[HN Gopher] The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future
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The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future
Author : mariuz
Score : 199 points
Date : 2026-03-09 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (europeancorrespondent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (europeancorrespondent.com)
| dinkblam wrote:
| everything in germany's economy is going downhill, the troubles
| in their car industry is just one symptom (but not the cause)
| gigatree wrote:
| Uh oh
| oytis wrote:
| Do not worry, the army is going downhill too
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| What is the cause?
| lm28469 wrote:
| imho there are multiple, starting with the pension and
| healthcare system which are not sustainable with the current
| demography trend, which pushed them into going all in with
| immigration, which fractured whatever was left of german
| identity (which was arguably already wiped out after ww2 and
| the cold war). Taxes are going up, retirement age is
| increasing, pensions are decreasing, public services are
| getting worse year after year, there is nothing young people
| can focus on, nothing they can expect to have better than
| their parents or grand parents, most will never own their
| place. The self sabotage of the energy sector certainly
| didn't help. No long term vision + no clear way to
| improvement + no sense of appartenance = game over, and this
| is hitting most of the west at once, it's all about
| individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on
| these principles.
| oytis wrote:
| > it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't
| build societies on these principles
|
| Lots of real problems listed, but such a non-sequitur
| conclusion. US is built on these principles, China seems to
| be more individualistic and consumerist than Germany too.
| If anything, a big problem in Germany is low ambition as
| the societal norm. A bit of consumerism could actually help
| with that, as to consume you need to earn, and to earn, you
| need some ambition.
| lnsru wrote:
| Tax system and IG Metall salary tables will kill ambition
| very quickly. The highest salary groups do not guarantee
| comfy lifestyle for the corresponding areas anymore.
| Giving away half of salary as mandatory insurance and
| paying 19% value added tax from the rest is just
| insulting. Don't forget the rents in 2026. It's again new
| all time high. It does not pay off to work anymore.
| oytis wrote:
| Yeah, to me it seems that instead of fighting
| individualism, Germany needs to make sure that it pays
| off. Higher taxes for ownership, lower taxes for income
| from one's work for example.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > US is built on these principles,
|
| And it's a complete clown show rewarding moral bankruptcy
| that ended up fabricating and promoting uneducated
| degenerates such as Trump, Hegseth, Miller, &co to the
| highest positions.
|
| Thanks for making my point really...
| oytis wrote:
| These are very different problems from what Germany has
| though. And it's a recent issue, while individualism is a
| core tenet of American culture since independence.
| lnsru wrote:
| You wrote my thoughts. Add one more thing: Germany is
| federation with insanely complex administration. With many
| different (outdated) education systems, too many public
| healthcare insurers. It's too much of regulation of
| everything decreasing real efficiency to zero.
|
| Latest example (I am electrical engineer AND electrician):
| from this year on my buddy heating system specialist can't
| help me with photovoltaic system installation on the roof.
| Last year he was qualified, this year not anymore. He can
| however install air conditioning unit on the roof this year
| too. But not the solar panels... Every year some shady
| lobby group writes some special law crippling last pieces
| of working system.
|
| There should be some deregulation and centralization
| institution in Germany with a real short time efficiency
| increase plan. Otherwise it will stay there as a country of
| Oktoberfest and Cologne Carnival.
| tsss wrote:
| If anything, _more_ individualism and personal
| responsibility would help, not less.
| locallost wrote:
| What is the "current demography trend", when did it become
| current, how does it compare to 35 years ago?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Where did you get that opinion? Germany is not doing great but
| OK in the group of Western countries, and its car industry _is_
| both very imporant and in trouble, so it 's not an unreasonable
| opinion that things would be better without that trouble.
| tw-20260303-001 wrote:
| It's not. It's more like a cancer patient with an Uberweisung
| for their first cancer screening but dragging their feet to
| go and do it. They know is it bad and will get worse but
| they're afraid of facing it.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Imho, the german mentality just doesn't fit today's economy.
| Too risk averse, too conservative. Creativity is not really
| embraced.
|
| The state of the german IT sector also shows that.
|
| Most startups have nearly no moat at all and purely live off
| marketing with some sprinkles of corporate identity.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| In Switzerland, we use a lot of German and Switzerland born
| products, and they mostly suck.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| I'm not saying there are no good products. Hetzner Cloud
| come into my mind for example. It's executed really well.
|
| I'm saying that the number of good software offerings is
| too low, to have a significant impact on the country's
| economy.
|
| One of the advantages Germany had though, was a somewhat
| good and accessible higher education system in regards of
| computer science.
|
| Now, with software development becoming a commodity, this
| advantage vanishes.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Perfect regulatory capture is like putting a toddler in charge of
| your household - corporate organisms, like toddlers, do not know
| what is good for them, and are not willing to accept short term
| pain for long term gain.
|
| I see parallels with unions in the U.K. in the 70s, as they were
| ultimately the controlling entity of a lot of industry - and they
| too were unwilling to accept short term pain for long term gain,
| which ultimately resulted in the collapse of British
| manufacturing, as money that should have been reinvested in plant
| upgrades and technology instead disappeared into exorbitant -
| unfathomable by today's standards - pension plans and pay
| packets.
|
| Anyway. I suppose this is just humans 101, and today it's the
| German car industry insisting that eating their body weight in
| candy today will have no consequences tomorrow.
