The new road tax: more climate protection or tax reduction programme?

On 1 July 2009 the new German road tax will take effect. The taxation of new vehicles will be based partly on the engine volume of the vehicles and partly on carbon dioxide emissions. How do critics view the reform? According to Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, Center Automotive Research (CAR), University of Duisburg-Essen, the reform fails to meet "all the targets that were set". The tax cements the existing standards, does not provide any incentives for the development of petrol-saving technologies and is unintelligible. For Ansgar Belke, University of Duisburg-Essen, the road tax reform is a step in the right direction since it includes stimuli to purchase a new vehicle with low emissions. However, the engine volume component reduces this effect. In his opinion it would have been better for climate protection, but not politically realisable, to have transferred the road tax to the energy tax. Also the road tax model has no economic steering effect, because it is still much too complicated. Winfried Hermann, Green parliamentary party, sees "much car promotion and little climate protection" in the new law. And for Jürgen Resch, Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V., the lack of tax incentives for low-carbon vehicles as well as "lowest taxation, by European standards, on climate-killer cars" are the greatest problems of the law. Here Germany has backed away from providing impulses for the development of particularly efficient engines.