Germany's auto industry: suppliers' confidence waning
dw.com
dw.com
Their government introduces more bureaucracy for companies, discouraging investments there. Berlin had a chance to take #1 spot as the tech capital of Europe post-Brexit, instead we rarely see any new unicorns coming from there.
Auto industry is another example - Volkswagen and Volvo groups are #4 and #5 when it comes to battery-only electric cars, and they're behind Tesla, BYD and SAIC (both Chinese). They're not innovators, they're still behind and I don't know if they'll catch up.
As an EU citizen I feel more and more negative about the economic future here, with UK having left and the biggest countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) struggling to stay relevant, especially in tech industry where AI can soon turn cause a major power shift.
Yea, it's rather tragic. It's especially visible in tech sector. There is basically no success large player/story in EU (Spotify is more licensing and Skype was moved out) and instead of fixing the environment, EU just adds regulations and fines giants from US.
Let's regulate metaverse, let's regulate AI.... Large players from overseas will pay lawyers and small ones will avoid EU and local ones are stifled.
Tech ... nothing. Automotive ... will be killed by Chinese EVs (good luck with tarifs when most profits of domestic OEM are from Chine)... Manufacturing... Most of it is gone, but some are still hanging on (Siemens et al). I guess there is a fasion/brand and turism.
In Germany, there are still people who think that German ICEs are our competitive advantage...
If you tell a lie enough times, you start believing it yourself.
The Human race is basically screwed and civilization will collapse in a few decades anyway. Most of your children's lives will be spent either starving, freezing, drowning, burning or fighting.
I wanted germany to make more sense but NL seems better on every metric. Except elevation.
It is ultimately the German culture that is to blame. Germans are way too conservative and risk-averse. And pessimistic to boot. You can say all you want about bureaucracy and all that ease-of-doing-business gibberish, but ultimately it is simply that Germans do not believe they can actually innovate and are too scared to take the risk. And this is true across the whole of society, from the plumbers to the board members of Siemens and Bosch.
I could write a whole book about the problems with German culture. This is really only one aspect of a much bigger issue.
Maybe it's just a very German thing to not have too many children - if it weren't for immigration, the country would have peaked in population in the 70s.
Tough to increase native population when you don't build enough housing because you have CO2 caps, and you also turned the existing housing stock in a speculative casino table designed to enrich the few asset owners and the banks, and hoping unrestricted immigration that will suppress wages and prop up housing prices enough to get economic "growth".
Basically, Germany is just burning the candle on both ends, economically speaking.
I would speculate that there is cultural identity and dynamism value in having your own independent currency, just as there is in having your own language.
Germany's economy for example would be more potent if they weren't on the Euro. Artificially cheap exports is like a sugar high that is ultimately unhealthy for them, they have ridden that horse too far (relied on it to too great of an extent).
> Their government introduces more bureaucracy for companies, discouraging investments there.
I made the mistake of trying to build a startup in Germany. Not only is the overall total level of taxation absolutely killing us, not to mention the absolute lack of R&D support that is available almost everywhere else in the EU, the local tax authority just handed me an assessment for 2024 and pls pay up in 6 weeks time.
I’m writing them a “no, thank you” note because I’m shutting up shop. We are self funded, were about to reach MVP and look for some seed funding, and the German taxation essentially killed us at short notice.
There are two types of businesses that can work in Germany: small businesses and massive enterprises. Everyone else is forced to stay in their place.
My personal story is just anecdata, but the German (and European, in general) startup stories are relatively few and far between, so I know I am part of a wider pattern.
It is clear that the EU Regulates (and taxes!) whilst the USA innovates. Once I dig myself out of this taxation hole I’m trying again in the USA.
Germany is essentially the oldest nation in the world at the median (very close to or beyond Japan's figure). The median closing in on being 50 years old, is going to tend to crimp the output of the labor base vs the population scale (active workers vs retired ratio). The only offset to that is either extreme productivity increases (have to make your remaining workers far more productive), or immigration.
I rarely hear anything about the kind of high-skill immigration efforts that, for example, Canada is known to pursue the past few decades. Germany should be a tech juggernaut.
Germany had its Heyday when the technologies it specialised in – namely cars, industrial equipment, and components where at the peak of the technological demand curve. But this peak has long ago moved to software and Germany has nothing to offer in this regard (yes, I am aware of SAP.)
Having said that – and despite what this article says – I’m confident that Germany’s car manufacturers will be able to leverage their (in many regards world leading) abilities to succeed in the electric car sector. But Germany’s economy as a whole needs a fundamental change of direction if it is to succeed in the next decades.
The software itself may be bad - but their ability to capture value is incredible.
Looking at the timescales of climate chaos I'd say European social democracies will not be the worst place to be for the next 30years (and no amount of software will help you unless you are part of the oligarchy...).
And if you think we'll all freeze and starve: if we do as the US currently tells us (this is indeed a problem) we can still burn a lot of lignite (which is likely not much worse than leaky fracking fields....).
It really isn't equivalent, this opinion just reads like copium.
If I jump ship to a better paying job to capture more value, am I now the "rentier oligarchy"? No, I just move to where the money is as it benefits me and also benefits the state who's taxing me to fund social welfare.
Similarly it's the job of any country to do the same and orient its economy to where it can capture more value (hopefully in an ethical and environmentally friendly way), as staying behind and falling to do so means less wealth, less tax revenues, and less welfare for its citizens.
>we can still burn a lot of lignite
It will also heavily reduce your lifespan, which is good for the state I guess, as that means less pensions will have to be paid out.
So what is "capturing value" other than rent? And yes, I would hope that water wars were copium, but they might be a bitter reality soon...