| pc86 wrote:
| Unions don't exist to protect the industry or maximize
| industrial gain, they exist to get as much as they can for the
| most senior members of the union (with union leadership being
| at the top) and proportionally less the less senior you are. By
| design they are more than happy for individual companies or
| even large swaths of industry to disappear if it means more
| spoils for the senior members in the short term.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| I found a very detailed and well argumented opinion piece on X
| that struck really hard on this topic:
| https://x.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/2027625247068065864
|
| Here's the plain text in case you don't want to go to X:
|
| _> "I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come
| back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately
| knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same
| cognitive shock
|
| my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype
| iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand
| bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar
| and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost
| two months to arrive
|
| when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own
| project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and
| it goes way deeper than speed & cost
|
| what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism,
| imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component
| distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km
| radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you
| realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise
|
| I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was
| working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate
| similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified
| his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed
| before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the
| relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily
|
| the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize
| by centralizing...
|
| China accidentally built a distributed neural network of
| manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally
| across thousands of agents faster than any single western company
| can process internally
|
| so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I
| think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the
| solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse
| to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine
|
| the gap is ARCHITECTURAL
|
| it's ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen
| you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks
|
| it's iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization
| at the system level, it's risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship
| something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday
| while European companies are still in the approval phase for the
| pilot program of the feasibility study...
|
| and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2
| cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at
| scale right now
|
| BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker
| combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip
| under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically
| impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced
| manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe
| debates whether AI needs another ethics committee
|
| I think what we're watching is the most asymmetric economic
| competition in modern history and most western leaders are still
| framing it as a productivity problem when it's actually an
| ontological one
|
| Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped
| tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions
| the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the
| courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but
| working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you
| arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster
|
| Europe's answer to China is always a committee, a regulation, a 5
| year strategic plan and a press conference
|
| China's answer to anything is ship it tomorrow and figure out the
| rest next week
|
| one side is trying to predict the future the other side is
| building it live and adjusting in real time, that asymmetry alone
| tells you everything about who wins this century "_
| okokwhatever wrote:
| This is brutal truth
| menaerus wrote:
| Truth that not many are ready or want to hear.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped
| tracking years ago
|
| Net income?
|
| >looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize
| redundancy is actually information density in disguise
|
| Everyone knows redundancy costs money today in exchange for
| security tomorrow. Presumably, Chinese executives are earning
| more by keeping redundancy, whereas executives in Europe and
| the US earn more by removing redundancy.
|
| How does China incentivize its executives to spend money on
| redundancy? I have to imagine it's some type of top down system
| that fights against personal interests to advance the interests
| of the tribe (obviously at the expense of personal liberties).
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Net income?_
|
| Whose income? The automotive engineers being mass layoffed?
| Liftyee wrote:
| Doesn't necessarily have to be top down. It could be
| cultural, the quarter-by-quarter market economics
| incentivises "money today" (just look at all the disasters
| caused by poor maintenance) but cultural norms of long-term
| thinking could drive prioritisation of "security tomorrow".
| Also, a sense of personal duty and honor instead of
| accumulating money being the sole arbiter of social status.
| kenhwang wrote:
| It's not redundancy, it's capitalism.
|
| There is a large number of competing and overlapping
| suppliers because they're all competing for business and none
| have gained market dominance.
|
| The US and most of the west is largely in a post-capitalistic
| market, where competition is no longer necessary because
| monopoly/duopoly status has been reached and segment leaders
| can simply use their capital to prevent challengers instead
| of competing on product/service quality, and margins can be
| widened and quality can decrease because there's no other
| option.
|
| To me, it seems the solution is to make it possible again for
| smaller more agile players to compete against bloated and
| stagnating established companies. The large legacy companies
| are preventing innovation to protect their domain instead of
| innovating to keep up.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| > segment leaders can simply use their capital to prevent
| challengers instead of competing on product/service quality
|
| This is done through regulations. If you are the market
| leader, you have the resources to comply with new
| bureaucracy (that you lobby for through standards
| organisations) and you don't really want to do much risky
| new development so ossifying your product is fine. That
| makes it really hard for new competitors to enter the
| sector.
| roughly wrote:
| It's also done through acquisitions, anticompetitive
| practices, exporting externalities, and exploiting
| consumer information asymmetries.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Standards and regulations are simply one tool, and not
| even the most common one. In the US auto market for
| example, standards besides FMVSS (and IHS testing
| practically speaking) are purely optional. You can read
| FMVSS for free and compliance is self-certified.
| Emissions regs are slightly tighter, but not a hurdle for
| EVs.
|
| And outside automotive there's plenty of leaders that
| don't dominate based on regulations. Google search
| doesn't dominate based on regulations. Spotify doesn't
| dominate because they enshrined themselves in copyright
| law.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| It's one of those ironies in power structures, how a
| 'communist' society can act as turbo capitalist one and visa
| versa. It's a mistake to think that just because things are
| one way at the top they're the same way all the way down the
| power structure. Even with heavy corruption there are
| competing corrupt entities which can lead to a healthy
| competition of governance as an emergent behavior.
| Dysfunction at one level efficiencies at another. Corruption
| is self corrupting so it's difficult to maintain at all
| levels.
|
| In my view much of the 'corruption' in the west takes the
| form of very legal financialization, this massively rewards
| consolidation as the high debt to equity ratios means low
| interest rates are paramount and combining two entities
| allows one to act as insurance for the other lowering the
| risk component of the interest rate allowing the entity to
| out compete the remaining entities. Once reaching a certain
| size the company becomes too big to fail and the risk
| component merges with the US government. Since the US
| government is very receptive to donations these companies are
| in effect able to form an oligarchy. Compare this to China
| where companies are subordinate to the politicians.
|
| I think the West overestimates the deleterious effects of
| corruption of our competitors and underestimates our own
| systemic (and legalized) corruption.
| js8 wrote:
| > How does China incentivize its executives to spend money on
| redundancy?
|
| IMHO, China has two parallel hierarchies of status - one in
| the ruling party, other in private sector. So the ruling
| party can maintain the capitalist competition, and dictate
| overall industrial policy, which fuels the innovation.
