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Germany’s powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival. Instead of investing in EV innovation to fut

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...
- CharlieDigital 7mo ago
  > It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak. It's very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE as far as efficiency, weight, and power output goes. The same cannot be said for batteries and electric motors. We are still quite far from technological limits for the platform. It doesn't seem disputable at all that a platform that can still evolve and improve with significant room for growth will eventually overtake one that has peaked.
  - nine_k 7mo ago
    Also, oil will only get more expensive in the long term, and electricity is going to get cheaper, with more and more solar panels generating electricity locally "for free".
    - nindalf 7mo ago
      > oil will only get more expensive in the long term Will it? Oil price will reach an equilibrium because lower demand due to electrification will lead to lower prices, which will increase higher consumption. There are enough low cost oil producers like Saudi Arabia to keep the pipes filled with oil at whatever the prevailing market price is.
      - imtringued 7mo ago
        The price of gas is $9 per gallon in Germany right now.
    - wqaatwt 7mo ago
      Oil (prior to the current pointless war) was pretty cheap, though. Adjusted inflation cheaper than e.g. it was at any point between 1975 and 85.
  - sofixa 7mo ago
    > As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak. It's very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE as far as efficiency, weight, and power output goes What makes you say that? Jet engine manufacturers are constantly making improvements, and one of the biggest recent breakthroughs has been around using proprietary alloys in the construction of some parts to make them lighter and able to operate at hotter temperatures, thus increasing efficiency. I'm not working on any engines, but from a layman's perspective I don't see why there couldn't be material science improvements made to combustion engines.
- xoa 7mo ago
  >It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future It is not disputable (unless you're including Old Auto lobbyists I suppose). Without government imposed restrictions keeping the public from buying Chinese BEVs without an outrageous markup (or at all) the ICE industry would already be imploding. The government could and should require that all vehicles be under full control of their owners with no remote telematics required, or even allowed necessarily (and heavily restricted even then). That'd resolve concerns about Chinese kill switches or gathering intel data or whatever. But of course the Western industry hates that too because they want to fully enshittify cars next and turn them into locked-in subscription revenue and advertising data sources. So they can't even compete on trustworthiness. Total embarrassment and also long term ruin. The present gas price mess and global instability Trump has kicked off is just going to draw an even bigger line under both the personal and the national security value of not being tied to any single source of energy for mechanized transportation. BEVs are simply fundamentally superior particularly in a risky world.
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    Not to mention, regenerative braking. It recovers something like 30% of energy that was previously just wasted, so in terms of having energy independence, it's worth mentioning.
- TheJoeMan 7mo ago
  Not to mention, those same carbon emission regulations/targets they are lobbying/fighting against did not come about in a vacuum. The regulations were intentionally cranked up to "unachievable" levels for ICE vehicles from groups pushing other technologies.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    The temperature of the atmosphere is not amenable to lobbying.
- asymmetric 7mo ago
  I'm curious, what do you think the future of the car industry is, then?
- theK 7mo ago
  No it is not. Anything combustion related certainly isn't, as has been proven ad absurdum. All non BEV non combustion alternatives are, optimistically phrased, in their infancy. So yes, BEVs are the future for the next 20-40 years at a minimum. Edit: clarity
darth_avocado 7mo ago
> Germany’s powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival Gee I wonder where they got the ideas from
whiteboardr 7mo ago
It's not as simple as 100% of this is on the car manufacturers. There's a lot at play, which in combination led to this "perfect" storm. Energy policies and hence ever increasing energy prices, bureaucracy almost as bad as Italy, governements making technical decisions for unprepared manufacturers by setting goals of EV production numbers and above all phasing out the cornerstone of the countries engine, literally: ICE power units. And yes, most management are of an era that truly doesn't understand the convergent challenges in a mixed market of ICE and EVs. Shortsighted decisions have been made, throwing out the baby with the bathwater - craftsmanship, vision and engineering prowess. What was an engineering driven industry with a say in where all this is headed became a soulless marketing machine, merely scratching the surface of what needs to be done. They created some very bad "sci-fi" by plastering screens everywhere in interiors while still treating software like some part you can outsource to the lowest bidding supplier, swapping these out every other model range or update. Actual internal research and guidance got killed off around the early 2010s by outsourcing all of it externally. Besides, the culture and politics within these corporations are the worst i ever encountered in my whole career. It's a very grim picture we're looking at but there's nobody, neither in upper management across boards nor in politics actually being able to see the misery they're in, let alone doing something about it. Glad i left almost 10 years ago but still sad, since all I had to witness is effecting society as a whole and not in a good way. It's really just the beginning of what is to come.
- pimeys 7mo ago
  I'm not working in this industry, but I am living in Germany. I'm lucky enough to take remote jobs all around the world, but I'm a bit scared on what it means politically in Germany when the sh*t really hits the fan. This might be one of the reasons I should not buy an apartment and settle in Germany...
  - reactordev 7mo ago
