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German industrial output falls to 2005 levels as auto sector craters
- pretzelhands 1y agohttps://archive.ph/PHphs https://archive.ph/PHphs
- junaru 1y ago> as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is set to meet the bosses of the country’s carmakers on Thursday in Berlin to discuss the woes of the struggling sector. Consumers will definitely profit from that, there's no way they will tax Chinese imports even more, no way i tell's ya!
- LunaSea 1y agoThey will ask the EU to remove environmental protections like the end of new gas / diesel cars by 2035.
- raverbashing 1y agoYeah meanwhile China installs record breaking amounts of Solar and Nuclear
- wongarsu 1y agoand record breaking amounts of coal, to be fair. Their energy mix doesn't look all that great
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoGermany (and the EU generally) import 98% of their oil-derived products.. Before sanctions the leading import source was Russia. EVs could have helped a lot more as China has demonstrated but people like the brum-brum noise and all the right-wing parties with mysterious ties to Russia and other fossil fuel producers didn't think they'd work for some reason.
- LunaSea 1y agoBeyond the points you made about petrol cars, the price is also a big factor. In the EU, car companies only sell large (and very expensive) SUVs. If you want to have a fully electric car on top of that, the bill will be far too high for most people. This is also why the EU is seeing a switch where people can't buy their cars anymore and have to lease them or hope their employer will do it for them as part of a company car package.
- ben_w 1y ago> In the EU, car companies only sell large (and very expensive) SUVs. News to me. Did you mean in the US? Or did you mean the most famous German brands like BMW and Audi? For the EU as a whole, there's e.g. Dacia which is Romanian and therefore EU: https://shop.dacia.de/offer/257/235286/0/0 https://shop.dacia.de/offer/257/235286/0/0 this is clearly neither an SUV, nor particularly expensive — even 18 years ago I was seeing things for about this price new, and there's been a lot of inflation since then.
- MaxPock 1y ago[flagged]
- piva00 1y agoI didn't know it was in the liberal agenda to give automanufacturers protectionist mechanisms against competitors making products more aligned with customer demand to artificially prop up a major industry sector. What kind of liberal are you talking about though? The American version or the European one? They mean very different things.
- detaro 1y agoGermanys economic policies really have nothing to do with "liberal agenda".
- immibis 1y agoI guess they're talking about neoliberal, which is completely different from liberal (but overlaps - both liberals and conservatives are neoliberal; actual leftists aren't)
- this_user 1y agoThe problem are leftist policies that have completely destroyed any economic dynamism and that have created such high tax burdens that working full-time and trying to advance in your career is basically not worth it for many professionals. I know a lot of people who have either left the country or who have switched to part-time, because doing four days a week gives you 50% more weekend, but only costs you a little bit of money if you are reasonably well paid. If anything, we need more economically liberal policies, because those actually do stimulate innovation and growth. Instead, leftists are completely focused on how they can extract even more money from the productive part of the population to give to the unproductive.
- piva00 1y agoThat doesn't explain how Denmark and Sweden can have quite high economic dynamism while the tax burden is higher than Germany. It's not that simple, it's never that simple...
- mytailorisrich 1y agoThe trend is fairly consistent since 2018, though, according to the graph in the article.
- belter 1y agoThey need their own AI bubble... https://x.com/jasonfurman/status/1971995367202775284 https://x.com/jasonfurman/status/1971995367202775284
- lifestyleguru 1y agoTheir public media broadcaster has ever increasing and absurd budget, these temporary bubbles are nothing in comparison.
- bootsmann 1y agoTheir _two_ public media broadcasters.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoSo now they are broadcasting TWO competing series about mountain doctor driving Mercedes and investigating that most rare disease?!
- johannes1234321 1y agoThe number you are looking for is 10. ARD is made out of 9 different stations, which each has its own oversight based on the state they are from. While there are valid areas of criticism, they are overall quite good. (And then two more, Deutschlandradio and Deutsche Welle)
- luxurytent 1y agoWhy is output falling? Are there other countries taking the market share? Or is there more to it?
- icetank 1y agoYes. German car makers have been very dependent on the Chinese market to sell their cars too. Now that China is pushing for domestic electric vehicles, German car makers are falling behind.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoOther countries like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia "diversified" by pushing into German automotive supply chain and are sinking along Germany. German automotive was so self confident still 15 years ago that you can see this confidence in drivers of their cars until today on roads worldwide.