|
| In the West, the rich people owning capital captured the
| political class, so there is only one status hierarchy now -
| of capitalists. This hierarchy ossifies and becomes
| increasingly resistant to competition - why invest into
| something new when it will most likely cause your individual
| wealth to decrease?
|
| I think this manifests as the wealthy class increasingly
| speculating on the rising price of assets and extracting
| rents from them, rather investing in productive
| infrastructure. So the neoliberalism (capitalism) is in a
| sort of tragedy of commons, where wealthy individuals benefit
| more from this financialization rather than actual
| production.
|
| The West avoided this in the past by having strong unions and
| middle class controlling the policy through democracy, which
| balanced the accumulation of wealth. If China can in the
| future avoid this (or other) trap, where the status elite
| ossifies and prevents investment in the interest of whole
| society, remains to be seen.
| linkregister wrote:
| This is an excellent analysis of the issue.
| treis wrote:
| This is more like inefficiency in sheeps clothing. Being able
| to iterate that quickly and cheaply relies on spare capacity
| and people making salaries 10-25% of what Germans get.
| riskd wrote:
| Source?
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> people making salaries 10-25% of what Germans get._
|
| The likes of Huawei pay their engineers six figure salaries
| plus tonnes of perks. You're crazy if you think skilled
| Chinese engineers make only 15% of those in Germany. All
| their engineers would emigrate abroad if that were the case
| and they wouldn't be making domestic CPUs and AI
| accelerators.
| trelane wrote:
| > All their engineers would emigrate abroad if that were
| the case and they wouldn't be making domestic CPUs and AI
| accelerators.
|
| Maybe, though nationalism may play a role here, especially
| if they believe themselves to be the underdogs. Not
| everybody only optimizes for money.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Not everybody only optimizes for money_
|
| Yeah but it's bad faith argument to say they work for
| peanuts. This is western colonial mindset to assume
| China's success is due to poverty wages. You can't build
| a semiconductor industry on that.
| orwin wrote:
| 8 years ago, a new unskilled factory worker in china made the
| equivalent of 700-800EUR hourly, with free food and
| accommodation (this cause issues in rural areas but this
| isn't the subject).
|
| I assume salaries have gone up soon since, but even if they
| stagnated, what's the entry-level pay for unskilled factory
| work in Germany? Just to be sure it's more than 21k.
| sandos wrote:
| Source for this? That sounds insane.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I assume they meant 7-8/hour.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| It's not that much higher, actually. I just looked at some
| unskilled production line job offers, and looks like they
| start at 15-18EUR per hour. Scale that to full time, and
| it's less than 30kEUR/year - and of course without the free
| food and accommodation that you mentioned.
| afavour wrote:
| > China accidentally built a distributed neural network of
| manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses
| horizontally across thousands of agents
|
| I find it difficult to take statements like this seriously.
|
| China has built an incredibly dense manufacturing zone. They've
| done so by manufacturing more cheaply than other countries do,
| a key element of which is paying workers less than any European
| country would be able to do. The rest of what's being described
| is just what falls into place once you've created that dense,
| cheap in demand manufacturing zone.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> a key element of which is paying workers less than any
| European country would be able to do_
|
| Not true. Manufacturing labor costs are higher in China than
| in Eastern Europe. For electronics industry I mean, not
| sweatshops for clothes and sneakers and aliexpress
| knicknacks. China stopped being the place to go for cheap
| labor a while ago. You go there for the expertise.
| orwin wrote:
| Not only for electronics, for metallurgy too.
| edgolub wrote:
| "distributed neural network" is just AI-bro speak, most
| likely generated by an LLM.
|
| So I would just ignore that whole comment.
|
| What you said is the truth.
|
| Cheap, efficient, fast manufacturing process. I am a software
| dev, I happen to have worked with Chinese software APIs
| related to manufacturing and logictics. Move fast and ship
| broken stuff on monday, and forget to fix it - that is the
| reality, but somehow people expect they maintain some level
| of quality now.
|
| Just try working with products like TikTok, their APIs and
| documentation, the endless headache you will get will show
| you how they do itterate, but quality is still only barely a
| factor.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| 100% agree. I am whitnessimg this on a daily basis working for
| a german company that develops both hard and software for
| indistrial machines.
| bix6 wrote:
| Meanwhile our top VCs continue to invest in SaaS, AI (new
| SaaS), and crypto (ponzi returns) because I guess the only
| thing that matters is widening the wealth gap and enjoying the
| yacht life.
|
| I work in VC and make early stage investments primarily into
| industrial or other physical industries. It often feels like an
| uphill battle trying to get people to take interest in this
| stuff.
|
| My most recent company sources from China because the US
| infrastructure can't supply what we need. This is a company
| that will be worth billions when it scales up and the US
| literally cannot supply it because our factories are so
| ancient.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| It's also that the west collectively convinced themselves
| that the economy could be built on high value knowledge work
| and services and manufacturing will be handled by someone
| else. Of course people would rather live near some offices,
| or maybe a workshop than a heavy industrial site...
|
| The transition of my country from a socialist to a western
| capitalist system included a mass closure of heavy industry
| and what remains is dying a slow death of high energy costs.
| I remember when a coal mine closed there were all those
| marvelous ideas how the area would transition to high tech
| programming jobs; the thing that actually saved the area was
| a fuse manufacturing plant.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Where is this, Poland?
| heisenbit wrote:
| This diffusion requires a different attitude towards IPR.
| Western countries prioritize protection of past investments (or
| dometes just the first to stumble through a gate or file
| first).
