Σύμφωνα με ρεπορτάζ
των New York Times από την Αθήνα, πολλοί ιδιοκτήτες αυτοκινήτων αφήνουν τα αυτοκίνητα τους να
σκουριάζουν λόγω των δυσκολιών.
Παρομοιάζει την Ελλάδα ως "απέραντο νεκροταφείο εγκαταλελειμμένων αυτοκινήτων" και αναφέρεται στις επιστροφές
πινακίδων, για τις οποίες η κυβέρνηση δεν έχει καταφέρει να δώσει ένα ακριβές νούμερο
αλλά και στα ανασφάλιστα οχήματα, τα οποία το ρεπορτάζ υπολογίζει γύρω στα 800.000.
Hard Times Leave Some Greek Car Owners With Nothing but Rust
By SUZANNE DALEY, FEB. 19, 2014
ATHENS — No longer able to pay for gas, Giannis Zgourakis parked his
prized BMW on the street near his home and turned to a motorcycle. That was
more than a year ago. Now, the car sits there a forlorn wreck, its battery
dead, its tires ruined.
Mr. Zgourakis’s car is hardly the only one out there, though. Walk the
streets of most residential neighborhoods in Athens, and it is easy to find
parked cars, some late-model and under plastic covers, missing license plates
and unattended.
Greeks have long had a love affair with cars, buying more of them per
capita than many of their European neighbors. But these days, the country has
become a vast graveyard of abandoned automobiles, one more measure of hard
times.
In the last few days of 2013, so many people lined up to turn in their
license plates in advance of a new tax on luxury cars that the government
allowed the deadline to stretch into the new year, though officials have been
unable to provide figures on how many plates were collected in 2013. Between
November and January alone, about half of Greece’s districts collected roughly
130,000 license plates, according to Nikolaos Nikolopoulos, a member of
Parliament who has been pressing the government for a more precise accounting.
Many gave up their plates with honest resignation, like Mr. Zgourakis,
36, who hopes to rescue his BMW sometime in the future when he will have more
money. “I like to think that it is just sleeping,” he says.
But others keep driving, turning to counterfeit license plates or going
without plates and skulking around back streets. Some do this out of need. But
not all. A few months ago, the traffic police caught a former transportation
minister driving his luxury sport utility vehicle through a stop sign in the
seaside town of Loutsa outside of Athens.
It turned out that the former minister, Michalis Liapis, was driving
with fake plates and no insurance, which infuriated many struggling Greeks.
“I am a pensioner, and I, too, have been affected by the crisis,” he
told reporters on the way to the prosecutor’s office, prompting various news
organizations to begin calculating Mr. Liapis’s net worth, which appears
substantial. A mock “Free Liapis” Twitter campaign sprang up, and the former
minister was jeered as he came to court in December.
Others, however, saw good news in the mere fact of Mr. Liapis’s arrest.
“It is a sign that things are changing,” said Spiros Poulimenos, 62, a recently
retired teacher who was taking in the sun in the working-class Keramikos
neighborhood of Athens. “In the old days, the police would never have touched
an official like that.”
Mr. Poulimenos was sitting in front of a boarded-up store, a late-model
Porsche without plates parked at the curb in front of him. “There was a lady
who parked it here this morning and took the subway,” he said with a shrug.
“Does this shock you? I know people driving around with fake plates. Everybody
does.”
Government officials say they are trying to crack down on unregistered
cars, and even more on people who register their cars but fail to get
insurance, another way of saving money. But a new computer system that would
make crosschecks possible is not up and running yet.
Traffic officials say that 74,081 violations were issued regarding
uninsured vehicles last year, up from 72,930 the year before. Earlier figures
are not available, and the department does not keep track of the number of
vehicles stopped with counterfeit plates.
But leaked reports of a government survey indicate that as many as
800,000 cars are uninsured. Greeks have always cheated on insurance, experts
say. But in the past, their uninsured vehicles were mostly a second or third
car stashed away in a country village and rarely used.
Nowadays “we fear this is also true for their primary vehicle,” says
Konstantinos Bertsias, a spokesman for the Hellenic Association of Insurance
Companies.
Emmanuel Koutsikos, a car insurance broker in Athens, says his business
has declined 7 to 10 percent every year since 2010. Recently, he said, one
wealthy client canceled the insurance on five vehicles. He told Mr. Koutsikos
that he had a choice: He could keep the cars and fire 22 employees or get rid
of the cars and fire only 20.
“What can you possibly say to that?” Mr. Koutsikos said with a sigh.
Sagging tires indicate that most of the unregistered cars never move.
Mr. Zgourakis, who owns a solar panel installation company that is not doing
much business these days, says that watching his car rot on the street has been
hard. But he does not have the money to store or maintain it.
“I just didn’t need it anymore,” he said. “When we were installing, I
needed the car to carry equipment. But now, since the business is only
maintenance work, it is easy to carry a few tools on the motorcycle. It’s like
20 years ago. When I need a car now, I borrow my father’s.”
He does walk by his car once in a while to make sure that the police
have not slapped a notice on his windshield warning that the vehicle is about
to be towed. That has not happened yet, perhaps not surprisingly since budget
cuts have left most ministries struggling just to take care of immediate needs.
(Athens, for instance, recently laid off its entire police force, deciding to
rely on the national police.)
Leaving a car parked for a long period of time in a place like Athens is
likely to cause all kinds of damage to it, experts say. In the summer, when
temperatures soar, the air inside a car gets even hotter, melting all the
rubber caulking around the windows, for instance.
But selling a car here these days is not easy, and even people with
expensive models would have to accept low prices because of the new taxes that
can be as high as $7,700 a year for cars with very large engines.
Some Greek car dealers, however, have seen an opportunity. Instead of
importing such cars, they now do the reverse, shipping used luxury cars out of
the country to Germany and Saudi Arabia, according to George Pappas, a
spokesman for Sarakakis, one of the largest car dealerships in Athens.
Before the economic crisis, Mr. Pappas said, about 280,000 cars were
sold in Greece every year. Last year, that number dropped to 59,000. And people
were interested only in cheaper models. Ninety percent of the cars sold were
less than $33,000, he said.
“We used to have the second-highest ratio of Porsche Cayennes per capita
in Europe,” Mr. Pappas said. “Now you never even see any of those cars.”
ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ - ΔΕΙΤΕ ΑΚΟΜΗ
VIDEO.EURONEWS.Οι
Έλληνες καταθέτουν πινακίδες, λόγω λιτότητας.
“Η Ελλάδα έχει τα
υψηλότερα τέλη κυκλοφορίας στην Ευρώπη”. Συγκριτικές τιμές.
