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The car industry in Germany is being Nokia'd. The iPhone didn't win because the US had central planning.

I'm not convinced at all free market economics are holding us back. Rather other parts of the world are leapfrogging us despite not adopting it.

It was always obvious EVs would be the future. I remember being at a friend's party in Germany more than a decade ago, talking to some guests who worked in the auto industry. Told them about this new upcoming car company called Tesla and how it would transform the entire transportation sector and eat their lunch. The entire group laughed me out of the room and talked about the amazing research they were doing on "clean diesel" or something, I kid you not.

It's simply a combination of innovator's dilemma, complacency and no appetite for risk taking.

You are both wrong, it's the other way around - the free market economics are outside the EU. Here is the EUSSR. Just try producing something in "green" Europe, have a look at the amount of carbon tax you have to pay, then you will see.

Yes, I often wonder if China's main advantage here is the lack of an incumbent ICE industry holding things back.

Apparently the Japanese manufacturers downfall. Tens of thousands of almost impossible to fire ice car engineers and factory workers.

> I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though.

This is wrong. In the past German car makers made a great profit from selling cars in China and had a really good time. Now the Chinese have learned to build their own cars, which lead to a significant loss of market share for German and other foreign car makers.

But German car makers are still quite profitable. For example BMW just announced a profit of 7.68B Euros, and are still the largest exporter of cars in the USA (yes, exporter). The race is still on, and despite strong competition from Chinese car manufacturers, German car makers are everything but "shredded into pieces".

Plus the above example of the culture of finger pointing, hence avoiding accountability for the lack of vision.

Getting into the game too late and wasting a ton of cash on cars that miss actual target-user’s needs and wallets.

Unfortunately, this is a pattern having emerged in Germany since quite a while - it’s either the pandemic, putin, the government, china or whatever is en vogue to put blame on.

German engineering prowess is dying a slow death caused by their own ignorance of their arrogance.

They are still selling cars for the badge but people are slowly realizing that things have changed.

And don't get me started on the quality of their automotive software. I just bought an Audi so the pain is still fresh but after two weeks I'm still not able to properly login to my car - actually, it's 4 (four! yes!) different logins, and one of them is stuck to Italian. To call Audi software "garbage" is an understatement, and if there's anyone working there in here, yes I stand by my statement.

I live in Germany, and have heard the same story for years - only with Tesla instead of "Chinese cars". And look, who is dying now? Meanwhile, my ID.7 is just an excellent car. Totgesagte leben länger, and such. The problems for German car makers were never that they could not deliver BEV, but that people would not buy them in numbers which would justify complete transition. Manufacturers like BMW, who were driving a more cautious, dual BEV/Hybrid approach for the same model did much better, and it is not like an BMW i4 is not a very good BEV.

Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper. They also send all used batteries back to China, leaving no pollution to your country. But such thing won't last forever.

> Because of low human rights advantage, their products are much cheaper.

Honestly, this is strongly misleading.

Chinese goods are not primarily cheap because they are subsidised by communists, or because of lax environmental regulations, or because of prisoner labor-- the primary reason (and its not even close) are low wage levels. Chinese manufacturing pays an average $25k/year ($15k without adjusting for purchasing parity!!) for a 49h week. No western industrialized country even wants to compete with that.

You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).

> You are very correct that this is not gonna last forever though, because wages are rising in China, too, which will probably lead to a bunch of manufacturing moving to another low-wage country (maybe India, or even Africa in the future).

Already happening. Was in China recently - the driver of the rideshare I took said he was driving now because his electronics company outsourced manufacturing to Indonesia.

Other than what the other person said I don't think it's just wages. I'd say decades of having western manufacturing exported there in large part because of those wages, stability, etc leads to a country that's now just simply good at manufacturing. With diversified supply options, plenty of experienced human capital, automation skills and companies. A different place like India or some place in africa can have those low wages and plenty of people but lack the supply chains, automation experience and infrastructure, etc

You are absolutely correct that just low wages by themselves are not enough to attract manufacturing on a global scale.

There are a lot of prerequisites (power/transport infrastructure, capable workers, political stability, organizational know-how) plus also network effects and advantages from local demand, and Chinese government did a really good job at providing all this over the last half-century.

But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.

I also really wanted to stress this because people love to gloss over this wage-gap, and pretend that US manufacturing would get an immediate resurgence if we only abolished environmental regulations, or gave industry juicy tax-breaks/incentives, or invested heavily into relevant education programs-- but IMO those arguments are mostly a sham, and the core problem is that US workers are neither willing to work for $5/h nor are consumer willing to pay the difference.

>But the majority of those would already be met in a lot of western economies, and wage IS the number one factor to build factories in China instead of, say, Italy.

It may be the biggest but at this point i think the combined corpus of other factor outweighs it insofar that it would take a long time for things to slowly come back. At least for factories that aren't sweatshop work or primarily manual conveyor belt work.

Even in those later ones (I did automation for one in the food industry that literally can't move far abroad) it's insane how much of the endless amount of components that keep it all running came from china.

I think your best bet other than just wage is both education adjustments and gov incentive that works primarily from the bottom up rather than from the top down like countries in general in the west tend to try. After all if i get a tax credit or grant or what have you for locally produced....idk keyboards...the cheapest way for me is still to get every component from china and to assemble here using a PnP machine manufactured in...you guessed it.