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Is there realistically a path to the west learning any of these
| lessons without going through WW3?
|
| It's not like any of this is news. My newspaper of choice has
| been telling me about how fast china moves, in vivid detail,
| since at least 2018 - others probably knew much earlier than I
| did. I watched a graphic documentary on YouTube about Shenzhen
| in 2019 that gave me all of the same information in this tweet,
| minus the accomplishments that have happened since then.
|
| My own eyes have seen how their consumer goods have transformed
| in a very short time. Maybe other Americans don't notice
| because the key categories (tech, cars) have so much
| protectionism. I'm not sure about the Europeans.
|
| The west is better at coming up with excuses and red tape than
| actually solving problems, it seems.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Is there realistically a path to the west learning any of
| these lessons without going through WW3?
|
| > The west is better at coming up with excuses and red tape
| than actually solving problems, it seems.
|
| Most of the west still has this paterno-colonialist view of
| the world, we're too complacent, too sure of ourselves, it
| never changed, just look at how Trump talks about Iran, he is
| completely clueless about the history of this region of the
| world, they'd nuke themselves before accepting the
| unconditional surrender he asked for... It was the same with
| China: "let's move all our industries there, they are too
| dumb to figure anything out and they'll will be our cheap
| labor forever", well no, they're just as smart as us and as
| soon as they reached the threshold necessary to provide
| education to the mass they also reached our technological
| level.
|
| It mostly is over for the west as we know it,
| demographically, politically, industrially, soon militarily,
| people who don't see it are straight up blind or historically
| illiterate, we're in a end of the Portuguese or British
| empire situation.
| philistine wrote:
| > they'd nuke themselves before accepting the unconditional
| surrender he asked for
|
| To me it's a bit more complicated than that. Unconditional
| surrender can be achieved ... with boots on the ground all
| over Iran on a penetration level last seen in WW2. If you
| think Iran's government is as simple to decapitate as Iraq,
| think again.
|
| Then you get the unconditional surrender of a government.
| Is the average Iranian amenable to tolerate this situation
| and get its terms dictated by the US? Nope, they're not the
| Germans in '45. You'll get decades of insurgency; if you
| think ISIS as a consequence of the Iraq Invasion was bad,
| look forward to even worse.
|
| At the end of the day, Trump always chickens out. Look
| forward to the end of the American bombings the second the
| new leader gets him on the phone. The Israelis that's
| another thing.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > with boots on the ground all over Iran on a penetration
| level last seen in WW2.
|
| It's four times larger than Iraq, with a much tougher
| terrain and they've been setting up militarily
| independent regions for the last 40 years specifically in
| case this would happen. The current operation at week 1
| has already a worse public approval than the Vietnam war
| after 5 years of american dying in ground operations.
|
| I'd love if they went in because it would precipitate the
| end the US empire by a good decade
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> The current operation at week 1 has already a worse
| public approval than the Vietnam war after 5 years of
| american dying in ground operations._
|
| Do you have a source for this? Numbers I find online vary
| wildly.
|
| Edit: I found Al Jazeera was the one saying what you
| said, but I can't classify them as objective and accurate
| in this case, sorry.
|
| If the war with Iran is indeed that unpopular we'll see
| at the midterms.
| roughly wrote:
| > Europe's answer to China is always a committee, a regulation,
| a 5 year strategic plan and a press conference
|
| > China's answer to anything is ship it tomorrow and figure out
| the rest next week
|
| Yes, god knows we'd never see the Chinese delivering 5 year
| strategic plans, and they're notably committee-averse.
|
| A large part of China's success is they've been intentional
| about what they're doing - they've _had_ a strategy, whereas
| every time we consider that in the West, we're told that's a
| loser's bet and we need to just let the market do its thing.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Looking back, people had the exact same kinds of reactions
| (regarded as cheap trash => cutting edge) to the Japanese
| electronics industry 40 years ago, with the eact same takes
| (overstated rationalizations focussing on process,
| organization, culture; I could probably find like 20 different
| books discussing those in excruciating detail in a minute).
|
| But the simplest explanation is just basic economics and
| nothing else (growth being fueled by cost difference, mostly
| from cheap labor, and to a far smaller extend network effects).
|
| I predict Chinese growth slowing down exactly the same way
| other countries did as wage gaps get smaller.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >Here's the plain text in case you don't want to go to X
|
| Nitter to the rescue!
|
| https://xcancel.com/BetterCallMedhi/status/20276252470680658...
| alephnerd wrote:
| While Germany should invest in EVs and Green Energy, that alone
| isn't blocking German economic growth.
|
| Almost all German exports have seen a precipitous drop [0]. EV
| exports wouldn't have helped given that Germany's two largest
| trading partners (the US and China) both enacted trade barriers
| against foreign exporters.
|
| When the US enacted the IRA under Biden, a large portion of
| Germany Inc shifted to the US [1], but the German government and
| EU decided _not_ to enact subsidies [2].
|
| Similarly, China demanded JVs for German manufacturing companies
| to enter the Chinese market, which Volkswagen (with SAIC),
| Siemens (with SEPG), Mercedes Benz (with BAIC), and others
| manufacturers complied with.
|
| Germany's economy was hollowed out because Germany Inc decided to
| shift capacity to it's two largest unified markets.
|
| It's not like the PRC nor the US are allowing German EV exports
| _already_ - for example, all of VW 's ID4s sold in the US and
| China are being manufactured in Tennessee and Shanghai
| respectively.
|
| This is _why_ the EU has been pushing for a "rules based order",
| becuase otherwise individual EU states lack export markets.
|
| [0] - https://oec.world/en/profile/country/deu#yearly-trade
|
| [1] - https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/EconPol-PolicyReport_41_1.pdf
|
| [2] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/02/14/biden-ira-germany-
| rules-...
| paganel wrote:
| This [1] is what really brought Germany's industry down, not the
| green non-sense spouted by articles like this one:
|
| > Gas prices rose to $70 per megawatt-hour in Germany -- it makes
| it 6 times more expensive than in the US
|
| Germany was relatively fine, industrially speaking, while it
| still had a working relationship with Russia and especially with
| cheap Russian gas. It all went to the gutters when the Americans
| imposed their imperial will on them, on the Germans (see also the
| Nord Stream fuck-up), and it has been a steady downhill road for
| the Germans since then.