    No where is safe from this kind of fuckery though. Greed is in human nature because education is gamified, sports are gamified, business is gamified, your attention is even gamified. You’re forced to run a race you never signed up for in a manner which you disagree with for an audience that gives nothing in return but laughs as they watch you spin the wheel for them. Literary aside, there used to be a time when you could count on a company and they could count on you. Now it’s a culture cult. This makes whistleblowing and doing what’s right virtually impossible. Who wants to sacrifice everything? Only the scorned and mistreated or it has to be egregious enough to solicit public outcry.
V__ 7mo ago
Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done it this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely prevalent. I say this as a German. This is also reflected in the big political parties, which would rather keep these beliefs alive than inspire change. I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when enough other countries implement more progressive economic policies.
- whiteboardr 7mo ago
  I would disagree. The willingness to change is there, it's mostly the motives and what is being targeted where the problems are. We as a country lost our balls. Decisions are increasingly made on an emotional basis, and the poster child for this has been the politically calculated exit of nuclear power based on the Fukushima accident to gain an election win. Most of senior management is trying to act like suddenly they are some cool nimble startup CEO that can burn through cash until the subscription fees for lane keeping assists and heated seats are paying the bills. It's all buzzwords being thrown around without anyone really caring for reality. Just looking at how the "dress code" changed over the last 10 years in automotive is funny by itself. Hefty statements, zero backing and ever shrinking balls. The bill is going to be huge.
  - soco 7mo ago
    I somehow have the feelings that you two actually agree quite a lot. Because there are two populations there: one who'd be able and willing to change, and the other busy to protect their own accounts and after me the deluge. It's all which one of these are at the buttons, and I reckon it's the second.
- odiroot 7mo ago
  > Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done it this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely prevalent. I say this as a German. Interestingly it's not only the domain of the conservatives (e.g. CDU/CSU) to cut any discussion this way. Social democrats (and their voters) use the same argument, just in instances where it fits their program (e.g. labour laws). > I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when enough other countries implement more progressive economic policies. The only party suggesting any such policies consistently fails to clear the 5% threshold as of late. Evidently, the electorate is satisfied with the status quo.
boondongle 7mo ago
For me its as simple as mature companies are extremely difficult to reorient towards working at a loss through R&D. People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking.
- noosphr 7mo ago
  China couldn't get a local ICE industry running no matter how many times it tried in the 70s, 80s and 90s. So they made a bet on the next technology. They not only didn't have a local industry, they knew they couldn't make one and adjusted government policy.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    They do actually make ICE cars and hybrids as well, it's not just electrics.
    - hangonhn 7mo ago
      They do but they were not on par with foreign competitors.
- hangonhn 7mo ago
  > People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking. I would add that despite joint ventures, China's domestic internal combustion engine industry never really caught up. In fact their best engines were made by wholly domestic companies but those were not nearly as good as those made by Western and Japanese companies. As Warren Buffet noted over a decade ago, BEV is an opportunity for China to simply skip over all of that and just leapfrog everyone else. So it's even better than greenfield. It's green field for them while allowing them to completely disrupt existing foreign competitors.
Spooky23 7mo ago
It's the standard innovators dilemma nonsense, with the added drama of the car case that the innovator (Tesla) shot itself in the foot due to a madman in charge. The entire ecosystem of automaking is just like tech - clusters of complimentary industries. There's a symbiotic relationship between Mercedes, Ford, BMW, GM, etc and their suppliers -- many of whom in the american case were former subsidiaries of the automaker. That's why Ford, GM, Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, etc have a hard time closing the deal on EV. The American car companies are more fucked because they've engineered the business around compliance requirements to mostly only make trucks. It's hard to eat your children. Meanwhile, BYD isn't run by a bipolar drug addict, and they are going to back up the truck, slowed down only by protectionism. I drove one when traveling, and it felt like driving a Tesla in 2015. For companies building cars in Germany, the US and to some extent Japan & Korea, we're living in a do-over of 1976, except China is Japan.
- jandrese 7mo ago
  There is another dimension to this. All of the legacy auto manufacturers, without exception, have been dragging their heels on EVs. Lots of people talk about corporate inertia and shareholders and whatnot forcing the companies to be irrational, but I don't think that's entirely correct. I think the executives at these companies have long since identified that EVs are a far more fundamental existential challenge than people normally understand. The reason I think so is that Internal Combustion Engines are the primary barrier to entry into the car market. In an all electric world they are once again open to competition from startups who can source the same commodity motors, batteries, controllers, and the like. The barriers to entry drop and it becomes a brand new world of competition from all sides. The only major stumbling block being regulatory (crash testing, etc...). Nobody in the industry wants that, so the best solution is to fight the EV adoption as long as they can. Had Tesla not been a company they would still be dragging their heels with compliance cars to this day. Of course countries without existing ICE manufacturers to protect, like China, are free to take control of the EV market and dominate the auto industry in the coming decades. An existential crisis for legacy automakers.
