Lower Saxony’s Economics Minister Olaf Lies believes that Volkswagen’s focus on electric cars is the right thing to do, despite the tightened austerity plans. Transformations always come with setbacks, the SPD politician told the “Braunschweiger Zeitung”. “We are now in exactly such a setback – in other words, in an extremely difficult time. But that doesn’t change the fact that the path to e-mobility is the right one.”
The alternative, in the minister’s view, would be to suspend innovations and sell combustion engines for as long as possible, which would mean that we would eventually miss the boat. “That would definitely be the wrong approach,” said Lies.
Read: Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake
The SPD politician also supported the ideas of Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens) to provide new impetus for the purchase of electric cars. “We now need market impulses, external incentives that also generate sales,” said Lies. Recently, new registrations of electric cars in Germany collapsed after the halt in state funding.
With regard to the importance of VW for Lower Saxony and Germany, the state politician said that this could not be overestimated: “Volkswagen is Lower Saxony’s largest industrial employer. And it is about hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs throughout Germany, but it is also about the question of innovation and sustainability.”
Lower Saxony wants to secure VW locations
His goal as Minister of Economic Affairs is to ensure that the locations in Lower Saxony are not only maintained, but developed. “My goal is sustainable employment both at Volkswagen and in the supplier industry. My goal is for the automotive industry to remain the heart of industry in Lower Saxony,” he said. VW has six locations in Lower Saxony: Wolfsburg, Hanover, Braunschweig, Emden, Salzgitter and Osnabrück.
The company announced on Monday that it was no longer ruling out a plant closure in Germany and redundancies. VW did not provide any new details about the savings plans at a staff meeting in Wolfsburg.
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