Is Bosch going to turn its back on the EV revolution that is currently in full swing?
Bosch supervisory board chairman Franz Fehrenbach has recently been in the headlines for a rather bold statement he made, which criticised the current trend towards electrification in the auto industry.
According to a report by the German newspaper Stuggarter Nachrichten, the top man of one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers has recently accused the EU of preferring the battery-electric car unilaterally and thus harming climate protection.
The gist of Fehrenbach’s argument in regards to this matter is that EVs these days are not climate neutral, owing to the emissions produced during the generation of electricity. On this same note, he goes on to state that the production of the EV battery cells are also very energy intensive, with most of the energy coming from coal-fired power plants in Asia.
Fehrenbach also considers the current batch of BEVs to not yet be ready for the market, stating that the charging infrastructure for these electric cars are yet to be ready for true mass adoption. In addition to this, the Bosch chairman believes that this problem is further amplified on the climate front due to the ‘lack of renewable electricity and capacity for the (charging of the) battery cell’.
Now, it is worth pointing out at this point that this is not the first time someone at the top has made such comments about EVs. In fact, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda has said something along the same vein as what was pointed out by Fehrenbach just a few months prior.
And much like that time too, when the many tech-based media outlets got wind of this news, they have since proceeded to soundly lambast these statements by Fehrenbach. Calling it short-sighted and misguided to criticise the rise of EVs.
Then again, to those who bothered to read more closely into these two statements made by these two top men in the auto industry, the problem they have isn’t with the electric propulsion in itself, but it is actually with the batteries that power these electrified vehicles. Both Fehrenbach and Toyota have come out instead in favour of hydrogen fuel cells as power source of EVs for the future.
To hear Fehrenbach say it, investment into the hydrogen economy will make it ‘possible to store large quantities of renewable energies and use them for energy-intensive industries’. Looking at it on the automotive front, this means that it will not only be made available for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but also for the production of synthetic fuels that could drive cars with combustion engines in a climate-neutral manner.
