A former boss of Opel criticizes the German car industry

reFormer Opel boss Karl-Thomas Neumann sees the German car industry in a bad position to spark a shift towards electric mobility. The leaders of the German industry can not openly say that the future is electric, said the head of the Evelozcity electric start-up company in California at a conference of the Frankfurt Mobility Center HOLM.

Auto CEOs are responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and injections of billions in existing plants, Neumann said. "It's very, very difficult to be very efficient all day and continue to run your old business with ambition and become a startup entrepreneur at five in the evening."

Neumann recommends companies create new companies and brands by strictly separating themselves from "old" companies. Resources should be deployed in a start-up context to help those who have destroyed previous activities. "But I can not see it anywhere, in fact it would disrupt and eventually completely disbademble the existing industry," Neumann said. For him, there is no doubt that electronic mobility will be a decisive step forward. Evelozcity wants to propose, according to his information, in 2021, an electric car initially in Greater Los Angeles.