This is just part of the public blame game between management, ownership, unions and politicians to position themselves to take the smallest possible hit for their group. She represents VW employees and will want to blame everything on management mistakes and claim that labour cost does not matter.
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Of course, everyone has personal interests to fight for. The irony here is that shareholders also blame everything on management mistakes and no one portraits shareholders as “positioning themselves to take the smallest possible hit for the group”. Well, that’s the job of being a shareholder.
Back to quantifiable things:
- supply side issue 1: labor costs are higher in Germany. That 100% tariff on imported EVs will take care of that.
- supply side issue 2: VW strayed away from the people’s car path. If EV is really the future, where is the EV Polo? 80+k Euro ID Buzz is not helping to the 10+ million car annual sales. The Porsche and Lamborghini of VW group are Porsche and Lamborghini. Other brands should stay in their lane. This is management’s emotions gone wild.
- demand side issues: Toyota global production is 30% hybrids, and Toyota has sold the most cars around the world since the Great Recession.
It is an interesting mix of shareholders. The Porsche family has the majority of the vote. The state of Lower Saxony has 20% and can block a lot of things if they want. Add to this the Qatari investment fund to get to a great political mix.
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I see what you’re saying, but management isn’t really making it easy for themselves either. Just today, Volkswagen’s $5bn Rivian tie-up prompts dismay at software division. “We all learned about Rivian from the news,” said one senior Cariad engineer, adding that the partnership had unleashed uncertainty and frustration among the division’s 6,000 employees.
I think where VW is today is where the other German automakers will be a bit later. BMW and Mercedes are not saved by the brand name, their brand names are just postponing the inevitable.
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I have seen this movie before. From this perspective, workers at VW plants should grab the pitchforks. It was the software side that let all people down.
PS. if anyone is curious how the money was spent: competing with phone companies, whatsapp and MS Teams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQLcNZHbkBo
I thought CARIAD is based on Android Automotive and assumed that Android apps generally worked on CARIAD too. Or VW decided to develop their own apps?
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Correct. Android Auto but in a “premium” software format…whatever that means.
I did not pay attention to the CARIAD story before. The VW automotive cloud smells quite bad.
If anyone tells me about 50 TB of data per car per day, I’d do a bit of due diligence on those assertions. Apparently, VW management didn’t.
From a wider perspective, it’s a bunch of university kids that love hyperbolic language taking down thousands of honest workers that work with their hands. The world is not fair.
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Even without being an expert on automotive software, this indeed sounds ridiculous . 50TB is circa 50 hours of UNCOMPRESSED 4k video stream
Well, just wait until the insurance companies want to get their hands on that data.
The next meltdown: BMW announced a giant recall of over 1,500,000 cars covering many models–just caught the end of the announcement on Baden Württemberg radio…and the brakes came from Continental. That’s 3 German companies in trouble.
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No action needed in Canton Aargau, they’ve all upgraded theirs to Brembos.
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If I understood well, it’s only 2023-2025 models, the ones with beaver teeth 
Anyway, the BMW recall check website. Use chassis number
https://www.bmw.ch/de/topics/angebote-und-services/service-und-wartung/recall.html
BMW announced “high triple-digit million” cost in Q3 due to this. Continental announced “mid double-digit million” provisions 
But we digress. This was meant to be a thread to complain about the Green Party. Or capitalism. Or something.
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Yeah, first they destroyed the design, now they are destroying the company. Why we only have old collectibles. Maybe someone should tell Tom1234 that he’d better watch out for newish black BMWs with no brakes.
I think the “new” designs (which personally for me looks awful) are really meant for China and the US where things have to be “in your face”, big, aggressive and “bold”. But then again, the design language is no excuse for technical faults leading to 1.5m cars recall. This is massive.
VW have now officially cancelled the „no-firings“ contract they had with the unions.
As for the Rivian thing: employees and even management at CARIAD learned the news from the press…
…that and the no plant closure Klausel, welcome to the 21 century VW.
Nothing really new. Intel, the computer CPU maker, was always pushing for self-production. Recently they had a huge gov financial support for bringing production back to USA. I was ROTFL when I’ve read the news that they had just offloaded the newest CPU manufacture to China to be able to stay as a competitive player!
The problem is that patriotic ambition is on one side, business is on the other side of the scale. Intel made a f*up with the latest chip production (they are literally decaying within months). Besides they just couldn’t get their fab technology down to 4nm lithography as the Chinese TSMC offers (for example AMD chips are made by TSMC). I see it as to-be or not-to-be on the market, either they cede everything back to China where the expertise is, or they’re busted from the market.
So what will happen with their $$$$ billion dollars fabs recently moved to USA, if they are already obsolete on the market?
Taiwanese, not Chinese. It’s even in the name Taiwan SeMiConductor.
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I just read that VW will be letting go of 30.000 employees.
That sucks.