11 ms·

The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future

248 points by mariuz 7mo ago

dinkblam 7mo ago
everything in germany's economy is going downhill, the troubles in their car industry is just one symptom (but not the cause)
- gigatree 7mo ago
  Uh oh
  - oytis 7mo ago
    Do not worry, the army is going downhill too
- rokhayakebe 7mo ago
  What is the cause?
  - lm28469 7mo ago
    imho there are multiple, starting with the pension and healthcare system which are not sustainable with the current demography trend, which pushed them into going all in with immigration, which fractured whatever was left of german identity (which was arguably already wiped out after ww2 and the cold war). Taxes are going up, retirement age is increasing, pensions are decreasing, public services are getting worse year after year, there is nothing young people can focus on, nothing they can expect to have better than their parents or grand parents, most will never own their place. The self sabotage of the energy sector certainly didn't help. No long term vision + no clear way to improvement + no sense of appartenance = game over, and this is hitting most of the west at once, it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles.
    - oytis 7mo ago
      > it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles Lots of real problems listed, but such a non-sequitur conclusion. US is built on these principles, China seems to be more individualistic and consumerist than Germany too. If anything, a big problem in Germany is low ambition as the societal norm. A bit of consumerism could actually help with that, as to consume you need to earn, and to earn, you need some ambition.
      - lnsru 7mo ago
        Tax system and IG Metall salary tables will kill ambition very quickly. The highest salary groups do not guarantee comfy lifestyle for the corresponding areas anymore. Giving away half of salary as mandatory insurance and paying 19% value added tax from the rest is just insulting. Don’t forget the rents in 2026. It’s again new all time high. It does not pay off to work anymore.
        oytis 7mo ago
        Yeah, to me it seems that instead of fighting individualism, Germany needs to make sure that it pays off. Higher taxes for ownership, lower taxes for income from one's work for example.
      - lm28469 7mo ago
        > US is built on these principles, And it's a complete clown show rewarding moral bankruptcy that ended up fabricating and promoting uneducated degenerates such as Trump, Hegseth, Miller, &co to the highest positions. Thanks for making my point really...
        oytis 7mo ago
        These are very different problems from what Germany has though. And it's a recent issue, while individualism is a core tenet of American culture since independence.
    - lnsru 7mo ago
- ahartmetz 7mo ago
  Where did you get that opinion? Germany is not doing great but OK in the group of Western countries, and its car industry is both very imporant and in trouble, so it's not an unreasonable opinion that things would be better without that trouble.
  - tw-20260303-001 7mo ago
    It's not. It's more like a cancer patient with an Überweisung for their first cancer screening but dragging their feet to go and do it. They know is it bad and will get worse but they're afraid of facing it.
  - Towaway69 7mo ago
    Germany has a great layer of "consultants" that fudge the books and make everything look profitable and rosy. It's the land of "Arbeitsgruppen" and "Berater" - folks that ensure things get buried and forgotten. But there is no investment in the future, no investment in infrastructure and no investment in anything creative, in fact, that's were cuts are made, in the arts and culture. Once a society can no longer afford the arts, you know there is something going wrong and Germany is going wrong. Perhaps "klagen auf hohem Niveau" (complaining from up on high) but the higher they are, the further they fall.
- lagrange77 7mo ago
  Imho, the german mentality just doesn't fit today's economy. Too risk averse, too conservative. Creativity is not really embraced. The state of the german IT sector also shows that. Most startups have nearly no moat at all and purely live off marketing with some sprinkles of corporate identity.
  - Foobar8568 7mo ago
    In Switzerland, we use a lot of German and Switzerland born products, and they mostly suck.
    - lagrange77 7mo ago
      I'm not saying there are no good products. Hetzner Cloud come into my mind for example. It's executed really well. I'm saying that the number of good software offerings is too low, to have a significant impact on the country's economy. One of the advantages Germany had though, was a somewhat good and accessible higher education system in regards of computer science. Now, with software development becoming a commodity, this advantage vanishes.
madaxe_again 7mo ago
Perfect regulatory capture is like putting a toddler in charge of your household - corporate organisms, like toddlers, do not know what is good for them, and are not willing to accept short term pain for long term gain. I see parallels with unions in the U.K. in the 70s, as they were ultimately the controlling entity of a lot of industry - and they too were unwilling to accept short term pain for long term gain, which ultimately resulted in the collapse of British manufacturing, as money that should have been reinvested in plant upgrades and technology instead disappeared into exorbitant - unfathomable by today’s standards - pension plans and pay packets. Anyway. I suppose this is just humans 101, and today it’s the German car industry insisting that eating their body weight in candy today will have no consequences tomorrow.
- pc86 7mo ago
  Unions don't exist to protect the industry or maximize industrial gain, they exist to get as much as they can for the most senior members of the union (with union leadership being at the top) and proportionally less the less senior you are. By design they are more than happy for individual companies or even large swaths of industry to disappear if it means more spoils for the senior members in the short term.
joe_mamba 7mo ago
I found a very detailed and well argumented opinion piece on X that struck really hard on this topic: https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2027625247068065864 https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2027625247068065864 Here's the plain text in case you don't want to go to X: >"I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster Europe’s answer to China is always a committee, a regulation, a 5 year strategic plan and a press conference China’s answer to anything is ship it tomorrow and figure out the rest next week one side is trying to predict the future the other side is building it live and adjusting in real time, that asymmetry alone tells you everything about who wins this century "
alephnerd 7mo ago
While Germany should invest in EVs and Green Energy, that alone isn't blocking German economic growth. Almost all German exports have seen a precipitous drop [0]. EV exports wouldn't have helped given that Germany's two largest trading partners (the US and China) both enacted trade barriers against foreign exporters. When the US enacted the IRA under Biden, a large portion of Germany Inc shifted to the US [1], but the German government and EU decided not to enact subsidies [2]. Similarly, China demanded JVs for German manufacturing companies to enter the Chinese market, which Volkswagen (with SAIC), Siemens (with SEPG), Mercedes Benz (with BAIC), and others manufacturers complied with. Germany's economy was hollowed out because Germany Inc decided to shift capacity to it's two largest unified markets. It's not like the PRC nor the US are allowing German EV exports already - for example, all of VW's ID4s sold in the US and China are being manufactured in Tennessee and Shanghai respectively. This is why the EU has been pushing for a "rules based order", becuase otherwise individual EU states lack export markets. [0] - https://oec.world/en/profile/country/deu#yearly-trade https://oec.world/en/profile/country/deu#yearly-trade [1] - https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/EconPol-PolicyReport_41_1.pdf https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/EconPol-PolicyReport_41_1.pdf [2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/02/14/biden-ira-germany-rules-out-spending-as-europe-aims-to-avoid-us-subsidy-race.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/02/14/biden-ira-germany-rules-...
newzino 7mo ago
[flagged]
paganel 7mo ago