  - throwaway_20357 7mo ago
theK 7mo ago
Its not only the automotive lobby to be fair. Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production, batteries and lately heat pumps. So yeah, the legacy industry lobbies are the problem but not exclusively the automaker ones.
- danmaz74 7mo ago
  > Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production, batteries Was it lobbies, or costs which aren't competitive with China?
  - theK 7mo ago
    Afaik, It was lobbies and conservative goverents that chose to put the question up to the "free market", completely disregarding the fact that the competing geographies where heavily subsidizing those industries.
- AnonymousPlanet 7mo ago
  This is a very well researched essay regarding the solar panel industry in China and Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo I really recommend watching / reading sober assessments like this. This is the strategic decision that was the last nail in the coffin for European battery cell manufacturing: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery-cell-production-in-blow-to-europe-idUSKCN1GC2DY https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery... It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.
pkos98 7mo ago
As a German, I genuinely cannot comprehend this short-sightedness and ignorance: Our current Chancellor (Merz) publicly boasts that Germans work too few hours and calls on them to work more [0] implying this would generate more tax revenue. Yet working has arguably never been less rewarding for workers: Germany currently has the 2nd highest tax wedge among all OECD nations (≈48% for a single worker, nearly 13 percentage points above the OECD average) [2][3]. This is compounded by demand-side welfare measures for low earners such as Wohngeld (housing benefit) and pension supplements like Mütterrente ("Mothers' pension"), creating a massive redistribution from working people to non-working people. Meanwhile, the German government has spent years failing to fully prosecute the CumEx/CumCum tax fraud scandal, a scheme through which banks and investors systematically robbed the German state of an estimated €36 billion in tax revenues [4][5]. The contrast could not be more glaring: squeeze workers harder while letting financial fraudsters off easy. I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here. - [0] Merz urges Germans to work more CGTN (Feb 2026): https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must-work-harder-cites-China-after-official-visit-1L847d0EJqw/p.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must... - [1] EUFactCheck Merz's claim rated "Mostly False": https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-work-more-and-more-efficiently-again/ https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-wor... - [2] OECD Taxing Wages 2025 Germany: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/04/taxing-wages-2025-country-notes_16d47563/germany_59f2afde/510f880a-en.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... - [3] Tax Foundation Tax Burden on Labor, OECD 2024: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labor-oecd-2024/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo... - [4] CumEx-Files Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files - [5] Stanford GSB CumEx and CumCum Scandals: https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-financial-scandals-reveal-how-democratic-institutions-fail https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-fin...
- master-lincoln 7mo ago
  > I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here. You quit your job at a large US company because you do not see yourself building a future in Germany?
AnonymousPlanet 7mo ago
That is a very popular opinion and I've held it too for a very long time. Until I read an issue [1] of The Economist in 2020 and did some digging afterwards. Turns out, the real moat of any successful car industry so far wasn't brand recognition, lobbyists, tariffs, or the pleasing sound of a shutting car door. It's the combustion engine itself. Or rather the industry you're embedded in that provides the metallurgy and chemistry to reliably produce high quality engine blocks and seals. Because your engine needs to withstand high pressures and temperatures that go from below freezing all the way up to way over 2000K. And you also need the know how and experience to build all of that together. None of that can be exfiltrated as a zip file or wished into existence by party officials. The EV sidesteps all of that in one go. Now it's all down to who has the best batteries and who can do high quality assembly real cheap. Both points go to China. Why? The same reason: The surrounding industry. It's what you get from doing (even simple) electronics for decades, cultivating a competitive industry for assembly and high quality battery cells. The only hope for the incumbents was hydrogen instead of batteries because this again is engineering and seals. The alternative would have been to become really good at batteries themselves. However, Europe's best chance to get there, Bosch, decided in 2018 not to go that way [2]. Once you let all of that sink in, you realise the inevitability of the current situation. And they knew. All this time they knew. The rest was song and dance for politicians and shareholders. [1] https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/china-has-never-mastered-internal-combustion-engines https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/ch... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery-cell-production-in-blow-to-europe-idUSKCN1GC2DY https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery...
- twoodfin 7mo ago
  If the platform, power train, manufacturing is commoditized, shouldn’t that in theory be great news for existing brands with consumer trust and design competence?
  - AnonymousPlanet 7mo ago
    That's the current hope. But do you know who also had consumer trust and design competence? Telefunken, AEG, Braun, Grundig, Blaupunkt, Loewe ... How many products of those brands are produced in Europe today, if at all? None of them had a moat as deep as the combustion engine.
CamperBob2 7mo ago
If people don't want to buy the EVs they're forced to make, what's their next move, in your view?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
thrance 7mo ago
This is exactly what happened with a minor nitpick: the lobbyists and shareholders that orchestrated it obtained what they wanted (a quick buck) and got out unharmed, free to think about their next enterprise. The workers will be the ones to bear the cost, along with the environment.