|
| To re-iterate, there's no German economic miracle that would
| allow them to be competitive against other indutrialised
| countries (such as the US) while they have to pay two or three
| times more for their energy inputs.
|
| [1] https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2031015804179791877
| miohtama wrote:
| Germany was also fine when they still had nuclear energy
| dgacmu wrote:
| What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to invade
| Ukraine, nor did it force Germany to respond to the Fukushima
| daiichi disaster by killing all of its nuclear power.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| It's a shame, too, because they are right about the
| hydrocarbon input price effects, but speculative in a bizarre
| way elsewhere. Germany had a selection of strategic
| hydrocarbon options in the 2000s and fumbled by picking the
| option that would later prove to launch revisionary wars that
| interrupt their export capability.
|
| Even if we lived in an alternate timeline where the US was
| completely supportive of the 2022 invasion at the time,
| Germany would still be surrounded on all sides by countries
| with a vested interest in pointing nuclear deterrents at
| Moscow and lose their energy feed in the same way.
| nairboon wrote:
| > What a strange comment. The US did not force Russia to
| invade Ukraine
|
| OP's comment doesn't state that. It refers to the US forcing
| Germany to stop Nord Stream.
| kvgr wrote:
| What Imperial will if you dont mind asking? That they stoped
| buying gas from country that attacked europe and tries to
| overthrow democracy in other EU countries? Their delusion was
| in turning off nuclear... and it was exactly what russia
| wanted. By funding anti nuclear protests in EU, and selling
| more and more gas to make Europe attached. So when Russia does
| something bad, it is harder to sanction them. What happend in
| Germany is real political failure in seeing this, maybe even
| treason.
| s_dev wrote:
| Non of these issues affect France because France had the
| foresight to invest in Nuclear tech that gave them energy
| independence from both the US and Russia while being green and
| sustainable. It's certainly not perfect e.g. France imports
| some Uranium from Russia but they are in a far better position
| than Germany. Germany has produced many brilliant people but it
| really has to self reflect on some of the major errors in big
| decisions it has made the past few decades.
| basilikum wrote:
| > Germany was relatively fine, industrially speaking, while it
| still had a working relationship with Russia and especially
| with cheap Russian gas. It all went to the gutters when the
| Americans imposed their imperial will on them, on the Germans
| (see also the Nord Stream fuck-up), and it has been a steady
| downhill road for the Germans since then.
|
| That's quite the reversal of facts. Germany cut off Russian gas
| after imperial Russia started a full invasion on Ukraine. That
| was Germany's decision and has little to do with the US. The US
| also did not force Russia to invade Ukraine and to targeted
| kill Ukrainian civilians for their decision to strive for
| freedom, democracy and prosperity rather than being a corrupt
| satellite state to Putin's terror.
|
| Energy prices undoubtedly skyrocketed after that, but that's
| just the immediate result of finally breaking with the
| politically engineered dependence on Russia. For decades
| Germany made itself reliant on Russian gas. What might have
| started as optimism after the cold war and the hope for good
| mutually beneficial relations with Russia turned into
| corruption and irresponsible ignorance and short term thinking
| at best.
|
| Energy prices in Germany are so high because the German
| government deliberately sabotaged the shift to renewables.
| German politics made Germany dependent on fossil fuels that you
| can burn exactly once and that Germany has to continuously,
| expensively dig out of the ground and keep importing because
| Germany lacks enough natural gas. Digging something out of the
| ground to burn it once is not economic when the alternative of
| harvesting the sun and wind that just keep on giving you energy
| indefinitely exists. But Germany decided to deliberately stall
| building grid technology and farms for harvesting free
| unlimited energy. Instead they turned to Russia to get gas for
| cheapish in the exchange for letting Putin live out his
| imperialist plans. Russia's aggression is not new. They invaded
| Georgia in 2008 and started the war against Ukraine in 2014.
| Germany started building the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, which
| would have even furthered its dependence, in 2015, after all
| that. And they kept the plan when Russia backed Assad and
| commited war crimes against the Syrian people.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Wow, Denmark is leading manufacturing growth and the German
| government is still telling us that the hourly wage is the
| problem.
| kaon_2 wrote:
| Agreed. Actually - maybe no? Maybe the hourly wage is the
| problem. It's been too low for too long so there was no
| pressure to innovate. Denmark and Switzerland are big
| manufacturers with high wages that are continuously innovating.
| Maybe the Euro was a curse for Germany afteral? Without it
| their wages would have been higher.
| scottyah wrote:
| Artificially increasing wages to get a better product is like
| Cargo Culting. Some people see successful companies paying
| their employees a ton, then assume that's what created the
| successful company when it's so obviously the other way
| around. But the politicians/union heads benefit from selling
| it the other way. This conversation just always gets derailed
| by pointing out how paying substantially below market is also
| bad, as if it were a counterpoint.
| psalaun wrote:
| That's my point in France also: industries complain about the
| cost of workforce, therefore they've moved everything
| offshore for the last two decades and they are lobbying
| heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order to
| "invest".
|
| But there is nothing to invest into anymore, France's
| industry is dead (partly because of Germany with the Hartz
| agreement btw, lowering demand for italian or french goods
| which were already less competitive than german ones on
| export and domestic market because of the euro) and if they
| didn't care to put capital on automation when wages were
| high, why would they do it when work becomes cheap?