This [1] is what really brought Germany's industry down, not the green non-sense spouted by articles like this one: > Gas prices rose to $70 per megawatt-hour in Germany — it makes it 6 times more expensive than in the US Germany was relatively fine, industrially speaking, while it still had a working relationship with Russia and especially with cheap Russian gas. It all went to the gutters when the Americans imposed their imperial will on them, on the Germans (see also the Nord Stream fuck-up), and it has been a steady downhill road for the Germans since then. To re-iterate, there's no German economic miracle that would allow them to be competitive against other indutrialised countries (such as the US) while they have to pay two or three times more for their energy inputs. [1] https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2031015804179791877 https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2031015804179791877
- miohtama 7mo ago
  Germany was also fine when they still had nuclear energy
- dgacmu 7mo ago
  What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to invade Ukraine, nor did it force Germany to respond to the Fukushima daiichi disaster by killing all of its nuclear power.
  - OgsyedIE 7mo ago
    It's a shame, too, because they are right about the hydrocarbon input price effects, but speculative in a bizarre way elsewhere. Germany had a selection of strategic hydrocarbon options in the 2000s and fumbled by picking the option that would later prove to launch revisionary wars that interrupt their export capability. Even if we lived in an alternate timeline where the US was completely supportive of the 2022 invasion at the time, Germany would still be surrounded on all sides by countries with a vested interest in pointing nuclear deterrents at Moscow and lose their energy feed in the same way.
  - nairboon 7mo ago
    > What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to invade Ukraine OP's comment doesn't state that. It refers to the US forcing Germany to stop Nord Stream.
_ink_ 7mo ago
Wow, Denmark is leading manufacturing growth and the German government is still telling us that the hourly wage is the problem.
- kaon_2 7mo ago
  Agreed. Actually - maybe no? Maybe the hourly wage is the problem. It's been too low for too long so there was no pressure to innovate. Denmark and Switzerland are big manufacturers with high wages that are continuously innovating. Maybe the Euro was a curse for Germany afteral? Without it their wages would have been higher.
  - scottyah 7mo ago
    Artificially increasing wages to get a better product is like Cargo Culting. Some people see successful companies paying their employees a ton, then assume that's what created the successful company when it's so obviously the other way around. But the politicians/union heads benefit from selling it the other way. This conversation just always gets derailed by pointing out how paying substantially below market is also bad, as if it were a counterpoint.
  - psalaun 7mo ago
    That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest". But there is nothing to invest into anymore, France's industry is dead (partly because of Germany with the Hartz agreement btw, lowering demand for italian or french goods which were already less competitive than german ones on export and domestic market because of the euro) and if they didn't care to put capital on automation when wages were high, why would they do it when work becomes cheap?
    - joe_mamba 7mo ago
      >That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest". 100% exactly the same in Austria and I can speculate Italy as well.
mentalgear 7mo ago
Germany’s powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival. Instead of investing in EV innovation to future-proof the industry, they leveraged their influence with the conservative (CDU/CSU) and free-market (FDP) government parties to weaken national and EU emission targets. This reliance on political lobbying rather than technological advancement was a fatal miscalculation: While executives spent the last decade fighting carbon taxes and stalling the EV transition, they ignored the reality of their primary export markets - most notably China where today German ICE cars are seen as obsolete - and the rest of the world rapidly pivoting to electric. By choosing payday over progress, the "autobauers" & their political helpers have left the German workforce to pay the price. The looming job losses and economic instability are the direct result of a managerial class that traded their country’s industrial crown for a final decade of bloated bonuses.
- JSR_FDED 7mo ago
  This word-for-word applies to the US car industry too. The Europeans would do well to see the current state of US car manufacturers as a cautionary tale.
- d3ckard 7mo ago
  It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future and your entire thesis depends on it to be true.
  - mentalgear 7mo ago
    Not my entire thesis: It's the content of the article and otherwise well known.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    Until recently (and probably with some pressure from VW) everything else was supposed to be phased out in Europe within a decade: https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/12/europe-shifts-into-reverse-on-eu-2035-ice-ban https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/1...
  - 7mo ago
Suckseh 7mo ago
China took over exports and manufactoring capacity 5 fold of what germany was doing in core industries: manufacturing, machine building and chemicals. Its not just innovation, we missed and our stubbornes of just keep doing what we good at, its also china catching up and steam rolling us. When I bought an EV, people around me told me the same thing and still do: they like the sound of engines, these EVs are not suitable for daily use, EVs will burn down, we hate renewable, we hate cables, we hate... To match china, we would not only need to work a lot more, we would also need to work on saturdays, break a lot of labor laws we build up, reduce salary despite working more, reduce energy costs massivly and automate as much as possible. A nitting machine from germany costs 60k. In china, with the same quality (because they catched up) is 20k. 20k! And were i'm from (bavaria) most young man want to become Mechanical engineers because of BMW and co. No one wants to do IT (lets ignore the AI elephant in the room).
- cactusplant7374 7mo ago
  Copy the model of ASML. Build something really complicated that no one else can easily copy.
  - doug_durham 7mo ago
    First what would that be? Second you can't sustain an entire country on one company
    - andsoitis 7mo ago
      It’s a model to copy. Ie move higher up the innovation chain.
      - zeroc8 7mo ago
        That's what we've been doing for a long time. But that's not possible with today's China anymore. They are as innovative as the rest, if not more so.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
mg 7mo ago
German chancellor Friedrich Merz ... lashed out at German workers to “simply do a little more,” Germany literally pays people to do nothing. A friend of mine, an engineer who works in the German car industry, recently told me that nowadays he has a lot of free time. Because the company he works for has so few orders that the company is granted "Kurzarbeitergeld" - the government pays 60% of the salary if the employees work less. That blew my mind. If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.
- niemandhier 7mo ago
  That is true for RnD not for Factory workers. Germany has quite strong workers rights, so mass layoffs are not a possible solution to safe money if facing lacking orders. Essentially companies get some of the money back they and their employees paid as taxes.
- mentalgear 7mo ago
  The problem is they don't get rid of their ICE cars any more - most of the world is transitioning to EVs and China - their previously biggest importer - has strict EV quotas and no one wants to buy German EVs that are too expensive and less capable than Chinese made EVs. Germany was ahead in EVs and solar - both industries have been cuto off by conservative/free-market ICE lobbysts and these 2 huge global markets are now dominated by China instead.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    The VW EVs aren't bad, apart from poor UX design, which they have realized.
    - atmosx 7mo ago
      Broadly speaking they're not _as far away_ from Chinese EVs as we all make it here to be. However, the problem is that the stockholders of all these companies expect 500% YoY growth which isn't sustainable. Not to mention the cost of a car has grown significantly while all German cars have degraded substantially in quality. For example, you can expect Porsche to sell FOREVER the number of cars they manage to sell in the 00s and 10s: 2000: ~54,600 (happy) 2007: ~98,600 (happy) 2019: ~280,800 2025: 280,000 (CRISIS!!!) I mean... It's a freaking sports car! Why on earth would you expect to sell more units than these?
