Hydrogen instead of electric? Armin Laschet shines in front of Elon Musk with ignorance
Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet. (Photo: 360b / Shutterstock)
Tesla boss Elon Musk is currently on the Gigafactory construction site in Grünheide. CDU Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet also stopped by and showed that he doesn’t seem to be quite as well informed about the future of mobility.
Elon Musk and Armin Laschet meet at Tesla’s Gigafactory construction site near Berlin to talk shop about the automotive industry of the future. At least that’s the theory. To the press, however, the party chairman of the CDU Laschet repeatedly showed that he was not deep enough into the subject to be able to initiate a discussion with electric car pioneer Musk.
Laschet asks Musk about the future of the car and wants to give him a few examples straight away. Take hydrogen, for example. When this word is uttered, Musk waves it aside and interrupts Laschet. Hydrogen is wasted time, says the entrepreneur and starts to laugh heartily. Laschet does not seem to have expected such a reaction, because he switched from English to German to explain to the press that there would be a scientific dispute here. However, the dispute between hydrogen and electric is not a scientific one, as Laschet claims, but just one between interest groups who want to benefit as much as possible from the abandonment of the combustion engine.
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The future is electric
A comparison with the electropendant shows that the hydrogen car has no future: A modern electric car brings around 70 to 80 percent of a kilowatt hour of electricity to the road as drive power, while the hydrogen variant consumes around twice to three times as much electricity for the same distance.
The costs of the necessary public infrastructure as well as maintenance and acquisition costs are also higher than for an electric car. So it’s no wonder that leading manufacturers such as Volkswagen are already describing the electric car as lacking an alternative and have turned away from the hydrogen car. Mr Laschet, who incidentally drives an electric car himself and still does not see it as the vehicle of the future, may not have noticed that yet.
