German lawnmower masculinity saved at the last minute

A proposed new law could have seen many Germans with ride-on lawnmowers having to get road vehicle insurance or face up to a year in prison. In the event, the bill was prevented from being signed into law at the last minute, and the government is going to have to do exactly what they were told they would have to do.

Chapters:
00:00 Good news!
00:35 The law
01:48 The insurers’ response
02:49 The government tries anyway
03:53 The aftermath

Music:
“Hot Swing”
by Kevin MacLeod https://incompetech.com/
Creative Commons Attribution licence

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Good news for owners of ride-on lawnmowers in Germany: you won’t have to get car insurance after all, after the government failed to get the necessary legislation passed. And yes — I’m back! I mean, I haven’t been anywhere, but as those who saw my last video know, I’ve been busy with this creature.

And she’s doing well, thank you for asking. Anyway: ride-on lawnmowers, the must-have for the German rural alpha male, along with chainsaws and, of course, leaf-blowers. Because nothing proves your masculinity more than owning unnecessarily loud machines. For a while, it looked as if people who owned and used ride-on lawnmowers

Might have to get insurance, which would be expensive and bureaucratic. Now, this law didn’t specifically target lawnmowers: rather, it was aimed at removing an exception to the rules on vehicle insurance and to avoid a fine for failing to implement an EU directive.

This exception is for self-propelled machines with a top speed of no more than 20 km/h. And this description fits not just ride-on mowers, but things like, for example, forklift trucks. So long as these machines remain on private property, there’s no issue. But often they don’t.

For example, there might be a public road dividing two parts of a factory or a farm. Or a construction company might bring a digger on a trailer that it parks on the road — and now it has to offload the digger. Or a mower turning at the edge of a lawn

Might, for a few seconds at a time, stray onto public property, or a neighbour might borrow it. Under the proposed new law, if the machine wasn’t insured the owner could have faced a fine or up to a year in prison.

Now, you might think the insurance companies would have been in favour of just such a law: I mean, why wouldn’t they want more customers? But… they weren’t, which makes me wonder if their CEOs all have ride-on mowers. In any case, they pointed out that traffic accidents involving these machines are so rare,

That it’s simply not worth the extra administrative headaches. For example, a spokesman for one company said that it would cost them a ridiculous amount of money simply to inform all of their clients of their new responsibilities. There is another possibility.

Since the mid-1950s, German car insurance companies have been paying into a special fund used to pay for damages that aren’t, or can’t be, covered by a specific insurance company. This is often used, for example, in hit-and-run cases; but there’s no reason it couldn’t also be used

If, say, a lawnmower knocks a cyclist off his bike. In fact, the EU directive explicitly allows this option. The government had rejected the idea, however, on the grounds that it would be unfair to expect car drivers to effectively pay for all accidents caused by lawnmowers even if they don’t actually own a lawnmower.

I have a range of responses to that, from: “Well, that’s basically how insurance works,” to: “Isn’t it likewise unfair to force all households to pay the radio and TV fee even if they never consume content from the public broadcasters?” Nevertheless, the draft legislation was passed by the Bundestag last December.

“Oh, but Andrew,” you might be saying, “didn’t you say the law wasn’t passed?” Yes — but after it was passed by the Bundestag, it had to be approved by the Bundesrat, which is made up of delegates from each of the 16 states. And the Bundesrat didn’t approve it.

This left the federal government with a couple of options, and it went for the convening of an arbitration committee, to try to find a compromise that both sides can live with. And in this case the arbitration committee has reported that this attempt has failed,

And so the legislation is not going to be passed after all. A big sigh of relief, then, for all those German men who can’t afford sports cars. It’s also a small victory for the CDU, the main opposition party, which had opposed the legislation on the grounds that it was just incredibly bureaucratic.

Meanwhile, the government has just spent months trying to push something through against the advice of the insurance companies, and is now having to do exactly what the insurance companies had suggested in the first place, which is simply to let this fund deal with the tiny number of claims.

Of course, for me the most remarkable thing is that this is Germany, a country where everyone has as many insurance policies as they can afford. And yet in this case even the insurance companies were saying: “This is a step too far.”