ramboldio 7mo ago
A very key problem is the common narrative that green policies and the EU allegedly caused the downfall of the car industry (-> "Verbrennerverbot"). In reality, a way bigger impact seems to be that the Chinese govt stopped buying German cars once they could build their own (which they have been always transparent about). Unfortunately, this misdiagnosis leads to the wrong conclusion to double-down on a obsolete business model of the car industry, instead of diversifying away from it.
- Tade0 7mo ago
  This. China is a much larger economy and by far the single largest car market in the world - selling more vehicles domestically than the EU and USA combined. That being said just like Germany they're largely export-oriented and if local demand ever weakens, they'll struggle all the same.
- jansan 7mo ago
  It's both. Of course the massively shrinking share of the Chinese market is a big chunk of the problem. But the whole mindset here in Germany is completely delusional with the idea to be leaders in environmental technology and sustainability solutions. My favorite example of this delusion is Porsche who somehow thought that selling their bread-and-butter model Macan exclusively as an EV was a good idea. I still cannot understand how they arrived at this decision.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway_20357 7mo ago
  What would the appropriate strategy have been after realizing China had decided to squeeze foreign cars out of the market? The "obsolete business model" still sells many cars world-wide.
  - aurareturn 7mo ago
    Maybe recognize that China needed energy independence and that they needed to turn to EVs? Designs and sell cheap EVs in China? Tesla is a top selling car brand in China.
niemandhier 7mo ago
There is little the US could have done more to harm Europe and Germany in particular than engaging in the Iranian conflict. Qatar was supposed to be the replacement for lacking Russian deliveries. In addition the current government is pro fossile fuels, and parts of it are the same south germans that keep building natural gas power plants. Those plants play an important part in driving up electricity prices in the whole country, since the same people that insist on using natural gas also refuse to split the country into electricity price zones.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- alephnerd 7mo ago
  You could have invested in nuclear instead of adopting a broadly popular anti-nuclear policy. The EU could have also enforced the JCPOA as one of it's guaranteers but decided to be inward facing instead of treating the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as the wake up call that it should have been. We have been saying for almost 20 years that we in the US are shifting East, but Western and Northern European states like Germany did nothing to prepare for such a world. At least the French establish military bases, conduct coups, and attempt to project hard power abroad in order to protect their interests.
  - niemandhier 7mo ago
    About 40% of the uranium used in Germany came from Rosatom, either directly from Russia or from Kasachstan. That would have helped us to reduce co2, but not to get independent from Russia. Also: Natural gas is used heavily in chemistry and the steel industry, electricity alone does not help, although I admit not raising the point in the previous comment.
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      Germany could have sourced from Niger - who's entire uranium supply chain is owned by hook and by crook by France's Orano. > Natural gas is used heavily in chemistry and the steel industry Absolutely, and Germany could have defended it's ability to access NatGas from outside Russia or the MidEast if they collaborated like France's TotalEnergie and their Indian JV partners did when expanding capacity in Mozambique and Angola. --- The reality is German politicians are a reflection of the German people (as you guys are fond of telling us Americans). Germans would gladly choose vassalage instead of restarting and expanding conscription, investing in industrial subsidizes, and adopting a hard power foreign policy strategy. Merz only started these kinds of policies in mid-late 2025, and while it is a good start, it is too little too late. Germany used to have one of the most respected armed forces in NATO and was the linchpin of the Yugoslav Wars, but German voters decided to whittle away that legacy.
pmarreck 7mo ago
To quote my 4.5 year old son: "Daddy, look, another stinky gas car!" The kids already know it.
ShellackGobln7 7mo ago
The thesis here is that Germany is suffering because they didn't out-compete China on EVs? Really? Maybe these writers should go invent a new battery! No amount of German Engineering is going to beat the costs of Chinese scale.
axegon_ 7mo ago
I have some experience with the German automotive industry (having worked at a company that is a service provider for much of the German giants), I can instantly confirm a few things, which are known by some and suspected by most: Historically VW has been the "people's car" - a good car that people could afford and for the longest period that was the case: affordable and rock-solid. Around the late 2000s, that changed. VWs are no longer affordable and when problems hit, they hit hard - they are both time consuming and unless covered by a warranty, expensive. Also hard to fix even if it's something simple. That problem is cascading down the entire VW Group and it is hurting everyone along the way. Some companies under the VW Group are hit very hard by this. At the same time, the second big player, Mercedes, was never really affordable but lately their image of a tank-solid machine has cracked, suffering from a similar, brutally over-engineered, unmaintainable, engineering maze as VW. BMW is in a similar state as Mercedes but with a slightly different twist: BMW's are not to everyone's taste and I am saying that as an owner myself. But these days even the most die-hard fans acknowledge that the modern designs are absolutely atrocious. Top Gear were making fun of the Porsche Panamera back in the day but looking at new BMWs, I'd pick the Panamera in a heartbeat. In addition to their hard push for anti-consumer practices and outrageously over-engineered solutions. All of this has painted German cars in a negative way - expensive and finicky. Most of the customers were happy to pay a higher price for quality and creature comforts but there is a line between comfort and something dumb like having to visit a mechanic in order to swap a dead battery - something which should have been a simple operation that you can do on the side of the road if it comes down to it. And even though I am happy with my current car and I don't plan on changing it anytime soon, if I were in the market for a new car, I'd definitely consider other options, knowing what I know. My suggestion to the big-3 which will start solving problems: KISS.
- arethuza 7mo ago
  About 20 years ago I can remember a German colleague describing the quality of engineering by Mercedes as a "national disgrace". I wonder what he thinks now!
- chewz 7mo ago
  Agreed. No plans to buy German car anytime soon.
thi2 7mo ago
I've mostly worked in smaller companies (max 250 employees) and recently joined one of the larger corporations (not automotive related). The main issue I notice is how bad the communication is and how little can be done & decided. Before deploying a new Jenkins pipeline I need to speak to two different teams. It's insane how much time is lost doing meetings and syncs.
- delichon 7mo ago
  > Before deploying a new Jenkins pipeline I need to speak to two different teams It doesn't sound excessive that there would be two teams using a Jenkins pipeline that would need to be consulted.
  - thi2 7mo ago
    Maybe deploying was a bad choice of wording, I'm talking about setting up a new pipeline, for my repository with an internal tool. I need to speak to two different teams to ensure my CI/CD jumps through all the necessary hoops.
- Towaway69 7mo ago
  Totally the same experience. And then everyone is expected to work on weekends because that deadline that was missed four times before definitely needs to be done by this weekend. At least until it gets missed for the fifth time.
rramon 7mo ago
Germany could turn it around with laxer laws about permanent residency and new infrastructure. Allow people to live permanently in mobile homes, vans and caravans which they can rent to won from automobile makers, invest in campsites. The good future imo isn't megacities but distributed cities with families and social circles congregating.
