BYD are already planning one in Hungary.
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well played 
Please allow me to rephrase. It hides the weight well to the eyes, but the 2 tons should be felt while driving.
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Well, Habeck at long last gets his will. He said years ago that Germany doesn’t need a car or fossil fuels industry, the future lies elsewhere.
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He can use that for a fairy tale when the Greens get finally kicked out.
Once upon a time there was a minister that couldn‘t feel anything for Germany and rejoiced when the industry left the country and people couldn‘t afford heatings, cars……
Years ago Joschka Fischer, one of the founding greenies warned that the Green Party is splitting and they are going to become a nasty almost Marxist party that has the potential to ruin Germany,
They laughed at Fischer, nobody is laughing now,
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I am no friend of the Greens. But in all fairness, they have been in the federal government for less than 3 years and Germany’s manufacturing output has been in decline since 2017.
In other words, for 3 years they supported the industrial decline of Germany.
As if that was the only level that counts.
Blame the greens, blame the immigrants. How about the car industry waking up to the facts of modern life. It is no longer 1950. More private motor cars no longer means an increase in life quality. The move to electric will improve air quality - here the motor industry was/is as bad as the tobacco industrial for denial of the problem. Electric will not solve congestion problems. Public transport in its many possible forms might just. And there may also be climate benefits. The motor industry will evolve, it will have to.
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Here is an article from Frankfurter Allgemeine dated November 2021 that speaks about ongoing worries regarding Volkswagen plant utilization and risk of 30.000 jobs getting lost. The article was published a week before the Scholz cabinet was formed and the Greens entered the federal government for the first time.
Solving problems starts with analysing the causes. Maybe simplistic slogans are not as helpful as some of you think.
Actually blame capitalism and the share holder value, China does it cheaper.
For decades now the big companies have been looking to China for cheap stuff with dollar signs in their eyes and monies in their excited hands.
And now they are astonished, nay, dumbfounded now that China has developed the knowhow to take them to the cleaner.
“Der Kapitalismus frißt seine Kinder!” Capitalism eats its own children, is a quote I have always attribute to either Marx or Engels, but it is a quote that can´t be found on the internet in the last few years, so I can´t be sure.
Funny because one post above you complained a about the Greens becoming marxist. Which one is it?
I don’t know whom to blame but the ambition of the European Commission to switch to green cars (and we don’t really have lithium) will ruin the auto industry across Europe, not only Germany.
Instead, we will import cheap Chinese cars. Is it what people want?
Sorry to say that, but that’s the reality. We deliberately shoot ourselves in the foot, leaving the free space for China. And it’s not a process that started yesterday; it started decades ago with the decisions of most companies to move their production in China, under the mantra that we will become service economies. Needless to say the effects on the society were not positive.
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In Switzerland there are two Green Parties, one Left and the other Centre.
In my youth it was the Japanese car industry that was destroying the British with better, cheaper products. The Germans weathered that storm amazingly well. Now it is the Chinese who threaten with their cheap products - that is the issue for the west. Onn the other hand, NZ now depends on agricultural exports to China in the same way as it used to depend exports to the UK in the fifties and sixties. The world changes, economies have to adapt regardless of the mix of socialism/capitalism. The Greens are not the enemy - they (most of them) may just be your friend.
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Compared to the US and most European countries, Germany still has a high share of industry in its economy. It survived the first China wave quite well because its industry was high value add and was not as easy to replace as textile or electronics. Now there is a second China wave which is a much bigger threat because they have learned and spend massive amounts of money on subsidies. This is a general issue and of course the high cost of energy in Europe does not help in the energy-intensive sectors.
That said, Volkswagen has many problems of its own making. The state of Lower Saxony is a significant minority shareholder and the role of unions has historically be very strong. I would argue they have had a cost problem for a long time, but it was easy as long as they made loads of money in China which accounts for a third of their sales. This is over now. It also does not help that - at least in my view - most of their electric models are terribly unattractive and only sold with subsidies.
As for the Greens, they do many things wrong. Worst is the cheque-book industrial policy of Habeck that is aimed at “lighthouses” (= shiny headlines) and disincentivizes innovation and efficiency. One other thing that one can partly attribute to the Greens (or the Green Zeitgeist) is the intrusive EU sustainability directive that makes industry waste resources on reporting and documenting without any actual benefit to the environment.
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Adapt so well as to destroy themselves and accommodate others…
To be honest the British car Industrie Committed Ritual suicide. It had nothing to do with Japan.
Habeck said that in 2011. And he still acts accordingly.
Our opinions are nice, but usually people inside know better. I assume works council is something like the Arbeitnehmervertretung here in Switzerland.
Works council chief Daniella Cavallo said in an interview on Volkswagen’s intranet that its management had made “many wrong decisions” in recent years, including not investing in hybrids or being faster at developing affordable battery-electric cars.
Instead of plant closures, the board should be reducing complexity and taking advantage of synergies across the Volkswagen group’s plans, Cavallo argued, criticising the company’s “documentation madness” and “salami-slicing tactics”.
On the hybrids side, Toyota is doing great with hybrids and 30% of global Toyota sales are hybrid.
Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, scorns hybrids, saying it makes no sense to have two propulsion systems under the hood. Consumers don’t seem to care. Toyota offers more than two dozen hybrid or plug-in hybrid models, and they make up almost 30 percent of its sales, much higher than at most other automakers.
On the affordable BEV side, the Chinese manufacturers are quite competitive. The VW ID.2, or a electric Polo, is planned to be available for sale by the end of 2025. So, the comments from the worker’s council about being late are not that crazy.