The $2.4 billion plan to get Germans to buy EVs

The disconnect isn't new or unusual: lofty government goals don't inspire any desire on the part of the populace to meet them. That's the case in Germany with electric cars, where the federal government has set a target of one million BEVs on its roads by 2020. An article in Forbes puts the current number at around 21,000 EVs in circulation, and there's no way to add another 979,000 without financial help. One industry analyst predicted the global electric vehicle share to be less than one percent in 2020; Germany is well below that at just a quarter of a percent: on 2014 sales of 3.07M units, 7,518 were electric cars. That just won't do.

The Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen has a plan it thinks could work: a fuel tax. Add one euro cent to the price of a liter of gasoline or diesel, and the result would be a $2.4 billion haul that could subsidize electric car purchases and provide 80,000 charging stations.

The German government knows subsidies are needed, but no one's begun to lay out a way to enact them. Automakers are looking at higher emissions hurdles on the left and tepid consumer uptake on the right. Head over to Forbes to read more on CAR's plan and what's at stake.