76
German car industry warns of job collapse unless ‘bold decisions’ made to address Chinese threat
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
76 points (94.2% liked)
World News
57010 readers
1799 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But this is capitalism. If German manufacturers can’t compete, they should shut down. Survival of the fittest and free-markets etc etc. there will be job losses but the German people should ask their leaders why that happened
A fair argument can be made that the Chinese government considers EV an imperative and interferes and subsidizes, so it's not fully free market. Thus any country with industry competing with China needs to decide if they care and if they care, how to respond to advantage conferred by China government policies. Whether that's similar incentives for their domestic industry and/or tariffs to try to level the playing field.
Volkswagen was a state funded company until the sixties ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
New factories, battery research and stuff like that are heavily subsidized for German car makers as well.
Maybe China is subsidizing more, but maybe that only speaks for sound economic decisions in China, like
A. they have the money, apparently
B. they subsidize future technologies instead of fabulating about e-fuels and whatnot.
Exactly. They insisted China become capitalist then complain when they do capitalism.
Article doesn't really point to Chinese vehicles being the primary reason though- it's that demand is down for cars in Europe.
That said, it's not really free market capitalist anyway for China to heavily subsidize EV production.
Chinese car makers aren't really more subsidized than Europeans and US. Actually we're only seeing the brands that survived the internal competition of the Chinese car market, where a ton of brands failed and died.
What we're seeing are the brands that survived that competition through extreme optimization, at a level no other car manufacturer had to reach before. And they did that in a growing market of 1.5 billion people.
Why should they struggle when competing with an aging industry with aging production modes that only address ~600m people? Especially when those companies offer objectively worse products at worse prices?
"Objectively"
And just because China had companies go under doesn't mean they aren't still subsidized to the hilt.
I do enjoy though people that are normally pro Union, pro worker, etc. essentially arguing that these people's jobs don't matter and we'll take subsidized foreign cars just because they're cheaper.
You think European car brands aren't subsidized?
And this has nothing to do with struggling European car brands? https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/eu-relent-combustion-engines-ban-after-auto-industry-pressure-2025-12-16/
Lol you speak as if teslas haven't been heavily subsidized for decades. The difference is that chinese ev's are cheaper and deliver good quality.
Teslas are American and of course have been subsidized. But the article is about Volkswagen and German companies...