- fnord77 7mo ago
  sounds like "live like the homeless" Bitter german winters would make living in trailers miserable
- mingusrude 7mo ago
  I don't think trailer parks is how most people envision the future for a leading European country.
- butterbomb 7mo ago
  [dead]
- slaw 7mo ago
  Isn't it easier to fix housing issue and build more apartments?
- joegibbs 7mo ago
  Let in lots of immigrants who can live like the homeless? I don't think that would help their economy.
baggachipz 7mo ago
Looks like they're taking a page right out of the USA playbook: Chase quarterly profits at the expense of the future, enrich large investors via stock buybacks, lay off workers, and rely on the government to subsidize the behavior. Probably not the model to emulate, but here we are.
tsss 7mo ago
Germany is a country that never moved past 1918, both in technology and society. All the successful industry is from that time and the mindset is too. They may have gotten rid of the Emperor but the top-down government and Prussian subservience are strong as ever. It's no coincidence that the GDR was even more controlling than the Soviet Union and crashed even harder. The German federal republic, too, is turning more and more into a paralyzed command economy. The entire public sector, health care, and all large corporation certainly work that way and it is the reason for their unfathomable inefficiency. Ignoring EVs is a symptom and not a cause of the problems. It is impossible for these corporations to pivot or innovate, no matter in which direction.
intalentive 7mo ago
Where is Germany going to get the fuel to power an ICE fleet? Where is Germany going to get the electricity to power an EV fleet? Germany faces much bigger problems than the auto lobby.
markus_zhang 7mo ago
I don’t know what the German carmakers are going to do, but I’m wondering if they should put eyes on some Chinese EV carmakers that are going to go defunct — quite usual in Chinese manufacturing philosophy, and buy them cheap. Then they can use the tech to export cars back to EU.
- tsss 7mo ago
  They would just smother whatever is left of the Chinese company with their overbearing management.
- amai 7mo ago
  China will not allow that. China is not as stupid as Germany and allows critical companies to be sold to the competitor. As an example, see https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/case-studies/midea-kuka-case-study https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/case-studies/mid...
chmod775 7mo ago
> Having ideas is difficult and expensive. Let's lobby instead! > [..] spends around €10 million a year on lobbying – which sounds like a lot, but amounts to just 0.05% of VW's €21 billion R&D budget. > The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable. Complete non sequitur. This could more easily be read as "they don't care much about lobbying and are hard at work doing R&D instead", but then that would go very much against narrative the author is trying to spin for us here. Also I distinctly remember industry voices being very much pro-electric, while it was dinosaur politicians fetishizing ICE cars and fighting to keep production going, long past the point VW even wanted to focus on them. I don't think this one was a lobbying problem for once.
- enopod_ 7mo ago
  This. VW actually invested a lot into EVs and now they’re outselling every other EV maker in the European market. Mercedes and BMW also invested a lot. All of them have brand new and pretty competitive EV platforms. Heck, even Peugeot make decent EVs. The only manufacturers lagging behind at this point are the Americans. Tesla basically stopped investing into EVs and their tech is outdated, in Europe they get absolutely butchered by VW and in China they‘re only able to keep sales level because the market is growing so fast. But soon Tesla will get annihilated in China too. Other US car makers that build EVs on scale are nowhere to be seen, besides maybe Rivian.
adverbly 7mo ago
"The engine of X's wealth is blocking its future" is a pretty common theme these days... Pensions, patent/IP law, land ownership crowding out affordability... Birth rate drops dramatically Shocked pikachu face
- ch4s3 7mo ago
  You see low birth rates in places with relatively affordable cost of living and high levels of economic opportunity.
  - joe_mamba 7mo ago
    Like which places?
    - myrmidon 7mo ago
      All of them? You see sub-replacement birthrates in basically every halfway wealthy nation, there's almost no exceptions. I'd argue that the primary cause is that children no longer provide direct value to the family they're raised in; their roles as supplemental labor during adolescence and as "pension plan" have been devalued/taken over by institutions, while the costs for raising them have only increased.
      - joe_mamba 7mo ago
        >All of them? You see sub-replacement birthrates in basically every halfway wealthy nation, there's almost no exceptions Every halfway wealthy nation doesn't have affordable housing as GGP was talking about.
        ch4s3 7mo ago
        Australia is below the OECD median affordability[1] and the birth rate is 1.48. France is more affordable still and has WAY more services and the birthrate is barely better at 1.56. There's no correlation between housing affordability and birthrates. [1]https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-affordable-housing-database.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-affordable-housin...
grigio 7mo ago
EU destroyed all its industries (Olivetti, Ericsson, Nokia,..) and automotive isn't an exception
- sofixa 7mo ago
  The EU didn't have anything to do with the destruction of any industry, really. And especially none with Nokia?? Terrible product decision making destroyed Nokia's consumer business, not the EU. But Nokia and Ericsson are still there and quite strong in networking. You just don't see them because they're not consumer oriented businesses. Also, there are many industries still flourishing across the EU. Airbus, Renault, Zeiss, ASML, ThyssenKrupp, Saint-Gobain, Nestle, Siemens, Sanofi, IKEA, Inditex, Schneider Electric, etc etc etc.
  - throwaway_20357 7mo ago
    Problem is: this list gets shorter every year, without any new additions in the recent decades (!)
  - mna_ 7mo ago
    Nestle is Swiss, not EU. Also they're quite an immoral company. I wouldn't put the word "flourishing" near Nestle.
steviee 7mo ago
> It would be great to see a politician as angry about lobbying as Merz is about work-life balance. Love it! Merz (and our minister of commerce Reiche) is a desaster for Germany and all of Europe. Tump attacks Iran and Gas prices hit 2,12€ (and even more) per liter and still they think betting on fossil fuels from their dictatorship-friends is a good thing. Saving Earth is just not cost-effective (at least not for the "right" people).
TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
Everybody underestimated the ability of Chinese auto manufacturers to come up to speed. In a recent interview with the CEO of Ford he said something similar.
amai 7mo ago
„The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable…. Following this logic, German firms will keep pushing for carveouts instead of innovating, and catching up will become impossible.“ Nostalgia is not a strategy!
tsoukase 7mo ago
Everything that is happening now in the world was completely known and predicted since the 90's (energy and demographic crisis, China's rise, even decline of the West). Large projects were designed and implemented to combat these (with names in Germany like Innovation, Leistung, Kompetenz). But the results weren't enough and only mediocre. In a nutshell: Germany, like almost all of Europe, cannot innovate, not only in IT but in any intelligence-intesive sector. We will remain stuck in traditional industries and hope at least to reduce our dependency on the US. Hopefully, this last need will help Europe keep its domestic market and maintain its quality.
pingou 7mo ago
"In Germany, cars are a feature of national identity and symbol of affluence." I didn't get the impression that cars were more a symbol of affluence in Germany than in other countries. I would have said they are less a symbol of affluence than in the average country.
- BrandoElFollito 7mo ago
  In France for instance a car is a mean of transport and people in average do not care about cars at all. This is why we have a lot of generic small sized cars, with bumps or scratches. A company car is not a typical perk, as opposed to, say, Poland where it is an important element.

