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What would happen if all cars in Germany were electric?

Germany has around 46 million cars on the streets. These cars drive, on average, 14.000 km each year (2016 statistics). It doesn't look much but remember that this is the average. A sales representative may drive even over 100k per year while an retired person will make far less kilometers.

Doing the math, it results that all the cars in Germany drive, each year, around 640 bn kilometers. That's a lot!

What would be the energy consumption if all these cars were electric?

If we use an average power consumption of 18 kWh/100 km (which is quite low)  it results that, in order to drive all this distance, there is a need of aprox. 115 Terrawatt-hours (TWh) each year.

The total yearly electricity production in Germany is aprox. 600 Terrawatt-hours (TWh). This means that the power production should increase by 20% in order to cope with the demand coming only from passenger cars. We didn't count here the road transport industry.

Today, only 52% of the 569 TWh which are consumed annually, are coming from clean sources (including nuclear as it has zero CO2 emmisions).

With the current technology, the switch to electric vehicles will come with serious challenges in terms of infrastructure and power production mix.