12 ms·
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 h
by 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 agoI'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 agoNo 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.
- kspacewalk2 7mo agoShouldn't whistle-blowing be much easier in a more transactional work culture where everyone knows you can't count on the company and they'll fuck you over next Thursday on a whim of some consultant or an ambitious upper manager?
- reactordev 7mo agoThat entirely depends on the current economy. If they know they might have opportunities elsewhere, toot that whistle..
- gadflyinyoureye 7mo agoSadly no. The world is litigious. The expection is that a wealthy corporation will crush anyone who holds it accountable.
- meindnoch 7mo agoWeimar 2.0 Electric Boogaloo
- atmosx 7mo agoIf you look at their stock performance and management compensation the last 25 years, much of the responsibility seems to lie with the manufacturers themselves. They had roughly two decades to adapt, but instead they often relied on strategies like pressuring German workers with the possibility of relocating production to Poland to keep wages down, while investing little in research and development during a period when sales were strong and new markets, such as China, were opening up.
- throwaway_20357 7mo agoThere must be more to it. German automakers did belong to the top 10 (for some periods even top 5) R&D spenders world-wide. It seems they just did not spend it wisely. Similarly, the claim they "kept wages down" seems to require some nuance. VW workers are known to be very well paid. From the outside it seems like these companies became large behemoths who were not able to spend their R&D money wisely and their outsized pay packages forcing them to offer their products at uncompetitive prices.
- riedel 7mo agoAs a university computer scientist, I saw our graduates hardly getting job in automotive directly while mechanical engineers got all the good jobs for years. Then about 10 years ago the opposite happened: people quit their PhDs because industry was hiring as many CS /AI people they could get. Industry understood that they needed to invest (even it was already a bit late). However, they IMHO failed to turn scale that talent into sustainable innovation. Many people I know left again automotive. I think industry struggled quite a bit to translate engineering leadership to a digital age in many parts. I think it was easier for pure EV manufacturers to embrace also other digital innovations.
- raxxorraxor 7mo agoSoftware need to interface almost all parts and electronics in a vehicle. Since car makers outsourced these parts, interfacing them took a lot of work. Here manufacturers like Tesla were clearly at an advantage since they controlled all components. That is a nightmare situation for software that already started later in the development process.
- flakeoil 7mo agoThe fact that Angela Merkel closed down all nuclear power plants was probably a big part of the lower interest in EVs in recent year. Although they invested a lot in solar and wind, the solid base of electricity generation disappeared and thus the trust in electricity for transport disappeared amongst automotive management and the population at large.
- ffsm8 7mo ago[flagged]
- actionfromafar 7mo agoSo funny that the Green Party and Putin fit like hand in glove. Natural gas is somehow Very Good but nuclear is Very Bad.
- badpun 7mo ago"It's funny because it's true". Parts of the German green movement (esp. the anti-nuclears) were actively funded by the KGB.
- terhechte 7mo agoAny proof for this claim?
- OKRainbowKid 7mo agoWhat are you talking about? Greens are neither pro-gas nor pro-Russia. They were amongst those warning previous governments of energy dependence on Russia, and were basically the most decisively pro-Ukranian party in the previous government. They also weren't the ones who made the decision to shut down the remaining nuclear plants, despite what "conservatives" would like you to believe.
- nine_k 7mo agoNot running on Russian gas for a few more years might have some nonlinear effects around 2022 :-/
- oytis 7mo ago> It's not as simple as 100% of this is on the car manufacturers. Another big lobbyist is chemical industry. They are very reliant on gas.
- raxxorraxor 7mo agoThe problem is that there wasn't a correction of these business policies. It still is the same as before, engineering talent gets outsourced and software and more frequently also hardware parts is something that Germany despises completely by now. You are in sales or legal, anything else is secondary.