Concern grows in Italy about EU auto policies after Germany seems to embrace e-fuels. Here, the automotive sector represents 13% of GDP, occupying 250,000 jobs.
According to the Uilm-Està research, the ecological transition will impact the automotive sector, putting “up to 120,000 workers at risk”, because if a traditional vehicle with an internal combustion engine is made up of 7,000 components, an electric one reaches a maximum of 3,500/4,000, so it is expected that “40-45% of employed Italians will be impacted by the transition to electricity”. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to develop in so few years technological solutions capable of halving the CO2 emissions of trucks”, explained for example Acea, the European Association of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, according to which in order to achieve the new targets for 2030 at least 50,000 public recharging points for trucks are needed in the EU, of which 35,000 are high-performance and at least 700 hydrogen refueling stations.
“European vehicle manufacturers are facing a very asymmetrical challenge – De Meo said in his debut – we are no longer leading the technological race and while the incentives to purchase zero-emission vehicles decrease in the EU, we notice a massive support to our competitors in China and the United States”. According to Sergio Savaresi, full professor of vehicle automation at the Milan Polytechnic, “the transition to electric cars is difficult to reconcile with our traditional private car model. In Italy – he recalls – we have 40 million owned vehicles that are rarely used on average In this scenario, electric cars with a long range would be needed and therefore very large batteries, which with little use would represent a waste”.
Even a soft transition with the use of e-fuel could be of little use, on which the agreement announced today could focus according to the international NGO Transport&Environment. “The agreement on zero-emission cars, the only ones that will be marketed from 2035, must enter into force without further delays. In this perspective, e-fuels are a costly and inefficient diversion compared to the transformation towards electric, a an already solid industrial trend on which the entire automotive industry converges”. “Biofuels and synthetic fuels (e-fuel) are proposed by many in Italy as a tool to decarbonise the automotive sector, without destroying the endothermic engine supply chain. But the truth is that there is no adequate production of biofuels and e-fuel not even for the sector that really needs it, i.e. air transport” says the secretary of Motus-E, the association of electric car companies, Francesco Naso.
Source: Ansa
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