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> That's my point in France also: industries complain
| about the cost of workforce, therefore they've moved
| everything offshore for the last two decades and they are
| lobbying heavily for lowering the wages and taxes in order
| to "invest"._
|
| 100% exactly the same in Austria and I can speculate Italy
| as well.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Almost all Poles are very surprised about the second country on
| that graph.
|
| Edit: well, after some thinking and remembering all the banners
| for laser cutting and cnc machining in nearby areas (touristic
| region at that), there might be some truth to it.
| cm2012 wrote:
| The Polish manufacturing miracle is really well known among
| people who study economics so it's funny that natural Polish
| people wouldn't be aware of it.
| yetihehe wrote:
| I explain this with our national pessimism and constant
| complaints about everything. We also compare ourselves to
| rest of Europe, where wages are still better and many
| things are cheaper.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's basically just Novo Nordisk manufacturing Ozempic. Yes,
| it's big enough to distort all graphs about Denmark.
|
| (the real lesson here is "make a product that everyone wants")
| tokai wrote:
| If you look at actual numbers it is clear that danish
| manufacturing is very healthy underneath the NN success.
| varjag wrote:
| Denmark is also a leader in offshore wind power systems, so
| no it's not just pharma.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I'd really like to know which products that manufacturing in
| Denmark produces. Ozempic is a massive financial success, so
| maybe that is a large part of it? The lesson from Ozempic would
| be "Just have a huge hit come out of your R&D department", I
| guess...
| Tade0 wrote:
| ...and be a relatively small country.
|
| Novo Nordisk's sales numbers of 300bln DKK (~$46bln) amount
| to around 10% of Denmark's GDP.
| tokai wrote:
| Interestingly there was a public discussion in Denmark around
| 2016, about how the Danish labor market and industry should not
| end up approaching 'German conditions', even though the Hartz
| reforms were envied by some economically liberal Danish
| politicians.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Looks like as if it was a good choice to not copy the Hartz
| reforma.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Germany's powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term
| dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival. Instead
| of investing in EV innovation to future-proof the industry, they
| leveraged their influence with the conservative (CDU/CSU) and
| free-market (FDP) government parties to weaken national and EU
| emission targets.
|
| This reliance on political lobbying rather than technological
| advancement was a fatal miscalculation: While executives spent
| the last decade fighting carbon taxes and stalling the EV
| transition, they ignored the reality of their primary export
| markets - most notably China where today German ICE cars are seen
| as obsolete - and the rest of the world rapidly pivoting to
| electric.
|
| By choosing payday over progress, the "autobauers" & their
| political helpers have left the German workforce to pay the
| price. The looming job losses and economic instability are the
| direct result of a managerial class that traded their country's
| industrial crown for a final decade of bloated bonuses.
| d3ckard wrote:
| It's very disputable whether BEVs are industry's future and
| your entire thesis depends on it to be true.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Not my entire thesis: It's the content of the article and
| otherwise well known.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Until recently (and probably with some pressure from VW)
| everything else was supposed to be phased out in Europe
| within a decade: https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-
| insights/en/blogs/2025/1...
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > It's very disputable whether BEVs are industry's future
|
| As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak. It's
| very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE as far
| as efficiency, weight, and power output goes.
|
| The same cannot be said for batteries and electric motors. We
| are still quite far from technological limits for the
| platform. It doesn't seem disputable at all that a platform
| that can still evolve and improve with significant room for
| growth will eventually overtake one that has peaked.
| nine_k wrote:
| Also, oil will only get more expensive in the long term,
| and electricity is going to get cheaper, with more and more
| solar panels generating electricity locally "for free".
| nindalf wrote:
| > oil will only get more expensive in the long term
|
| Will it? Oil price will reach an equilibrium because
| lower demand due to electrification will lead to lower
| prices, which will increase higher consumption.
|
| There are enough low cost oil producers like Saudi Arabia
| to keep the pipes filled with oil at whatever the
| prevailing market price is.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Oil (prior to the current pointless war) was pretty
| cheap, though. Adjusted inflation cheaper than e.g. it
| was at any point between 1975 and 85.
| sofixa wrote:
| > As a technology, ICE is pretty much close to its peak.
| It's very hard to imagine significant improvements in ICE
| as far as efficiency, weight, and power output goes
|
| What makes you say that? Jet engine manufacturers are
| constantly making improvements, and one of the biggest
| recent breakthroughs has been around using proprietary
| alloys in the construction of some parts to make them
| lighter and able to operate at hotter temperatures, thus
| increasing efficiency. I'm not working on any engines, but
| from a layman's perspective I don't see why there couldn't
| be material science improvements made to combustion
| engines.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Your example is from a high-value engine where the switch
| to proprietary alloys has significant savings in a _jet
| engine_.
|
| ICE for cars? Do you think the same constraints apply?
| sofixa wrote:
| No, but I think if material science improvements can be
| made in jet engines, there is no reason to think
| combustion engines for car are "complete" and nothing
| around them could be improved. They're much less
| expensive, but at a much larger volume, and they have at
| least a few decades of future - even if we assume all of
| the developed world moves to EVs in the next decade or
| so, which is unrealistic already, there is all of the
| rest of the world. Most African countries don't have
| stable power for all of their populations, EVs are simply
| not going to work there as the main vehicle type. Then
| add in trucks, where the weight of the batteries makes
| them impractical for heavy duty long distance trucking.
| There are improvements, but it will still be many years
| before they are available, and decades before they've
| replaced everything already existing.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > They're much less expensive, but at a much larger
| volume
|
| It is precisely because they are much less expensive that
| they've reached a realistic ceiling of advancement. If
| you're going to produce an ICE that yields a 10%
| improvement in efficiency, decreased weight, increased
| reliability, decreased maintenance effort -- but at a
| cost of an extra $xxxx per unit, then it may as well
| never happen.
|
| As a logical exercise, let's consider what are some of
| the top technological advancements in ICE and ICE
| drivetrain components over the last 20 years. CVTs?