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...
CharlieDigital 7mo ago
> It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak. It's very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE as far as efficiency, weight, and power output goes. The same cannot be said for batteries and electric motors. We are still quite far from technological limits for the platform. It doesn't seem disputable at all that a platform that can still evolve and improve with significant room for growth will eventually overtake one that has peaked.
- nine_k 7mo ago
  Also, oil will only get more expensive in the long term, and electricity is going to get cheaper, with more and more solar panels generating electricity locally "for free".
  - nindalf 7mo ago
    > oil will only get more expensive in the long term Will it? Oil price will reach an equilibrium because lower demand due to electrification will lead to lower prices, which will increase higher consumption. There are enough low cost oil producers like Saudi Arabia to keep the pipes filled with oil at whatever the prevailing market price is.
    - imtringued 7mo ago
      The price of gas is $9 per gallon in Germany right now.
  - wqaatwt 7mo ago
    Oil (prior to the current pointless war) was pretty cheap, though. Adjusted inflation cheaper than e.g. it was at any point between 1975 and 85.
- sofixa 7mo ago
  > As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak. It's very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE as far as efficiency, weight, and power output goes What makes you say that? Jet engine manufacturers are constantly making improvements, and one of the biggest recent breakthroughs has been around using proprietary alloys in the construction of some parts to make them lighter and able to operate at hotter temperatures, thus increasing efficiency. I'm not working on any engines, but from a layman's perspective I don't see why there couldn't be material science improvements made to combustion engines.
xoa 7mo ago
>It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future It is not disputable (unless you're including Old Auto lobbyists I suppose). Without government imposed restrictions keeping the public from buying Chinese BEVs without an outrageous markup (or at all) the ICE industry would already be imploding. The government could and should require that all vehicles be under full control of their owners with no remote telematics required, or even allowed necessarily (and heavily restricted even then). That'd resolve concerns about Chinese kill switches or gathering intel data or whatever. But of course the Western industry hates that too because they want to fully enshittify cars next and turn them into locked-in subscription revenue and advertising data sources. So they can't even compete on trustworthiness. Total embarrassment and also long term ruin. The present gas price mess and global instability Trump has kicked off is just going to draw an even bigger line under both the personal and the national security value of not being tied to any single source of energy for mechanized transportation. BEVs are simply fundamentally superior particularly in a risky world.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  Not to mention, regenerative braking. It recovers something like 30% of energy that was previously just wasted, so in terms of having energy independence, it's worth mentioning.
TheJoeMan 7mo ago
Not to mention, those same carbon emission regulations/targets they are lobbying/fighting against did not come about in a vacuum. The regulations were intentionally cranked up to "unachievable" levels for ICE vehicles from groups pushing other technologies.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  The temperature of the atmosphere is not amenable to lobbying.
asymmetric 7mo ago
I'm curious, what do you think the future of the car industry is, then?
theK 7mo ago
No it is not. Anything combustion related certainly isn't, as has been proven ad absurdum. All non BEV non combustion alternatives are, optimistically phrased, in their infancy. So yes, BEVs are the future for the next 20-40 years at a minimum. Edit: clarity