248 points by mariuz 7mo ago

everything in germany's economy is going downhill, the troubles in their car industry is just one symptom (but not the cause)

gigatree 7mo ago
Uh oh
- oytis 7mo ago
  Do not worry, the army is going downhill too
rokhayakebe 7mo ago
What is the cause?
- lm28469 7mo ago
  imho there are multiple, starting with the pension and healthcare system which are not sustainable with the current demography trend, which pushed them into going all in with immigration, which fractured whatever was left of german identity (which was arguably already wiped out after ww2 and the cold war). Taxes are going up, retirement age is increasing, pensions are decreasing, public services are getting worse year after year, there is nothing young people can focus on, nothing they can expect to have better than their parents or grand parents, most will never own their place. The self sabotage of the energy sector certainly didn't help. No long term vision + no clear way to improvement + no sense of appartenance = game over, and this is hitting most of the west at once, it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles.
  - oytis 7mo ago
    > it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles Lots of real problems listed, but such a non-sequitur conclusion. US is built on these principles, China seems to be more individualistic and consumerist than Germany too. If anything, a big problem in Germany is low ambition as the societal norm. A bit of consumerism could actually help with that, as to consume you need to earn, and to earn, you need some ambition.
    - lnsru 7mo ago
      Tax system and IG Metall salary tables will kill ambition very quickly. The highest salary groups do not guarantee comfy lifestyle for the corresponding areas anymore. Giving away half of salary as mandatory insurance and paying 19% value added tax from the rest is just insulting. Don’t forget the rents in 2026. It’s again new all time high. It does not pay off to work anymore.
      - oytis 7mo ago
        Yeah, to me it seems that instead of fighting individualism, Germany needs to make sure that it pays off. Higher taxes for ownership, lower taxes for income from one's work for example.
    - lm28469 7mo ago
      > US is built on these principles, And it's a complete clown show rewarding moral bankruptcy that ended up fabricating and promoting uneducated degenerates such as Trump, Hegseth, Miller, &co to the highest positions. Thanks for making my point really...
      - oytis 7mo ago
        These are very different problems from what Germany has though. And it's a recent issue, while individualism is a core tenet of American culture since independence.
  - lnsru 7mo ago
ahartmetz 7mo ago
Where did you get that opinion? Germany is not doing great but OK in the group of Western countries, and its car industry is both very imporant and in trouble, so it's not an unreasonable opinion that things would be better without that trouble.
- tw-20260303-001 7mo ago
  It's not. It's more like a cancer patient with an Überweisung for their first cancer screening but dragging their feet to go and do it. They know is it bad and will get worse but they're afraid of facing it.
- Towaway69 7mo ago
  Germany has a great layer of "consultants" that fudge the books and make everything look profitable and rosy. It's the land of "Arbeitsgruppen" and "Berater" - folks that ensure things get buried and forgotten. But there is no investment in the future, no investment in infrastructure and no investment in anything creative, in fact, that's were cuts are made, in the arts and culture. Once a society can no longer afford the arts, you know there is something going wrong and Germany is going wrong. Perhaps "klagen auf hohem Niveau" (complaining from up on high) but the higher they are, the further they fall.
lagrange77 7mo ago
Imho, the german mentality just doesn't fit today's economy. Too risk averse, too conservative. Creativity is not really embraced. The state of the german IT sector also shows that. Most startups have nearly no moat at all and purely live off marketing with some sprinkles of corporate identity.
- Foobar8568 7mo ago
  In Switzerland, we use a lot of German and Switzerland born products, and they mostly suck.
  - lagrange77 7mo ago
    I'm not saying there are no good products. Hetzner Cloud come into my mind for example. It's executed really well. I'm saying that the number of good software offerings is too low, to have a significant impact on the country's economy. One of the advantages Germany had though, was a somewhat good and accessible higher education system in regards of computer science. Now, with software development becoming a commodity, this advantage vanishes.

madaxe_again 7mo ago

Perfect regulatory capture is like putting a toddler in charge of your household - corporate organisms, like toddlers, do not know what is good for them, and are not willing to accept short term pain for long term gain. I see parallels with unions in the U.K. in the 70s, as they were ultimately the controlling entity of a lot of industry - and they too were unwilling to accept short term pain for long term gain, which ultimately resulted in the collapse of British manufacturing, as money that should have been reinvested in plant upgrades and technology instead disappeared into exorbitant - unfathomable by today’s standards - pension plans and pay packets. Anyway. I suppose this is just humans 101, and today it’s the German car industry insisting that eating their body weight in candy today will have no consequences tomorrow.

pc86 7mo ago
Unions don't exist to protect the industry or maximize industrial gain, they exist to get as much as they can for the most senior members of the union (with union leadership being at the top) and proportionally less the less senior you are. By design they are more than happy for individual companies or even large swaths of industry to disappear if it means more spoils for the senior members in the short term.

joe_mamba 7mo ago

I found a very detailed and well argumented opinion piece on X that struck really hard on this topic: https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2027625247068065864 https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2027625247068065864 Here's the plain text in case you don't want to go to X: >"I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster Europe’s answer to China is always a committee, a regulation, a 5 year strategic plan and a press conference China’s answer to anything is ship it tomorrow and figure out the rest next week one side is trying to predict the future the other side is building it live and adjusting in real time, that asymmetry alone tells you everything about who wins this century "

alephnerd 7mo ago

While Germany should invest in EVs and Green Energy, that alone isn't blocking German economic growth. Almost all German exports have seen a precipitous drop [0]. EV exports wouldn't have helped given that Germany's two largest trading partners (the US and China) both enacted trade barriers against foreign exporters. When the US enacted the IRA under Biden, a large portion of Germany Inc shifted to the US [1], but the German government and EU decided not to enact subsidies [2]. Similarly, China demanded JVs for German manufacturing companies to enter the Chinese market, which Volkswagen (with SAIC), Siemens (with SEPG), Mercedes Benz (with BAIC), and others manufacturers complied with. Germany's economy was hollowed out because Germany Inc decided to shift capacity to it's two largest unified markets. It's not like the PRC nor the US are allowing German EV exports already - for example, all of VW's ID4s sold in the US and China are being manufactured in Tennessee and Shanghai respectively. This is why the EU has been pushing for a "rules based order", becuase otherwise individual EU states lack export markets. [0] - https://oec.world/en/profile/country/deu#yearly-trade https://oec.world/en/profile/country/deu#yearly-trade [1] - https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/EconPol-PolicyReport_41_1.pdf https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/EconPol-PolicyReport_41_1.pdf [2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/02/14/biden-ira-germany-rules-out-spending-as-europe-aims-to-avoid-us-subsidy-race.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/02/14/biden-ira-germany-rules-...

