Thought #423: The “Electric Mobility Cake” Lie—Why VW’s Drivetrain Shift Is Plundering Our Planet

Watching the ZDF talk show Markus Lanz on the crisis and restructuring at Volkswagen offers a textbook example of how blind our public debates have become to the physical realities of our planet. As the discussion turns to looming job cuts, an expert with a background in Sinology and business administration explains that China prepared for electric mobility ten to fifteen years ago while VW was asleep at the wheel – and then a telling image slips out: the Chinese market, she says, is a huge “electric mobility cake”, and now other players want their slice of it, too.

It is alarming how unquestioningly such business-school narratives are reproduced on public broadcasting. Because anyone who looks more closely will spot two fundamental errors of thinking in this language – errors that drive us ever deeper into the ecological and social crisis.

1. “Stand-mobiles” instead of automobiles: the fairy tale of electric mobility

The very term electric mobility is a linguistic smokescreen. This industrial model is not about real mobility, but about a gigantic depletion of natural resources for motorised private transport.

No private car delivers real mobility for the system as a whole, because the vast majority of these multi-tonne machines do not move at all for more than 90 per cent of the time. They are not vehicles but real estate on wheels – “stand-mobiles”. They sit around, block valuable urban living space and demand a gigantic infrastructure that is anything but green:

• Even the sleekest AI-controlled electric cars do not float above green meadows. They need sealed land, concrete and asphalt – and asphalt is made directly from crude oil.
• They require a vast network of charging stations, power lines and battery plants, which in turn depend on raw materials that are becoming scarcer and scarcer worldwide.

If you merely swap a combustion engine for a 500-kilo battery while leaving the concept of the two-tonne private tank untouched, you are not driving a transport transition – you are destroying resources with a different plug.

2. Why plunder is not a “cake”

Even more cynical is the typical business-school metaphor of the “market as a giant cake” that corporations carve up among themselves. A real cake is made of ingredients such as flour, water and fruit – in other words, of resources that can grow back every year under sustainable farming.

What boardrooms and talk shows call the “market cake” is in truth the sell-off of our finite natural capital:

• It is about groundwater that evaporates during lithium mining in arid regions.
• It is about rare earths, copper, cobalt, nickel and silicon, torn from the Earth’s crust at enormous energy cost.

These resources belong to no car company and no stock market – they belong to all of us and to every living being on this planet that depends on intact ecosystems to survive. Not a single aspect of so-called electric mobility in its current form is sustainable.

3. The failure of the media bubble

It is irresponsible that a public broadcaster like ZDF pays presenters such as Markus Lanz fees running into the millions, so that evening after evening the very growth and market fairy tales that manoeuvred us into this dead end in the first place can be repeated unfiltered.

Anyone who trivialises the destruction of the foundations of our lives as an appetising “cake” and tunes out critical questions about resource consumption is not only fuelling global species extinction, but also deepening social discontent, the gap between rich and poor and the distribution conflicts of our time. We do not need debates about how German corporations can build ever more raw materials into ever more cars even faster – we need the courage to finally think of mobility beyond the private ownership of sheet metal.