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How about the car industry making bold moves into EV production instead? They have fought EVs tooth and nail, and lobbied to retain the fossile fuel market forever.
We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas
free market advocates become anti free market when china comes into play
The threat is your disinterest in battery, charging and EV technology?
German cars have become the same plastic crap with the same spying software, but still at double the price.
I would happily buy a 2010 level German car if they would still make it.
They refused to make the transformation from gasoline to electro vehicles.
Not really. China is trying to wage economical war with the world.
Chinese EVs are made by workers who live in cages and work 12+ hour days making $500/mo in a country that's only 80% cheaper than the US. IE $500 is like living off $650/mo in the US if your living expenses were paid (and your home was a cage coffin). You're basically an indentured servant because you can leave, but you'll be homeless because you can't save enough to live in the city.
Second, the CCP subsidize the shit out of EVs. Then sells them across the world.
These two things are designed to destroy the auto industry across the world. The sad thing is most people are to idiotic to realize it. They just go "I wAnT cHeAp EvS duurrr". Plus, at least domestic Chinese EVs are scary AF, they have an insanely higher rate of thermal runaway. You can have you cheap EV at the cost of helping destroy your domestic economy, just don't park that shit within 590 feet of my house.
I think you're forgetting about Tesla. Long before China was the competitor Tesla was kicking European carmakers' asses and they were not even interested in responding. They ignored EV for about a decade and then when EU tried to push them by banning ICE cars they fought against it. Yes, is China beating them now but they made it really easy for them.
China has always been the land of the cheap workforce. What’s the reality today is robot factories, rapid concept to design to delivery pipelines. Essentially Europe, Japan and the USA have lost the race to innovate.
And the ccp cars are garbage/unsafe/rolling spy machines, but if they flood the market they can bankrupt the the auto industry and cause chaos.
All new cars are spy machines. As for unsafe, we haven’t seen that in Australia.
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...
its not that a certain minister of economy has called them out on their wrong course 5 years ago. But he was shut down as fearmongering and pushing a political agenda.
Folks were saying this when Tesla released model S, and did a reasonable job on the timeline. That's 14 years ago. But those were tree hugging fanatics who don't understand the importance of short term stock prices.
Who could have seen this comming...corruption catching up... Who could have seen it coming that bribing politicians to allow them producing their product, that the people dont want anymore, wouldnt result in people wanting their product!!? Truely mind boggeling /s
The so called "chinese threat" is the chinese not buying their cars anymore?
Euro cars are known to be finicky and when something goes wrong it's also always a write off unless it's under warranty.
Have they tried making cars that don't break after 3-5 years again?
Best I can do is put cameras all over it and track everything that happens inside and out of the car "for your safety".
I mean, most American models come broken from the factory...
🇯🇵 America is only worth talking about for trucks. Japan, China and sometimes even Korea do normal cars better
That would break them. Building cars that last means less demand for the next new car. Planned obsolescence is the only way to make sure the next round of vehicles has a market, regardless of whether its a significant enough improvement to justify the cost.
Doesn't sound quite right to me - isn't Toyota a top brand globally, and doing just fine building cars engineered to last hundreds of thousands of miles? Somehow there's plenty of market for their cars year after year.
Different business model. Toyota has the Lexus brand, but they rest most of their business model on the shrinking mass market. It works great... when there's a significant amount of money in the low- to mid-tier markets. Volkswagen group, Mercedes, etc. target upper-mid to luxury/sport markets. Their target market is people with money who want status symbols, not just tools. It has to run flawless, while it runs, but it doesn't have to run forever because it's just as much a fashion accessory as it is for transportation; and fashion trends need regular refreshes.
If you target that market with a super-reliable product, you get an Instant Pot. The original models were designed to be damn near bullet proof and last forever. People will take those things to the grave with them, but once everyone who would consider them had one?... the bottom fell out of the market and they didn't diversify into other appliances in time to make up for the lost revenue from their primary line of business. Fell into chapter 11 and got snapped up by a bigger fish. The new ones suck so bad... but it keeps people replacing them.
Line go up.
China is not the threat since Germany can always impose tariffs. As the article points out, benefits to workers are too high. Germany must explore other industries besides car manufacturing. This is where it's important for Germany to encourage immigrants with talent to study and work there. The AfD will exploit the warnings of job collapse to gain power. Hitler rose to power when the democratic Weimar Republic couldn't control inflation.
Tariffs won’t help because while they’re losing across the board, the most important market for VW, and also the one with the most drastic losses, is not Germany but China. They bet a lot on expansion into China and once reached ~20% market share there, but that has since dropped to half. For BEV specifically it’s abysmal, so the outlook is also bad: BEV has rapidly risen to nearly 60% of the Chinese retail market but VW’s share is in the low single digits.
Good point.
Germany must explore other industries besides car manufacturing.
This! Our industry is far too dependent on the car market. Car ownership is going down and people don't need to buy new cars all the time. The market is saturated. When I look around, everybody is driving a relatively new car that won't have to be replaced for years. It's just not a growth industry - and by the love of god, it shouldn't be one.
Germany could explore other ways of making money such as tourism and film making. Encouraging foreign students to study in Germany would bring tuition money.
Or simply other technologies. Instead of cars, heat pumps and ACs, both in high demand. Electrolysers for converting excess renewable energy into H2. Electric bikes. Electronic chips. Drones. Whatever.