newzino 7mo ago

[flagged]

paganel 7mo ago

This [1] is what really brought Germany's industry down, not the green non-sense spouted by articles like this one: > Gas prices rose to $70 per megawatt-hour in Germany — it makes it 6 times more expensive than in the US Germany was relatively fine, industrially speaking, while it still had a working relationship with Russia and especially with cheap Russian gas. It all went to the gutters when the Americans imposed their imperial will on them, on the Germans (see also the Nord Stream fuck-up), and it has been a steady downhill road for the Germans since then. To re-iterate, there's no German economic miracle that would allow them to be competitive against other indutrialised countries (such as the US) while they have to pay two or three times more for their energy inputs. [1] https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2031015804179791877 https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2031015804179791877

miohtama 7mo ago
Germany was also fine when they still had nuclear energy
dgacmu 7mo ago
What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to invade Ukraine, nor did it force Germany to respond to the Fukushima daiichi disaster by killing all of its nuclear power.
- OgsyedIE 7mo ago
  It's a shame, too, because they are right about the hydrocarbon input price effects, but speculative in a bizarre way elsewhere. Germany had a selection of strategic hydrocarbon options in the 2000s and fumbled by picking the option that would later prove to launch revisionary wars that interrupt their export capability. Even if we lived in an alternate timeline where the US was completely supportive of the 2022 invasion at the time, Germany would still be surrounded on all sides by countries with a vested interest in pointing nuclear deterrents at Moscow and lose their energy feed in the same way.
- nairboon 7mo ago
  > What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to invade Ukraine OP's comment doesn't state that. It refers to the US forcing Germany to stop Nord Stream.

_ink_ 7mo ago

Wow, Denmark is leading manufacturing growth and the German government is still telling us that the hourly wage is the problem.

kaon_2 7mo ago
Agreed. Actually - maybe no? Maybe the hourly wage is the problem. It's been too low for too long so there was no pressure to innovate. Denmark and Switzerland are big manufacturers with high wages that are continuously innovating. Maybe the Euro was a curse for Germany afteral? Without it their wages would have been higher.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  Artificially increasing wages to get a better product is like Cargo Culting. Some people see successful companies paying their employees a ton, then assume that's what created the successful company when it's so obviously the other way around. But the politicians/union heads benefit from selling it the other way. This conversation just always gets derailed by pointing out how paying substantially below market is also bad, as if it were a counterpoint.
- psalaun 7mo ago
  That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest". But there is nothing to invest into anymore, France's industry is dead (partly because of Germany with the Hartz agreement btw, lowering demand for italian or french goods which were already less competitive than german ones on export and domestic market because of the euro) and if they didn't care to put capital on automation when wages were high, why would they do it when work becomes cheap?
  - joe_mamba 7mo ago
    >That's my point in France also: industries complain about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to "invest". 100% exactly the same in Austria and I can speculate Italy as well.

mentalgear 7mo ago

Germany’s powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival. Instead of investing in EV innovation to future-proof the industry, they leveraged their influence with the conservative (CDU/CSU) and free-market (FDP) government parties to weaken national and EU emission targets. This reliance on political lobbying rather than technological advancement was a fatal miscalculation: While executives spent the last decade fighting carbon taxes and stalling the EV transition, they ignored the reality of their primary export markets - most notably China where today German ICE cars are seen as obsolete - and the rest of the world rapidly pivoting to electric. By choosing payday over progress, the "autobauers" & their political helpers have left the German workforce to pay the price. The looming job losses and economic instability are the direct result of a managerial class that traded their country’s industrial crown for a final decade of bloated bonuses.

JSR_FDED 7mo ago
This word-for-word applies to the US car industry too. The Europeans would do well to see the current state of US car manufacturers as a cautionary tale.
d3ckard 7mo ago
It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future and your entire thesis depends on it to be true.
- mentalgear 7mo ago
  Not my entire thesis: It's the content of the article and otherwise well known.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  Until recently (and probably with some pressure from VW) everything else was supposed to be phased out in Europe within a decade: https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/12/europe-shifts-into-reverse-on-eu-2035-ice-ban https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/1...
- 7mo ago

Suckseh 7mo ago

China took over exports and manufactoring capacity 5 fold of what germany was doing in core industries: manufacturing, machine building and chemicals. Its not just innovation, we missed and our stubbornes of just keep doing what we good at, its also china catching up and steam rolling us. When I bought an EV, people around me told me the same thing and still do: they like the sound of engines, these EVs are not suitable for daily use, EVs will burn down, we hate renewable, we hate cables, we hate... To match china, we would not only need to work a lot more, we would also need to work on saturdays, break a lot of labor laws we build up, reduce salary despite working more, reduce energy costs massivly and automate as much as possible. A nitting machine from germany costs 60k. In china, with the same quality (because they catched up) is 20k. 20k! And were i'm from (bavaria) most young man want to become Mechanical engineers because of BMW and co. No one wants to do IT (lets ignore the AI elephant in the room).

cactusplant7374 7mo ago
Copy the model of ASML. Build something really complicated that no one else can easily copy.
- doug_durham 7mo ago
  First what would that be? Second you can't sustain an entire country on one company
  - andsoitis 7mo ago
    It’s a model to copy. Ie move higher up the innovation chain.
    - zeroc8 7mo ago
      That's what we've been doing for a long time. But that's not possible with today's China anymore. They are as innovative as the rest, if not more so.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

mg 7mo ago

German chancellor Friedrich Merz ... lashed out at German workers to “simply do a little more,” Germany literally pays people to do nothing. A friend of mine, an engineer who works in the German car industry, recently told me that nowadays he has a lot of free time. Because the company he works for has so few orders that the company is granted "Kurzarbeitergeld" - the government pays 60% of the salary if the employees work less. That blew my mind. If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.

niemandhier 7mo ago
That is true for RnD not for Factory workers. Germany has quite strong workers rights, so mass layoffs are not a possible solution to safe money if facing lacking orders. Essentially companies get some of the money back they and their employees paid as taxes.
mentalgear 7mo ago
The problem is they don't get rid of their ICE cars any more - most of the world is transitioning to EVs and China - their previously biggest importer - has strict EV quotas and no one wants to buy German EVs that are too expensive and less capable than Chinese made EVs. Germany was ahead in EVs and solar - both industries have been cuto off by conservative/free-market ICE lobbysts and these 2 huge global markets are now dominated by China instead.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  The VW EVs aren't bad, apart from poor UX design, which they have realized.
  - atmosx 7mo ago
    Broadly speaking they're not _as far away_ from Chinese EVs as we all make it here to be. However, the problem is that the stockholders of all these companies expect 500% YoY growth which isn't sustainable. Not to mention the cost of a car has grown significantly while all German cars have degraded substantially in quality. For example, you can expect Porsche to sell FOREVER the number of cars they manage to sell in the 00s and 10s: 2000: ~54,600 (happy) 2007: ~98,600 (happy) 2019: ~280,800 2025: 280,000 (CRISIS!!!) I mean... It's a freaking sports car! Why on earth would you expect to sell more units than these?

ramboldio 7mo ago

A very key problem is the common narrative that green policies and the EU allegedly caused the downfall of the car industry (-> "Verbrennerverbot"). In reality, a way bigger impact seems to be that the Chinese govt stopped buying German cars once they could build their own (which they have been always transparent about). Unfortunately, this misdiagnosis leads to the wrong conclusion to double-down on a obsolete business model of the car industry, instead of diversifying away from it.