- ifwinterco 1y agoA lot of the industrial economy was based on cheap pipeline gas from Russia and there have been some issues with that policy recently
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago[flagged]
- NicoJuicy 1y agoYou're totally forgetting Putin's imperialistic motives. Proof: Finland and Sweden joined NATO and Putin didn't care.
- bootsmann 1y ago> but after multiple warnings and casus belli about Ukraine not flirting with NATO Putin invaded in 2014 after Ukraine deposed of their dictator over his failure to commit to EU alignment, the Nato stuff is a post-hoc excuse developed by the Russian government. This isn't about Nato it's about Putin being afraid of having working democracies next door.
- niffydroid 1y agoBut also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
- maerch 1y agoExactly this. I thought about getting a T7, but the price is just ridiculous. And it’s not even like you’re paying for quality, there are so many complaints about both minor and major issues.
- adamors 1y agoI've bought a Skoda after owning VW in the past and couldn't be happier. 80% (probably 95% for the things I actually care about) of what VW offers for almost 50% less.
- niffydroid 1y agoThat's different though. Skoda Seat etc you know is VW maybe not the latest generation or iteration but still the base is a VW
- kome 1y agoCutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households).
- yread 1y agoWait until you hear about closing of the Dutch gas fields. 40 bcm3 ~15% of EU gas consumption closed due to cracks in 5000 houses in Groningen.
- smallstepforman 1y agoRising energy costs and green policies make European manufacturing non-competitive. Politicians ruining their countries.
- adamors 1y agoIt's not about green policies, it's about Germany getting rid of its nuclear reactors after Fukushima and getting addicted to cheap Russian gas. Now that the latter is verboten their entire industry is in shambles. This is all Merkel giving in to populists instead of listening to scientists and trying to play nice with Putin. > Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende. Thus, Germany should have adopted an energy policy based on keeping and expanding nuclear power. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Cutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households) Brussels checkmated itself trying to maintain industrial power while appeasing its anti-nuke reactionaries. Europe cedes sovereignty with gas. (Whether it buys from America or Russia isn’t structurally relevant. Militarily the distant and rich master is obviously preferable.) The answers are solar, wind and nuclear. Germany is singularly responsible for fucking up the last, and with its Russian gas appeasement, undermining the former.
- alecco 1y agoMost of it caused by "Mama Merkel": * She inherited a booming economy with very good reforms and plenty of budget surplus * Let infrastructure to rot * Energy production cratered and shifted to Russian gas dependency (high profile politicians related) showering Putin with billions every year * Then tricking Puting to a peace agreement to quietly "rearm" Ukraine to prepare for war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements) * Nuclear reactor dismantling * Poisoned relationships with peripheral EU countries by forcing her brand of politics * Persecution of opposition, branding "far right" anything right of center * Destroying German identity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8PNgxbTE0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8PNgxbTE0o) * Pushing police state and against free speech * Failing upwards her protégé von der Leyen to the top of the EU, an incompetent, and unelected nepo-baby * Forcing Germany and the EU to take in tens of millions (at least) of "refugees" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_schaffen_das https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_schaffen_das ("we can take them", open doors, family "reunification", etc) * Anti family hard-line feminist TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever. Sure, not everything she did was bad. But her legacy is now Germany's nightmare. And EU's, too. Untangling this mess will be very difficult.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoA failed attempt at Catherine the Great II. I don't understand how everyone could be so blind in regards of relations of top leaders with Russia, like Merkel and Schroeder.
- jansan 1y agoAlso, she did not initiate a single structural reform in her 16 years of being chancellor. The public sector has become a huge burden for our country. It is just too expensive and just like AI is currently propping up the US economy, the growing public sector is what keeps Germany's economy afloat.
- kome 1y ago"TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever." to be honest, this is what enrages me. I feel like I was in a madhouse; the mass media were pushing an image of Merkel as the only adult in the room and the patron saint of liberalism. I saw, live, how she mismanaged the Eurocrisis, turning a banking crisis into a humanitarian crisis, and how her reaction to the invasion of Crimea was meek. but if you dared to say something about this, you were seen as a dangerous communist or worse. I hated her flawed politics for 15 years. But now, surprisingly, I kind of miss her. not because she was good; she was terrible as i said, but the new leadership, especially in Germany, is far worse: Friedrich Merz is a zero, and von der Leyen seems utterly retarded, and i don't mean it in a mocking way, but literally: they are always choosing the worst option for Europe at every step. dark clouds over europe... but mostly, of our own making.
- mamonster 1y agoGiven that France is also starting to suffer badly, one thing to watch is more and more people demanding a cut to EU budget contributions from these countries. Its like 40 billion EUR worth of net transfers. Could make for explosive politics.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ben_w 1y agoMuch to my annoyance, despite this being practically a rounding error (like, 1% or so of GDP), the EU budget contributions absolutely did have this effect in the UK.
