by governmental regulation and less by market forces. In the EU in 2019, the market share of new electric car registrations was only 2.6 percent. However, a market share of 30 to 50 percent by 2030 would be needed in order to achieve the targeted CO₂ limit value for new car fleets, the report states.

Germany’s influential carmakers have all announced ambitious plans to increase the share of e-cars in their product portfolio over the next years. The German government had aimed to have a million electric vehicles on its roads by 2020, but has since said this target will likely only be reached by 2021 or 2022.