Tade0 7mo ago
This. China is a much larger economy and by far the single largest car market in the world - selling more vehicles domestically than the EU and USA combined. That being said just like Germany they're largely export-oriented and if local demand ever weakens, they'll struggle all the same.
jansan 7mo ago
It's both. Of course the massively shrinking share of the Chinese market is a big chunk of the problem. But the whole mindset here in Germany is completely delusional with the idea to be leaders in environmental technology and sustainability solutions. My favorite example of this delusion is Porsche who somehow thought that selling their bread-and-butter model Macan exclusively as an EV was a good idea. I still cannot understand how they arrived at this decision.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
throwaway_20357 7mo ago
What would the appropriate strategy have been after realizing China had decided to squeeze foreign cars out of the market? The "obsolete business model" still sells many cars world-wide.
- aurareturn 7mo ago
  Maybe recognize that China needed energy independence and that they needed to turn to EVs? Designs and sell cheap EVs in China? Tesla is a top selling car brand in China.

niemandhier 7mo ago

There is little the US could have done more to harm Europe and Germany in particular than engaging in the Iranian conflict. Qatar was supposed to be the replacement for lacking Russian deliveries. In addition the current government is pro fossile fuels, and parts of it are the same south germans that keep building natural gas power plants. Those plants play an important part in driving up electricity prices in the whole country, since the same people that insist on using natural gas also refuse to split the country into electricity price zones.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
alephnerd 7mo ago
You could have invested in nuclear instead of adopting a broadly popular anti-nuclear policy. The EU could have also enforced the JCPOA as one of it's guaranteers but decided to be inward facing instead of treating the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as the wake up call that it should have been. We have been saying for almost 20 years that we in the US are shifting East, but Western and Northern European states like Germany did nothing to prepare for such a world. At least the French establish military bases, conduct coups, and attempt to project hard power abroad in order to protect their interests.
- niemandhier 7mo ago
  About 40% of the uranium used in Germany came from Rosatom, either directly from Russia or from Kasachstan. That would have helped us to reduce co2, but not to get independent from Russia. Also: Natural gas is used heavily in chemistry and the steel industry, electricity alone does not help, although I admit not raising the point in the previous comment.
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    Germany could have sourced from Niger - who's entire uranium supply chain is owned by hook and by crook by France's Orano. > Natural gas is used heavily in chemistry and the steel industry Absolutely, and Germany could have defended it's ability to access NatGas from outside Russia or the MidEast if they collaborated like France's TotalEnergie and their Indian JV partners did when expanding capacity in Mozambique and Angola. --- The reality is German politicians are a reflection of the German people (as you guys are fond of telling us Americans). Germans would gladly choose vassalage instead of restarting and expanding conscription, investing in industrial subsidizes, and adopting a hard power foreign policy strategy. Merz only started these kinds of policies in mid-late 2025, and while it is a good start, it is too little too late. Germany used to have one of the most respected armed forces in NATO and was the linchpin of the Yugoslav Wars, but German voters decided to whittle away that legacy.

pmarreck 7mo ago

To quote my 4.5 year old son: "Daddy, look, another stinky gas car!" The kids already know it.

ShellackGobln7 7mo ago

The thesis here is that Germany is suffering because they didn't out-compete China on EVs? Really? Maybe these writers should go invent a new battery! No amount of German Engineering is going to beat the costs of Chinese scale.

axegon_ 7mo ago

I have some experience with the German automotive industry (having worked at a company that is a service provider for much of the German giants), I can instantly confirm a few things, which are known by some and suspected by most: Historically VW has been the "people's car" - a good car that people could afford and for the longest period that was the case: affordable and rock-solid. Around the late 2000s, that changed. VWs are no longer affordable and when problems hit, they hit hard - they are both time consuming and unless covered by a warranty, expensive. Also hard to fix even if it's something simple. That problem is cascading down the entire VW Group and it is hurting everyone along the way. Some companies under the VW Group are hit very hard by this. At the same time, the second big player, Mercedes, was never really affordable but lately their image of a tank-solid machine has cracked, suffering from a similar, brutally over-engineered, unmaintainable, engineering maze as VW. BMW is in a similar state as Mercedes but with a slightly different twist: BMW's are not to everyone's taste and I am saying that as an owner myself. But these days even the most die-hard fans acknowledge that the modern designs are absolutely atrocious. Top Gear were making fun of the Porsche Panamera back in the day but looking at new BMWs, I'd pick the Panamera in a heartbeat. In addition to their hard push for anti-consumer practices and outrageously over-engineered solutions. All of this has painted German cars in a negative way - expensive and finicky. Most of the customers were happy to pay a higher price for quality and creature comforts but there is a line between comfort and something dumb like having to visit a mechanic in order to swap a dead battery - something which should have been a simple operation that you can do on the side of the road if it comes down to it. And even though I am happy with my current car and I don't plan on changing it anytime soon, if I were in the market for a new car, I'd definitely consider other options, knowing what I know. My suggestion to the big-3 which will start solving problems: KISS.

arethuza 7mo ago
About 20 years ago I can remember a German colleague describing the quality of engineering by Mercedes as a "national disgrace". I wonder what he thinks now!
chewz 7mo ago
Agreed. No plans to buy German car anytime soon.

thi2 7mo ago

I've mostly worked in smaller companies (max 250 employees) and recently joined one of the larger corporations (not automotive related). The main issue I notice is how bad the communication is and how little can be done & decided. Before deploying a new Jenkins pipeline I need to speak to two different teams. It's insane how much time is lost doing meetings and syncs.

delichon 7mo ago
> Before deploying a new Jenkins pipeline I need to speak to two different teams It doesn't sound excessive that there would be two teams using a Jenkins pipeline that would need to be consulted.
- thi2 7mo ago
  Maybe deploying was a bad choice of wording, I'm talking about setting up a new pipeline, for my repository with an internal tool. I need to speak to two different teams to ensure my CI/CD jumps through all the necessary hoops.
Towaway69 7mo ago
Totally the same experience. And then everyone is expected to work on weekends because that deadline that was missed four times before definitely needs to be done by this weekend. At least until it gets missed for the fifth time.

rramon 7mo ago

Germany could turn it around with laxer laws about permanent residency and new infrastructure. Allow people to live permanently in mobile homes, vans and caravans which they can rent to won from automobile makers, invest in campsites. The good future imo isn't megacities but distributed cities with families and social circles congregating.