| Nissan's VVEL? What do you think are noteworthy
| automotive ICE technological advancements we can look
| forward to in the consumer space? Where exactly do you
| see automotive applications of ICE advancing in the next
| 10 years?
|
| On the other hand, it seems pretty easy to see the exact
| opposite with electric/hybrid drivetrains. Many
| innovations and advancements. It's also easy to see the
| roadmap for advancements (see what the Chinese are
| doing). Battery swaps? New chemistries? Solid state
| batteries? Compact axial flux motors? Faster charging
| electrical architectures? Endless space for technological
| advancement and growth because it's so early.
| d3ckard wrote:
| False dichotomy. What ICEs are or aren't has zero impact on
| whether BEVs are the future.
| xoa wrote:
| > _It's very disputable whether BEVs are industry's future_
|
| It is not disputable (unless you're including Old Auto
| lobbyists I suppose). Without government imposed restrictions
| keeping the public from buying Chinese BEVs without an
| outrageous markup (or at all) the ICE industry would already
| be imploding. The government could and should require that
| all vehicles be under full control of their owners with no
| remote telematics required, or even allowed necessarily (and
| heavily restricted even then). That'd resolve concerns about
| Chinese kill switches or gathering intel data or whatever.
| But of course the Western industry hates that too because
| they want to fully enshittify cars next and turn them into
| locked-in subscription revenue and advertising data sources.
| So they can't even compete on trustworthiness. Total
| embarrassment and also long term ruin.
|
| The present gas price mess and global instability Trump has
| kicked off is just going to draw an even bigger line under
| both the personal and the national security value of not
| being tied to any single source of energy for mechanized
| transportation. BEVs are simply fundamentally superior
| particularly in a risky world.
| fragmede wrote:
| Not to mention, regenerative braking. It recovers something
| like 30% of energy that was previously just wasted, so in
| terms of having energy independence, it's worth mentioning.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Not to mention, those same carbon emission
| regulations/targets they are lobbying/fighting against did
| not come about in a vacuum. The regulations were
| intentionally cranked up to "unachievable" levels for ICE
| vehicles from groups pushing other technologies.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The temperature of the atmosphere is not amenable to
| lobbying.
| asymmetric wrote:
| I'm curious, what do you think the future of the car industry
| is, then?
| theK wrote:
| No it is not. Anything combustion related certainly isn't, as
| has been proven ad absurdum. All non BEV non combustion
| alternatives are, optimistically phrased, in their infancy.
| So yes, BEVs are the future for the next 20-40 years at a
| minimum.
|
| Edit: clarity
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Germany's powerful automotive lobby prioritized short-term
| dividends and executive bonuses over long-term survival
|
| Gee I wonder where they got the ideas from
| whiteboardr wrote:
| It's not as simple as 100% of this is on the car manufacturers.
|
| There's a lot at play, which in combination led to this
| "perfect" storm.
|
| Energy policies and hence ever increasing energy prices,
| bureaucracy almost as bad as Italy, governements making
| technical decisions for unprepared manufacturers by setting
| goals of EV production numbers and above all phasing out the
| cornerstone of the countries engine, literally: ICE power
| units.
|
| And yes, most management are of an era that truly doesn't
| understand the convergent challenges in a mixed market of ICE
| and EVs. Shortsighted decisions have been made, throwing out
| the baby with the bathwater - craftsmanship, vision and
| engineering prowess.
|
| What was an engineering driven industry with a say in where all
| this is headed became a soulless marketing machine, merely
| scratching the surface of what needs to be done.
|
| They created some very bad "sci-fi" by plastering screens
| everywhere in interiors while still treating software like some
| part you can outsource to the lowest bidding supplier, swapping
| these out every other model range or update.
|
| Actual internal research and guidance got killed off around the
| early 2010s by outsourcing all of it externally.
|
| Besides, the culture and politics within these corporations are
| the worst i ever encountered in my whole career.
|
| It's a very grim picture we're looking at but there's nobody,
| neither in upper management across boards nor in politics
| actually being able to see the misery they're in, let alone
| doing something about it.
|
| Glad i left almost 10 years ago but still sad, since all I had
| to witness is effecting society as a whole and not in a good
| way.
|
| It's really just the beginning of what is to come.
| pimeys wrote:
| I'm not working in this industry, but I am living in Germany.
| I'm lucky enough to take remote jobs all around the world,
| but I'm a bit scared on what it means politically in Germany
| when the sh*t really hits the fan.
|
| This might be one of the reasons I should not buy an
| apartment and settle in Germany...
| reactordev wrote:
| No where is safe from this kind of fuckery though. Greed is
| in human nature because education is gamified, sports are
| gamified, business is gamified, your attention is even
| gamified. You're forced to run a race you never signed up
| for in a manner which you disagree with for an audience
| that gives nothing in return but laughs as they watch you
| spin the wheel for them.
|
| Literary aside, there used to be a time when you could
| count on a company and they could count on you. Now it's a
| culture cult. This makes whistleblowing and doing what's
| right virtually impossible. Who wants to sacrifice
| everything? Only the scorned and mistreated or it has to be
| egregious enough to solicit public outcry.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Shouldn't whistle-blowing be much easier in a more
| transactional work culture where everyone knows you can't
| count on the company and they'll fuck you over next
| Thursday on a whim of some consultant or an ambitious
| upper manager?
| reactordev wrote:
| That entirely depends on the current economy. If they
| know they might have opportunities elsewhere, toot that
| whistle..
