The truth: The frontally undamaged one

Blessed, oh blessed, the rattling, rattling sixties and seventies! The motorcycles roared innocently, the trucks hummed, the car engines howled, the brakes squealed in front of the children hopping around on the street or just above them, but there were enough of them!

Federal Transport Minister Georg Leber had promised all Germans that they would be able to find and access a motorway entrance 500 meters from home. Obtaining a driving license was a fundamental right in those car-loving times, and human and civil rights also applied to automobiles.

A people on wheels! There was already a discussion in politics as to whether marriage with a vehicle could be legally protected and sanctioned by the church - that's when the environment gave in. The hollow air had become cloudy from the exhaust gases, the forest was rotten, instead the spirit of the times was turning green!

Steffen Bilger, who took his first breath too late, at the end of the seventies, only knows paradise from the myths and legends that his parents and grandparents told and exaggerated. But they awakened a longing for a world in which the cars and the people in them were happy. In which immaculate streets sparkled in the sun, the railway in the background adorned the idyll and cyclists were just a side dish in the jam-packed rush hour traffic!

Today, keyword 2026, the roads are full of holes, the rails are bulging, but the cycle paths are meters wide; The rivers and canals for inland shipping have been emaciated, many train stations are wrapped in cobwebs, and countless parking spaces in the city centers have been wiped out! But if mobility is a human right, as the UN says: then it also applies to vehicles, then it also applies to a BMW M760e xDrive hybrid and its guardian, then it also applies to Steffen Bilger.

Constructed where Mercedes-Benz and Porsche were born before him, in Baden-Württemberg, the transport minister rolled off the assembly line in Schongau on February 16, 1979. As early as 1996 he turned right into the CDU; Equipped with the TÜV seal from Backnanger's Max-Born-Gymnasium, he went to study law, then worked at a law firm with a focus on traffic and accident law and finally, in 2009, with a parking ticket purchased directly in the Ludwigsburg constituency, he steered his way into the Bundestag, where he immediately found a gap in the traffic committee.

It could have been parked there and mothballed like most of the others, but Bilger stepped on the gas loudly, for example when a car toll was supposed to suck out the money from non-German drivers. Unlike the then Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer, he escaped without criminal justice after the European Court of Justice scrapped the project.

The taxpayer was stuck with 270 million euros in debt - a pittance compared to the dinosaur-sized billions that another construction site beloved by Bilger will cost, the giant Stuttgart 21 station - short for: completion in 2100.

But don't tell anyone that Bilger doesn't look at money if it's not his own! He proved that he can be a saver at the CDU federal party conference in 2018 when he introduced the proposal to revoke the non-profit status of the German environmental aid organization DUH.

Enough! There are also positive things, since Bilger as Federal Highway Master, or more precisely: as Federal Transport Minister, he ensures that no speed limit continues to blight the highways and that no combustion engine shutdown leads to the combustion engine being phased out - both of which would affect the car, the German's often only but favorite child!

But Bilger also thinks ahead, where groundbreaking projects are planned at top speed. Air taxis for pilot-free air traffic and driving without a driver or vehicle are on the agenda, as is the Atlantic Tunnel, designed 100 years ago by Bernhard Kellermann in the novel “The Tunnel”, which is now to be opened not only to rail but also to car traffic - and perhaps even to ships!

On the other hand, the proposed highways to the moon and Mars still seem utopian; Because according to the renewed federal highway plan, work is already underway on the W1 space bypass road with an integrated rail line on the median strip for those in a hurry.

Not to be forgotten: In view of climate change, a new VW is being produced for earth-bound individual transport, the people's watercraft affordable for every middle budget; for the poor and unemployed people's snorkel.

The projects are financed according to the old recipe in a public-private partnership: the state advances, the private sector reaps the rewards. Similar to back then - Georg Leber would be spinning in his grave, at an exciting 6,000 revolutions per minute!