darth_avocado 7mo ago

> Germany’s powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival Gee I wonder where they got the ideas from

whiteboardr 7mo ago

It's not as simple as 100% of this is on the car manufacturers. There's a lot at play, which in combination led to this "perfect" storm. Energy policies and hence ever increasing energy prices, bureaucracy almost as bad as Italy, governements making technical decisions for unprepared manufacturers by setting goals of EV production numbers and above all phasing out the cornerstone of the countries engine, literally: ICE power units. And yes, most management are of an era that truly doesn't understand the convergent challenges in a mixed market of ICE and EVs. Shortsighted decisions have been made, throwing out the baby with the bathwater - craftsmanship, vision and engineering prowess. What was an engineering driven industry with a say in where all this is headed became a soulless marketing machine, merely scratching the surface of what needs to be done. They created some very bad "sci-fi" by plastering screens everywhere in interiors while still treating software like some part you can outsource to the lowest bidding supplier, swapping these out every other model range or update. Actual internal research and guidance got killed off around the early 2010s by outsourcing all of it externally. Besides, the culture and politics within these corporations are the worst i ever encountered in my whole career. It's a very grim picture we're looking at but there's nobody, neither in upper management across boards nor in politics actually being able to see the misery they're in, let alone doing something about it. Glad i left almost 10 years ago but still sad, since all I had to witness is effecting society as a whole and not in a good way. It's really just the beginning of what is to come.

pimeys 7mo ago
I'm not working in this industry, but I am living in Germany. I'm lucky enough to take remote jobs all around the world, but I'm a bit scared on what it means politically in Germany when the sh*t really hits the fan. This might be one of the reasons I should not buy an apartment and settle in Germany...
- reactordev 7mo ago
  No where is safe from this kind of fuckery though. Greed is in human nature because education is gamified, sports are gamified, business is gamified, your attention is even gamified. You’re forced to run a race you never signed up for in a manner which you disagree with for an audience that gives nothing in return but laughs as they watch you spin the wheel for them. Literary aside, there used to be a time when you could count on a company and they could count on you. Now it’s a culture cult. This makes whistleblowing and doing what’s right virtually impossible. Who wants to sacrifice everything? Only the scorned and mistreated or it has to be egregious enough to solicit public outcry.

V__ 7mo ago

Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done it this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely prevalent. I say this as a German. This is also reflected in the big political parties, which would rather keep these beliefs alive than inspire change. I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when enough other countries implement more progressive economic policies.

