Hacker News Reader

For a century Germany's comparative advantage has been [mechanical] engineering. As a European I want (need?) Germany to succeed. Ergo: more of this, please.

View on HN

Yasa is a British company, for the record.

Their advantage was mechanical engineering. They have historically not done well with electrical systems. So this is a change - hopefully for the better.

That's not quite right.

For example Siemens and Bosch are large enterprises specialised in industrial scale electrical machines and parts (among other fields).

Infineon was spun off from Siemens 25 years ago an plays an important role in chip manufacturing for automative systems.

Electrical auxiliary stuff used to be and maybe still is a source of trouble. Power electronics should be fine, there's plenty of know-how available in the country, and with any luck, car companies won't have time to home-grow a mismanagement structure to fuck it up like they did with software.

Software and battery cells are the main challenges.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com