> If I jump ship to a better paying job to capture more value, am I now the "rentier oligarchy"?
Yes that's fine, I guess you are anyways not very interested in community (which seems to be the thing with many people around...) - btw: what exactly will happen in that place if you have a car accident and can't work for 1-2 years?
> No, I just move to where the money is as it benefits me and also benefits the state who's taxing me to fund social welfare.
Good. But don't complain once you wake up in a dystopian, oligarchic nightmare.
> as staying behind and falling to do so means less wealth, less tax revenues, and less welfare for its citizens.
The US is clearly leading in the money metric and yet most metrics much more associated with human welfare (such as lifespan) are trending down... In that metric even Cuba is now better than the US ... There might be more to that than you assume...
> It will also heavily reduce your lifespan,
I guess either it's ChatGPT here or you are very deep in copium-territory...
Offering better products and services than your competition.
>Yes that's fine, I guess you are anyways not very interested in community
Where does it say I can't care as much about the community despite me getting a better paying job? In fact, me getting a better paying job helps my community because I'll spend the extra money there at shops, bars, cafes and barbers.
You're clutching at straws at this point embarrassing yourself further.
>Good. But don't complain once you wake up in a dystopian, oligarchic nightmare.
Damn, I didn't know Austria and Poland are distopic nightmares.
>The US is clearly leading in the money metric and yet most metrics much more associated with human welfare (such as lifespan) are trending down
No, Switzerland and Luxemburg are leading the money metric and yet are far from living nightmares.
You keep trying to die on this whataboutism hill by brining in the US in the discussion at every point even though I never mentioned it once.
>I guess either it's ChatGPT here or you are very deep in copium-territory...
Guess breathing in all the lignite Feinstaub got to you good, huh?
Ok, now look back to the life of ordinary swiss when things around were not good (aka worldwar 2 rationing. do you really think germany, france and italy will not pull a ukraine/belarus on them if they need to?) ...
Can you tell me, how normal people will prosper in these countries if things go bad around? Spoiler: they won't.
> You keep trying to die on this whataboutism hill by brining in the US
For all matters, people in Germany are EU citizens. They go down and up with the EU. I don't think it is a relevant comparison what some EU-landlocked microstates/money-laundromats do now if you think about the future: There is the EU. There is the US. There is China. There is the 3rd World. Largely EU might not be the worst bet all things considered (incl. now)...
> Damn, I didn't know Austria and Poland are distopic nightmares.
And now tell me about the innovative industries there which germany doesn't have?
sadly politicians give in to their lobbying so it seems they are betting on fossil fuel cars until it's to late, because it makes more profit
This is pretty spot on. People voted socialism, people got socialism, shrouded in green utopianism. There is no positive vision of the future, only guilt and shame about the things we consume and hare-brained schemes about where energy is supposed to come from. Redistribution without concern for value generation sums it up pretty well.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
Efficiency and electrification will also reduce it. As we try to get to net zero we're expected to double or triple the supply of electricity, while still reducing primary energy as we reduce the colossal amount of fossil fuels wasted as heat during burning them.
German car companies are not vertically integrated and are bad at software. They will get beaten badly on price and software quality, and consumer loyalty won’t last. They will have to reinvent themselves if they want to survive.
BMW makes pretty good cars, but most Europeans can't afford them. In Germany (which has favorable taxes on cars) the average new car costs €36,000. BMW has nothing at that price. Chinese cars will probably first compete in the budget segment. Only after having established a reputation for making good cars will Chinese brands try to compete directly in the 50k-100k segment, which has consumers who have car ownership as a big part of their identity.
If you look at the best braking cars (fastest 60 to 0 and smallest distance), excluding the supercars and hypercars, it's all Audi, Mercedes, BMW and especially Porsche.
A lot can be criticized about german cars but not braking well isn't part of it.
> In Germany (which has favorable taxes on cars) the average new car costs €36,000. BMW has nothing at that price.
A BMW 1-series start at 30 K EUR. Sure it's a "little" car but so are many of the cars people shall buy at 36 K EUR.
Unsurprisingly the BMW 1-series is nearly the best selling BMW series in the EU: neck to neck with the 3-series.
There are sure a lot of BMW 1-series where I live now (a country neighboring Germany).
I don't think BMW, VW and even Mercedes are going to give up that easily. They are trying to shift to EVs and I wouldn't rule out a country who's been producing the finest cars for decades yet (especially jot VW, who's not exactly been the first to adapt new technologies).
Kazakhstan: 27,748 tonnes (i.e. 20.1%);
Australia: 25,804 (18.7%);
Niger: 24,787 (17.9%);
Uzbekistan: 22,197 (16.1%).
Only Niger is in Africa, and France has 10 years stored in case of geopolitical conflicts.
Every Germany manufacturer has EV models, and there are a quite a manufacturers so that means a there lot of German EV's to choose from. That's because their government has put in strong tax incentives towards EV's. And most Germans seem to prefer to buy German cars and that goes for EV's, so you see of lot of German EV's in Germany.
But ... all the German EV's I saw were their existing ICE car bodies retrofitted with batteries and an electric motor. Right down to still having the exhaust hump going down the centre of the car. Even to a pleb like me it was obvious this layout sucked compared to say a something that was built from the ground up to be an EV, like a Tesla. Move outside of Germany, and German EV's are rare - true EV's like Tesla's dominate.
I guess the cost of re-doing the car body design must be huge. But until they do it I'd avoid them. And I'd say if they don't make the investment, they are doomed to suffer the fate of the dinosaurs.
German EVs are not rare in the rest of europe either