E-cars in the TV documentary – the movement in the car and labor market

Electric cars: you either love them or hate them. I belong to the second category. Why?

Because electric cars are not yet fully developed, are cumbersome to use, and are sluggish on the highway. Above all, planning the range and the annoying charging process with waiting times at charging stations are a complete deal-breaker.

That doesn't suit my personal circumstances. I just want to quickly refuel and get on with my journey. However, thanks to massive subsidies, politicians have managed to get electric cars on the road despite these drawbacks.

And most car manufacturers are going crazy. They are planning to phase out combustion engines quickly. The EU has now underlined this with the ban on the sale of combustion engines as new cars from 2035.

However, anyone who currently drives an electric car must be aware that they are a test driver for car and electricity companies – and that they also have to pay money for it.

And where exactly the environmental advantage lies for an imported electric car from China, which is transported here by ship at great expense.

Germany's car industry has been a job engine and a guarantor of prosperity for decades. But the switch to electric motors is rapidly changing the world of work.

The “Makro” documentary “E-cars – job killers or job engines?” by Torsten Mehltretter, which will be broadcast for the first time on 3sat on Tuesday, June 28, 2022, at 22.25:XNUMX p.m., deals with the opportunities, but also the possible problems, of switching to electric cars.

An estimated 200.000 jobs could be lost: jobs in transmission manufacturing will become redundant. However, more and more skilled workers are needed in battery manufacturing.

Ultimately, the industry could offer more jobs than before, but that is not certain. It will be particularly difficult for the supplier industry not to miss the boat when it comes to the transport transition, warns Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing in an interview with "Makro".

He says: “We must do everything in our power to drive change forward, then the German car industry will continue to be at the forefront in the future.”

The job profile will change for almost half of all jobs in the industry. Bosch has set up a training center specifically for training and retraining, where employees will be introduced to their future jobs.

Electrical engineering will increasingly dominate the job profiles in the automotive industry. However, unions fear that not all companies have yet considered this epochal change. Some employers are not yet clear how they will replace the production of gearboxes or pistons.

At the BMZ Group in Karlstein, Bavaria, they are not familiar with such problems. Company founder Sven Bauer began producing high-performance batteries back in 1994.

Almost 2.000 people now work for the company worldwide. They build batteries for cars, especially sports cars, as well as for trucks all over the world. And because good batteries promise big profits, German car manufacturers are now following suit with new factories.

However, these are only created in exceptional cases at the traditional production locations of Stuttgart, Munich and Wolfsburg. For some regions in eastern Germany, this opens up completely new economic perspectives.

So, the bottom line is that there is a lot of movement in the car and job markets. Personally, I still can't stand electric cars...

© Photo: Alessio Lin, Unsplash