whiteboardr 7mo ago
I would disagree. The willingness to change is there, it's mostly the motives and what is being targeted where the problems are. We as a country lost our balls. Decisions are increasingly made on an emotional basis, and the poster child for this has been the politically calculated exit of nuclear power based on the Fukushima accident to gain an election win. Most of senior management is trying to act like suddenly they are some cool nimble startup CEO that can burn through cash until the subscription fees for lane keeping assists and heated seats are paying the bills. It's all buzzwords being thrown around without anyone really caring for reality. Just looking at how the "dress code" changed over the last 10 years in automotive is funny by itself. Hefty statements, zero backing and ever shrinking balls. The bill is going to be huge.
- soco 7mo ago
  I somehow have the feelings that you two actually agree quite a lot. Because there are two populations there: one who'd be able and willing to change, and the other busy to protect their own accounts and after me the deluge. It's all which one of these are at the buttons, and I reckon it's the second.
odiroot 7mo ago
> Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done it this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely prevalent. I say this as a German. Interestingly it's not only the domain of the conservatives (e.g. CDU/CSU) to cut any discussion this way. Social democrats (and their voters) use the same argument, just in instances where it fits their program (e.g. labour laws). > I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when enough other countries implement more progressive economic policies. The only party suggesting any such policies consistently fails to clear the 5% threshold as of late. Evidently, the electorate is satisfied with the status quo.

boondongle 7mo ago

For me its as simple as mature companies are extremely difficult to reorient towards working at a loss through R&D. People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking.

noosphr 7mo ago
China couldn't get a local ICE industry running no matter how many times it tried in the 70s, 80s and 90s. So they made a bet on the next technology. They not only didn't have a local industry, they knew they couldn't make one and adjusted government policy.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  They do actually make ICE cars and hybrids as well, it's not just electrics.
  - hangonhn 7mo ago
    They do but they were not on par with foreign competitors.
hangonhn 7mo ago
> People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking. I would add that despite joint ventures, China's domestic internal combustion engine industry never really caught up. In fact their best engines were made by wholly domestic companies but those were not nearly as good as those made by Western and Japanese companies. As Warren Buffet noted over a decade ago, BEV is an opportunity for China to simply skip over all of that and just leapfrog everyone else. So it's even better than greenfield. It's green field for them while allowing them to completely disrupt existing foreign competitors.

Spooky23 7mo ago

It's the standard innovators dilemma nonsense, with the added drama of the car case that the innovator (Tesla) shot itself in the foot due to a madman in charge. The entire ecosystem of automaking is just like tech - clusters of complimentary industries. There's a symbiotic relationship between Mercedes, Ford, BMW, GM, etc and their suppliers -- many of whom in the american case were former subsidiaries of the automaker. That's why Ford, GM, Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, etc have a hard time closing the deal on EV. The American car companies are more fucked because they've engineered the business around compliance requirements to mostly only make trucks. It's hard to eat your children. Meanwhile, BYD isn't run by a bipolar drug addict, and they are going to back up the truck, slowed down only by protectionism. I drove one when traveling, and it felt like driving a Tesla in 2015. For companies building cars in Germany, the US and to some extent Japan & Korea, we're living in a do-over of 1976, except China is Japan.

jandrese 7mo ago
There is another dimension to this. All of the legacy auto manufacturers, without exception, have been dragging their heels on EVs. Lots of people talk about corporate inertia and shareholders and whatnot forcing the companies to be irrational, but I don't think that's entirely correct. I think the executives at these companies have long since identified that EVs are a far more fundamental existential challenge than people normally understand. The reason I think so is that Internal Combustion Engines are the primary barrier to entry into the car market. In an all electric world they are once again open to competition from startups who can source the same commodity motors, batteries, controllers, and the like. The barriers to entry drop and it becomes a brand new world of competition from all sides. The only major stumbling block being regulatory (crash testing, etc...). Nobody in the industry wants that, so the best solution is to fight the EV adoption as long as they can. Had Tesla not been a company they would still be dragging their heels with compliance cars to this day. Of course countries without existing ICE manufacturers to protect, like China, are free to take control of the EV market and dominate the auto industry in the coming decades. An existential crisis for legacy automakers.
- throwaway_20357 7mo ago

theK 7mo ago

Its not only the automotive lobby to be fair. Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production, batteries and lately heat pumps. So yeah, the legacy industry lobbies are the problem but not exclusively the automaker ones.

danmaz74 7mo ago
> Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production, batteries Was it lobbies, or costs which aren't competitive with China?
- theK 7mo ago
  Afaik, It was lobbies and conservative goverents that chose to put the question up to the "free market", completely disregarding the fact that the competing geographies where heavily subsidizing those industries.
AnonymousPlanet 7mo ago
This is a very well researched essay regarding the solar panel industry in China and Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo I really recommend watching / reading sober assessments like this. This is the strategic decision that was the last nail in the coffin for European battery cell manufacturing: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery-cell-production-in-blow-to-europe-idUSKCN1GC2DY https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery... It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.

