Climate change, dwindling oil reserves, crises in the financial and automotive industries, coupled with new technological developments in drive and battery technology – all this is giving a 100-year old topic a whole new meaning: the electric car. This vision of electric mobility come about as the result of the convergence of a number of factors: More and more people want to be individually mobile, while at the same time oil reserves are becoming more scarce and climate change has led to much more stringent CO₂ emission limits. Raw materials must therefore be utilized more efficiently and the proportion of renewable energies must be increased – this can only happen if electricity produced by environmentally friendly means becomes an omnipresent power source. Researchers at Siemens are therefore studying the productivity chain of electromobility comprehensively: The requirements of the electric car, electric drive and power recovery have been considered to the same extent as the design of the infrastructure (power generation and distribution, traffic and power management, intelligent processes for measuring and billing power consumption, power electronics, software and sensors). Working with collaboration with Ruf Automobile GmbH, the first prototype of an electric sports car – the eRuf Greenster – has already been developed.