Flames, trains and automobiles
Wednesday, 1st May
Good morning, and happy May Day/Internationaler Tag der Arbeit to those who celebrate. Stories covered today are from Handelsblatt, FAZ and BILD.
“Autoland Nummer Eins”
Today’s Handelsblatt has a fascinating piece on a crucial and iconic part of German industry and trade, and a bell-weather of changing global tides: the auto industry, specifically China’s attempts to challenge the Germans at their own game.
The trade paper’s deep-dive into BYD cannot mask its glee at the huge Chinese EV-maker’s struggle in breaking into the European, and especially German, auto market. Of the 2,890 BYD cars admitted to the EU so far this year, only 160 units have reached German forecourts. Getting the cars here has proven a problem, too. BYD admitted to having problems with cars getting mouldy during transport, and cars are sitting for months on end at their port of arrival, Bremershaven.
However, despite these teething problems, it is clear that the Germans are deeply concerned by the growing threat that Chinese companies such as BYD pose to their own industrial titans, and the entire high-tech, high-quality, export-based economy upon which the country depends. As Wolfgang Münchau’s recent columns have regularly reminded New Statesman readers, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the captains of German industry, and European leaders more generally, have been slow to comprehend this new landscape. The question remains how they respond once BYD figure out how to reliably get their EVs to market, and if European consumers start noticing. BYD’s sponsorship of this year’s Euros (hosted in Germany, no less) as ‘Official E-Mobility Partner’, will make that all the more possible.
The Deutschlandticket: far from all aboard
Closely linked to the story of the changing auto market, today’s FAZ offers a review of the success of the so-called ‘Deutschlandticket’: a heavily subsidised train ticket which allows the bearer to travel across all of Germany (on regional and local trains, but not the express ICE’s) for €49 a month. The scheme was piloted in the summer of 2022 as the ‘Neun-Euro-Ticket’, a much more generous deal which this writer took advantage of during his year abroad.
But as Corinna Budras shows, uptake of the scheme has been lacklustre. Some 11 million Germans have a Deutschlandticket, at a public cost of €3 billion a year. A poll included in the article asking respondents what their ‘ideal form of transport for the future’ is shows that, outside of thrifty students and Deutsche Bahn enthusiasts, only very few Germans are interested (only 15% responded for ‘train’). In contrast, BYD (and presumably the German automakers) will be pleased to see that 72% of respondents answered ‘car, electric car, and cars with alternative eco-friendly fuel’.
Mai-Demos jump the gun
And finally, completing my catchy title in the wrong order, BILD reports with horror the scenes of the annual 1st May demonstrations, which seem to have gotten off to a early start last night in Berlin, Leipzig and Hamburg. In a change from the traditional patrol car, up to 16 Amazon vans were torched by revellers in Berlin’s Thyssenstraße. BILD also has a piece, not unlike the build-up to a big game, on ‘What the Police are Expecting on 1st May in Berlin’. Certainly more high-octane than a dance round the May Pole.