fnord77 7mo ago
sounds like "live like the homeless" Bitter german winters would make living in trailers miserable
mingusrude 7mo ago
I don't think trailer parks is how most people envision the future for a leading European country.
butterbomb 7mo ago
[dead]
slaw 7mo ago
Isn't it easier to fix housing issue and build more apartments?
joegibbs 7mo ago
Let in lots of immigrants who can live like the homeless? I don't think that would help their economy.

baggachipz 7mo ago

Looks like they're taking a page right out of the USA playbook: Chase quarterly profits at the expense of the future, enrich large investors via stock buybacks, lay off workers, and rely on the government to subsidize the behavior. Probably not the model to emulate, but here we are.

tsss 7mo ago

Germany is a country that never moved past 1918, both in technology and society. All the successful industry is from that time and the mindset is too. They may have gotten rid of the Emperor but the top-down government and Prussian subservience are strong as ever. It's no coincidence that the GDR was even more controlling than the Soviet Union and crashed even harder. The German federal republic, too, is turning more and more into a paralyzed command economy. The entire public sector, health care, and all large corporation certainly work that way and it is the reason for their unfathomable inefficiency. Ignoring EVs is a symptom and not a cause of the problems. It is impossible for these corporations to pivot or innovate, no matter in which direction.

intalentive 7mo ago

Where is Germany going to get the fuel to power an ICE fleet? Where is Germany going to get the electricity to power an EV fleet? Germany faces much bigger problems than the auto lobby.

markus_zhang 7mo ago

I don’t know what the German carmakers are going to do, but I’m wondering if they should put eyes on some Chinese EV carmakers that are going to go defunct — quite usual in Chinese manufacturing philosophy, and buy them cheap. Then they can use the tech to export cars back to EU.

tsss 7mo ago
They would just smother whatever is left of the Chinese company with their overbearing management.
amai 7mo ago
China will not allow that. China is not as stupid as Germany and allows critical companies to be sold to the competitor. As an example, see https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/case-studies/midea-kuka-case-study https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/case-studies/mid...

chmod775 7mo ago

> Having ideas is difficult and expensive. Let's lobby instead! > [..] spends around €10 million a year on lobbying – which sounds like a lot, but amounts to just 0.05% of VW's €21 billion R&D budget. > The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable. Complete non sequitur. This could more easily be read as "they don't care much about lobbying and are hard at work doing R&D instead", but then that would go very much against narrative the author is trying to spin for us here. Also I distinctly remember industry voices being very much pro-electric, while it was dinosaur politicians fetishizing ICE cars and fighting to keep production going, long past the point VW even wanted to focus on them. I don't think this one was a lobbying problem for once.

enopod_ 7mo ago
This. VW actually invested a lot into EVs and now they’re outselling every other EV maker in the European market. Mercedes and BMW also invested a lot. All of them have brand new and pretty competitive EV platforms. Heck, even Peugeot make decent EVs. The only manufacturers lagging behind at this point are the Americans. Tesla basically stopped investing into EVs and their tech is outdated, in Europe they get absolutely butchered by VW and in China they‘re only able to keep sales level because the market is growing so fast. But soon Tesla will get annihilated in China too. Other US car makers that build EVs on scale are nowhere to be seen, besides maybe Rivian.

adverbly 7mo ago

"The engine of X's wealth is blocking its future" is a pretty common theme these days... Pensions, patent/IP law, land ownership crowding out affordability... Birth rate drops dramatically Shocked pikachu face

ch4s3 7mo ago
You see low birth rates in places with relatively affordable cost of living and high levels of economic opportunity.
- joe_mamba 7mo ago
  Like which places?
  - myrmidon 7mo ago
    All of them? You see sub-replacement birthrates in basically every halfway wealthy nation, there's almost no exceptions. I'd argue that the primary cause is that children no longer provide direct value to the family they're raised in; their roles as supplemental labor during adolescence and as "pension plan" have been devalued/taken over by institutions, while the costs for raising them have only increased.
    - joe_mamba 7mo ago
      >All of them? You see sub-replacement birthrates in basically every halfway wealthy nation, there's almost no exceptions Every halfway wealthy nation doesn't have affordable housing as GGP was talking about.
      - ch4s3 7mo ago
        Australia is below the OECD median affordability[1] and the birth rate is 1.48. France is more affordable still and has WAY more services and the birthrate is barely better at 1.56. There's no correlation between housing affordability and birthrates. [1]https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-affordable-housing-database.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/oecd-affordable-housin...

grigio 7mo ago

EU destroyed all its industries (Olivetti, Ericsson, Nokia,..) and automotive isn't an exception

sofixa 7mo ago
The EU didn't have anything to do with the destruction of any industry, really. And especially none with Nokia?? Terrible product decision making destroyed Nokia's consumer business, not the EU. But Nokia and Ericsson are still there and quite strong in networking. You just don't see them because they're not consumer oriented businesses. Also, there are many industries still flourishing across the EU. Airbus, Renault, Zeiss, ASML, ThyssenKrupp, Saint-Gobain, Nestle, Siemens, Sanofi, IKEA, Inditex, Schneider Electric, etc etc etc.
- throwaway_20357 7mo ago
  Problem is: this list gets shorter every year, without any new additions in the recent decades (!)
- mna_ 7mo ago
  Nestle is Swiss, not EU. Also they're quite an immoral company. I wouldn't put the word "flourishing" near Nestle.

steviee 7mo ago

> It would be great to see a politician as angry about lobbying as Merz is about work-life balance. Love it! Merz (and our minister of commerce Reiche) is a desaster for Germany and all of Europe. Tump attacks Iran and Gas prices hit 2,12€ (and even more) per liter and still they think betting on fossil fuels from their dictatorship-friends is a good thing. Saving Earth is just not cost-effective (at least not for the "right" people).

TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago

Everybody underestimated the ability of Chinese auto manufacturers to come up to speed. In a recent interview with the CEO of Ford he said something similar.

amai 7mo ago

„The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable…. Following this logic, German firms will keep pushing for carveouts instead of innovating, and catching up will become impossible.“ Nostalgia is not a strategy!

tsoukase 7mo ago

Everything that is happening now in the world was completely known and predicted since the 90's (energy and demographic crisis, China's rise, even decline of the West). Large projects were designed and implemented to combat these (with names in Germany like Innovation, Leistung, Kompetenz). But the results weren't enough and only mediocre. In a nutshell: Germany, like almost all of Europe, cannot innovate, not only in IT but in any intelligence-intesive sector. We will remain stuck in traditional industries and hope at least to reduce our dependency on the US. Hopefully, this last need will help Europe keep its domestic market and maintain its quality.

pingou 7mo ago

"In Germany, cars are a feature of national identity and symbol of affluence." I didn't get the impression that cars were more a symbol of affluence in Germany than in other countries. I would have said they are less a symbol of affluence than in the average country.

BrandoElFollito 7mo ago
In France for instance a car is a mean of transport and people in average do not care about cars at all. This is why we have a lot of generic small sized cars, with bumps or scratches. A company car is not a typical perk, as opposed to, say, Poland where it is an important element.