At the plenary session of the Parliament of Navarre on Thursday, Lehendakari Chivite placed great hopes on the electric car that will start producing at the Landaben plant from 2026: “The most successful electric car on the market is the one that will be built in Landaben.”

Volkswagen announced in 2023 that two electric cars would be produced in Landaben and two other combustion cars, and that bridges 2024 and 2025 would be years to prepare the plant for electric car production.

The multinational predicted that the workload would be greatly reduced in that transition, but it also announced that production would return to normal from 2026. Mistrust, however, is in the air, as UPN parliamentarian Ana Elizalde showed: “What’s the plan, move from 6,000 employees to 3,500?” According to Volkswagen, there are currently about 5,000 workers at the Landaben plant, which has 26,000 workers.

Chivite called for calm, “because factory closures seem to be confined to Germany.” It is not true, however, that in Belgium the company has also followed the same path. In Brussels, Volkswagen will close an Audi car factory of 3,000 employees next February, as announced recently. And the hardest part is that you're going to close a factory where you make the electric car, and not the conventional fuel car. From now on, the car that is manufactured in Brussels will be built in Mexico.

As far as Germany is concerned, Volkswagen has announced the closure of three production plants in the area. Tens of thousands of workers will stay on the streets and the rest of the company’s floors will reduce wages by 10%. The multinational has an estimated 120,000 staff in Germany.

At the moment, according to forecasts made in 2023, the multinational said that in 2024 it would produce 250,000 cars in Landaben, in 2025 150,000 and in 2026 up to 200,000, including the electric car. But meeting these goals will be more difficult than saying. According to the Diario de Navarra this Monday, in order to achieve these objectives it was necessary to invest EUR 250 million a year in Landaben until 2027, and for this year an investment of EUR 160 million is foreseen. However, the newspaper of Cordovilla highlights in the title of the news that “the automotive industry has done its homework” in Navarra.

Doubts about electricity

The doubts raised in the Foral Parliament have a firm foundation. There are great reasons for predicting black clouds in the future for two reasons: on the one hand, because although governments are lengthening the production of conventional cars as a chewing gum, their production has a timescale; and on the other, because the production of electric cars and sales forecasts are not being met at all, at least in Europe.

Volkswagen is in crisis, but Mercedes-Benz is also in trouble. The CEO of Ola Kaellenius Mercedes has acknowledged in the British magazine Autocar that she did not believe that the sale of electric cars could be slow at this time of the year. In the interview he acknowledges that forecasts indicate that, at present, a quarter of the sale of his cars would be electric cars, but that they have not even halved.

The countries with the most electric cars in Europe were Norway and Sweden in 2022, and only Norway occupied 10% of the barrier (percentage of electricity among all cars in the area). Most countries were much smaller: In France they did not reach 2%, and in Spain they did not reach 1%, according to Eurostat data. In Hego Euskal Herria, for example, in 2023 some 2,300 electric cars were sold, 7.4% of all cars sold.

The EU regions with the higmmes of electric passenger cars in all cars in 2022 were :onpointe_automobile:
: flag-nl:Flevoland
(12.8%) :flag-nl:Utrecht and :flag-se:Stockholm (both 6.6%)

What about your country:question: :arrow_right: https://t.co/9QE7tOYF5W pic.twitter.com/eO3ioGQ5yT

— EU_Eurostat (@EU_Eurostat) May 6, 2024

And also difficulties.

In the foral Parliament there was no harsh talk, but in the coming years the automotive sector will be raw in Europe, as the number of electric cars can hardly replace the usual number of cars. The problems of selling are also evident to the most blind and the mistrust of buying: they are expensive, they have much less autonomy and there are still very few loading sites.

In addition, the electrical infrastructure network is only in its beginnings and the electrical power should at least double in the electricity grid. Difficulties in obtaining materials for the manufacture of electric cars will also increase in the near future. To make an electric car, much larger amounts of minerals are needed, twice as much as usual, and some of them are scarce to do so. For example, if the current number of cars in the world were to be replaced by electric cars, the planet would no longer be able to satisfy the production of many minerals needed for electric cars.

Decarbonisation is spoken of as a stimulus to the electrical impulse, but many of the calculations made indicate that the CO2 emissions of the electric car in its life would only be 17-30% less than those of the fossil car. Nobody knows what the future means, but it is clear that there will be far less cars. In the interview that ARGIA had with the geologist Antonio Aretxabala after the pandemic said: “Only one in 500 people who currently have a car will have it in the future.”