ZAGREB, April 30, 2019 – Electric, shared and autonomous – that is the future of cars and the car industry in decades to come, but the question is whether Croatia will be bypassed by an investment wave and whether we will respond on time, said Rimac Automobili owner Mate Rimac at the Croatia E-Mobility Forum, organised by the Jutarnji List daily and the American Chamber of Commerce in Zagreb on Tuesday.
“The future will bring radical changes in the car industry as early as the next 20 years. Cars will be used when necessary, their users will not be their owners, and future generations will probably not even learn how to drive. Close to 80% of cars will be autonomous by 2030 and all cars will be connected to the Internet. Newly-registered electric cars now account for 2% of all cars in Europe, and by 2030 they will account for one-third of all cars, while as many as 90% will be shared by 2030,” he said.
Rimac noted that over the past decades the automobile industry had spread across the ‘new Europe’, the only exception being Croatia.
As a result, Croatia has less than one billion dollars in revenue from the car industry while, for example, the Czech Republic, has 41 billion, he said.
He said that his research showed that contributions on high salaries, such as those in his company, were the highest in Europe, which drives investors away.
“Workers who are paid well bring new value and better jobs for others. Croatia should be a place that will attract the most innovative companies and engineers. The state should decide which investor it wants to attract and proactively work on that,” he said.
The head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Croatia, Andrea Doko Jelušić, said that there were an estimated 3.1 million electric vehicles on roads in the world.
She said that the expansion of e-mobility faced three challenges that had to be dealt with: the range of vehicles, infrastructure, and the price, which is defined by expensive batteries.
The head of the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund, Dubravko Ponoš, said that this year subsidies for electric vehicles and bicycles amounted to 40 million kuna.
Subsidies will be allocated in the years to come as well, and there will no longer be interruptions in their allocation, he said, noting that the amount of subsidies granted by the Fund was nonetheless ten times smaller than the interest in them.
More news about Mate Rimac can be found in the Business section.
