For generations, Germany's roads were quietly funded by the ritual of filling a tank — a fiscal compact between driver and state embedded in every liter of gasoline. Now, as electric vehicles multiply faster than policy can adapt, that compact is dissolving, and Berlin faces a structural reckoning: the infrastructure that binds the nation together can no longer be paid for by the fuels that once powered it. The question is not whether the funding model must change, but whether Germany will choose that change deliberately or have it forced upon them.