pkos98 7mo ago

As a German, I genuinely cannot comprehend this short-sightedness and ignorance: Our current Chancellor (Merz) publicly boasts that Germans work too few hours and calls on them to work more [0] implying this would generate more tax revenue. Yet working has arguably never been less rewarding for workers: Germany currently has the 2nd highest tax wedge among all OECD nations (≈48% for a single worker, nearly 13 percentage points above the OECD average) [2][3]. This is compounded by demand-side welfare measures for low earners such as Wohngeld (housing benefit) and pension supplements like Mütterrente ("Mothers' pension"), creating a massive redistribution from working people to non-working people. Meanwhile, the German government has spent years failing to fully prosecute the CumEx/CumCum tax fraud scandal, a scheme through which banks and investors systematically robbed the German state of an estimated €36 billion in tax revenues [4][5]. The contrast could not be more glaring: squeeze workers harder while letting financial fraudsters off easy. I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here. - [0] Merz urges Germans to work more CGTN (Feb 2026): https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must-work-harder-cites-China-after-official-visit-1L847d0EJqw/p.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must... - [1] EUFactCheck Merz's claim rated "Mostly False": https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-work-more-and-more-efficiently-again/ https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-wor... - [2] OECD Taxing Wages 2025 Germany: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/04/taxing-wages-2025-country-notes_16d47563/germany_59f2afde/510f880a-en.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... - [3] Tax Foundation Tax Burden on Labor, OECD 2024: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labor-oecd-2024/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo... - [4] CumEx-Files Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files - [5] Stanford GSB CumEx and CumCum Scandals: https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-financial-scandals-reveal-how-democratic-institutions-fail https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-fin...

master-lincoln 7mo ago
> I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here. You quit your job at a large US company because you do not see yourself building a future in Germany?

AnonymousPlanet 7mo ago

That is a very popular opinion and I've held it too for a very long time. Until I read an issue [1] of The Economist in 2020 and did some digging afterwards. Turns out, the real moat of any successful car industry so far wasn't brand recognition, lobbyists, tariffs, or the pleasing sound of a shutting car door. It's the combustion engine itself. Or rather the industry you're embedded in that provides the metallurgy and chemistry to reliably produce high quality engine blocks and seals. Because your engine needs to withstand high pressures and temperatures that go from below freezing all the way up to way over 2000K. And you also need the know how and experience to build all of that together. None of that can be exfiltrated as a zip file or wished into existence by party officials. The EV sidesteps all of that in one go. Now it's all down to who has the best batteries and who can do high quality assembly real cheap. Both points go to China. Why? The same reason: The surrounding industry. It's what you get from doing (even simple) electronics for decades, cultivating a competitive industry for assembly and high quality battery cells. The only hope for the incumbents was hydrogen instead of batteries because this again is engineering and seals. The alternative would have been to become really good at batteries themselves. However, Europe's best chance to get there, Bosch, decided in 2018 not to go that way [2]. Once you let all of that sink in, you realise the inevitability of the current situation. And they knew. All this time they knew. The rest was song and dance for politicians and shareholders. [1] https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/china-has-never-mastered-internal-combustion-engines https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/01/02/ch... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery-cell-production-in-blow-to-europe-idUSKCN1GC2DY https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery...

twoodfin 7mo ago
If the platform, power train, manufacturing is commoditized, shouldn’t that in theory be great news for existing brands with consumer trust and design competence?
- AnonymousPlanet 7mo ago
  That's the current hope. But do you know who also had consumer trust and design competence? Telefunken, AEG, Braun, Grundig, Blaupunkt, Loewe ... How many products of those brands are produced in Europe today, if at all? None of them had a moat as deep as the combustion engine.

CamperBob2 7mo ago

If people don't want to buy the EVs they're forced to make, what's their next move, in your view?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

thrance 7mo ago

This is exactly what happened with a minor nitpick: the lobbyists and shareholders that orchestrated it obtained what they wanted (a quick buck) and got out unharmed, free to think about their next enterprise. The workers will be the ones to bear the cost, along with the environment.