- mamonster 1y agoWell, the thing is: French budget reforms that the government wants to do is 40 billion EUR, their net contribution is 10 billion. Just going to neutral gets you a 4th of the way there without touching your internal social security. If you cancel contributions that's 25 billion, that's 60% of the way there. Not saying I agree but this sort of argument will be impossible to counter for centrists with the mounting populist backdrop.
- holowoodman 1y agoBeing the French, their tactics will rather be what it always has been: Not reduce their contribution, but vastly increase their received subsidies from the EU. That way, they can let the EU subsidize what they can no longer afford to pay for with their own money. The EU will go along with this because this is the accepted MO of France's EU contributions since forever, and increased spending towards France will increase the EU's overall budget and therefore importance. The only unhappy member states will be Germany and a few unimportant small payer states. But Germany has always gone along with those shenanigans, so no reason to think they won't happily open their wallet again...
- qcnguy 1y ago
- zerof1l 1y agoGermany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable. For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless bureaucratic structures that just keep on growing.
- jansan 1y agoWhat metrics are you using to label it as non-competitive?
- tacker2000 1y agoCheap russian gas is gone, so now all industry sectors (not only cars) are not as competetive as before. They are now downsizing, etc in order to save themselves.
- jansan 1y agoDo you know that German car manufacturers have factories worldwide (except Porsche)? And they are still quite profitable.
- tacker2000 1y agoSure but we are talking about german industrial output, and one of the main reasons for problems here is the absence of the cheap energy that was available until the russian invasion of ukraine.
- throwaway_20357 1y agoEnergy prices? Unit labour costs? Pisa Scores? VC Investments as percentage of GDP? Number of IPOs? Taxation of Income? Punctuality of public transport?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lossolo 1y agoWhile it may not be intuitive, exports are about 20% of GDP in China and about 42% in Germany so roughly twice as high in Germany. That makes Germany more exposed to global trade disruptions and geopolitical shifts.
- DataDaemon 1y agoRead history what will happen when Germany enters depression.
- Zufriedenheit 1y agoA story from a german town: We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore. It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess. The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down. But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit. They have finally started construction 5 years ago and the costs have doubled multiple times and are now in the hundreds of millions. They say that hopefully in another 5 years from now they might be finished with construction. For all those years the locals have to take a long detour because the bridge can't be used. I have recently read how in china they finished the tallest bridge of the world in a 3 year construction and the cost was less than our little bridge here. After hearing about this i realized how doomed we are. We have regulated our selfs into a total standstill. I can understand if we are maybe 10-30% slower due to better environmental protection, but if me are slower and more expensive by a factor 10, then we are just not competitive at all. This reads like satire but it is actually happening.
- throwaway_20357 1y agoIt seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.
- holowoodman 1y agoThe lack of can-do-attitude can be explained by regulations, imho. After you've seen the first few trivial things take ages because somebody has yet to stamp form 23b in triplicate and hand in 1k pages of environmental impact assessment, noise studies and socio-economic impact predictions, you loose the belief that you can do anything here. After you've been stonewalled by a few bureaucrats over a missing comma in their particular interpretation of subsection b12 subparagraph d footnote 11, you start going about your days looking for excuses not do to any work as well. After several people have cited "liability" and "legal risk" as arguments against babysitting their neighours cat for a day, you might start fearing that nebulous liability thing yourself. The whole culture is poisoned by regulations imho.
- manyaoman 1y agoStrange considering that Germany's PMI (Purchasing managers' index) has been recovering this year: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/manufacturing-pmi https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/manufacturing-pmi
- palmotea 1y ago> But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford? Do you have more details? From what I gather as an American from 5 minutes of Googling is that Ford sells a van in Europe that's a re-badged VW T7, but it's not like VW is selling Ford stuff.
- throwaway_20357 1y agoAs far as I understand, the VW Amarok is based on the Ford Ranger, the VW T7 Transporter (their Commercial vehicle) is based on the Ford Transit Custom. The T7 Multivan and California are still built on their own VW platform.
- niffydroid 1y agoSorry, the T7 is actually the multi van now, which is VW based The old transporter and panels vans were called T6 and this is where confusion lies. None the less, the Transporter etc are Fords. Re T naming convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter_(2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter_(2024) Straight up based on the ford platform Vw Transporter Panel Van £38,620 Ford Ford Transit® Custom £33,350