> as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is set to meet the bosses of the country’s carmakers on Thursday in Berlin to discuss the woes of the struggling sector.
Consumers will definitely profit from that, there's no way they will tax Chinese imports even more, no way i tell's ya!
Germany (and the EU generally) import 98% of their oil-derived products..
Before sanctions the leading import source was Russia.
EVs could have helped a lot more as China has demonstrated but people like the brum-brum noise and all the right-wing parties with mysterious ties to Russia and other fossil fuel producers didn't think they'd work for some reason.
Beyond the points you made about petrol cars, the price is also a big factor.
In the EU, car companies only sell large (and very expensive) SUVs.
If you want to have a fully electric car on top of that, the bill will be far too high for most people.
This is also why the EU is seeing a switch where people can't buy their cars anymore and have to lease them or hope their employer will do it for them as part of a company car package.
> In the EU, car companies only sell large (and very expensive) SUVs.
News to me. Did you mean in the US? Or did you mean the most famous German brands like BMW and Audi?
For the EU as a whole, there's e.g. Dacia which is Romanian and therefore EU: https://shop.dacia.de/offer/257/235286/0/0 this is clearly neither an SUV, nor particularly expensive — even 18 years ago I was seeing things for about this price new, and there's been a lot of inflation since then.
Yeah meanwhile China installs record breaking amounts of Solar and Nuclear
They will ask the EU to remove environmental protections like the end of new gas / diesel cars by 2035.