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Sadly no. The world is litigious. The expection is that a
| wealthy corporation will crush anyone who holds it
| accountable.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Weimar 2.0 Electric Boogaloo
| atmosx wrote:
| If you look at their stock performance and management
| compensation the last 25 years, much of the responsibility
| seems to lie with the manufacturers themselves.
|
| They had roughly two decades to adapt, but instead they often
| relied on strategies like pressuring German workers with the
| possibility of relocating production to Poland to keep wages
| down, while investing little in research and development
| during a period when sales were strong and new markets, such
| as China, were opening up.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| There must be more to it. German automakers did belong to
| the top 10 (for some periods even top 5) R&D spenders
| world-wide. It seems they just did not spend it wisely.
| Similarly, the claim they "kept wages down" seems to
| require some nuance. VW workers are known to be very well
| paid. From the outside it seems like these companies became
| large behemoths who were not able to spend their R&D money
| wisely and their outsized pay packages forcing them to
| offer their products at uncompetitive prices.
| riedel wrote:
| As a university computer scientist, I saw our graduates
| hardly getting job in automotive directly while
| mechanical engineers got all the good jobs for years.
| Then about 10 years ago the opposite happened: people
| quit their PhDs because industry was hiring as many CS
| /AI people they could get. Industry understood that they
| needed to invest (even it was already a bit late).
| However, they IMHO failed to turn scale that talent into
| sustainable innovation. Many people I know left again
| automotive. I think industry struggled quite a bit to
| translate engineering leadership to a digital age in many
| parts. I think it was easier for pure EV manufacturers to
| embrace also other digital innovations.
| flakeoil wrote:
| The fact that Angela Merkel closed down all nuclear power
| plants was probably a big part of the lower interest in EVs
| in recent year. Although they invested a lot in solar and
| wind, the solid base of electricity generation disappeared
| and thus the trust in electricity for transport disappeared
| amongst automotive management and the population at large.
| jonp888 wrote:
| "the solid base of electricity generation disappeared and
| thus the trust in electricity for transport disappeared"
|
| I'm sorry, but WTF?
|
| This is the most unhinged drivel about German nuclear I
| have ever read on HN, and that's saying something.
|
| There no problem with "trust in electricity", whatsoever,
| nor is there any lack of a "solid base". There has been no
| electricity grid collapse in Germany for decades(in stark
| contrast to the US, or f.e. Spain). Any problems with
| electrcity have been due to terrorism or building errors.
|
| Even with that, in case you haven't noticed, EV cars run on
| batteries and don't need constant power. Perhaps for
| "preppers" or people living in remote areas it would be a
| factor, but I have never in my life heard anyone connect
| the use of EV power with the power station the charging
| comes from or how reliable the grid is.
| sazz wrote:
| WTF about your understanding of the German power grid, I
| would say.
|
| Germany is not in a position to continuously meet its own
| electricity needs, but is dependent on daily aid
| deliveries of electricity from abroad. The electricity
| needs of industry cannot be met in a market-oriented
| manner, but taxpayers have to spend additional money so
| that industry can continue to produce at all.
|
| The absurdly high prices for electricity in Germany
| prevent any competitiveness. Ignoring all of this can
| only be described as WTF - what country do you actually
| live in?
| jhbruhn wrote:
| Energy scientist in Germany here. Germany could fully
| supply it's national grid with German energy production.
| We just don't do it because it's cheaper to buy i.e.
| heavily subsidized nuclear power from France, or other
| sources. In the end, it's all markets across the whole EU
| - by design. Why should it not be, the European energy
| grid is interconnected for a reason.
| UltraSane wrote:
| As a Germany energy scientist you should be very angry
| that right now according to ElectricityMaps.com Germany
| is emitting about 17 times as much CO2 per watt as France
| is.
| jhbruhn wrote:
| _waves fist_
| watt wrote:
| In 2010 I was paying 10 cents per kWh. In 2025 I am
| paying 36 cents per kWh. What ever happened in these 15
| years, it is an absolute death spiral.
| rob74 wrote:
| What you call "aid from abroad" is generally called a
| functioning wide area synchronous grid (https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid) which covers
| most of the EU plus some Balkan states, Moldova, Ukraine,
| Turkey and the northwestern corner of Africa. So Germany
| can sell power to others when renewables are generating
| more than it needs (which is often), and import power,
| not necessarily because it couldn't produce it, but
| because importing it can be cheaper than e.g. starting up
| an additional backup plant. This is nothing special and
| has been working reliably for decades.
| sazz wrote:
| That's right, Germany sells electricity to other
| countries during the day and buys electricity in the
| evening because there is no sun then.
|
| The problem is that other countries also have solar and
| wind power during the day and don't need this electricity
| at all. That's why Germany has to "sell" this surplus
| electricity, even though no one needs it. To ensure that
| the electricity is still "purchased", Germany has to pay
| money for it. In the evening, Germany has to pay money to
| buy back the missing electricity.
|
| Paying money to have something purchased is generally
| referred to as garbage fees.
| patall wrote:
| That does not seem to be a long term problem. Wind and
| solar can be down regulated with ease (and within
| fractions of a second), a negative prices only happen
| because producers got a flat-fee per kWh which is pretty
| much phase-out now. The problem is rather that Germany
| (plus Luxembourg) is still a single price zone, i.e when
| wind is blowing in Hamburg, the per-kWh price in Passau
| is also nill. While this is nice for Bavaria (the main
| culprit, as usual), there is an enormous cost for this in
| the form of re-dispatch fees as long as the grid is not
| strengthened a lot.
| FrojoS wrote:
| The main culprit as usual? They have been financing the
| whole gaga show for years.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I call buying French nuclear electricity after shutting
| down your own reactors hypocrisy.
| brnt wrote:
| I call it an opportunity. Let France built reactors on
| their borders (looking at you, Chooz) and earn money.
| What's the problem here? Everybody gets what they want.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The problem is it makes Germany's decision to shut down
| their perfectly safe nuclear reactors completely
| pointless.
| brnt wrote:
| Agreed, but that's over a decade against now. Time to
| move on. If Germans just don't want nuclear in their back
| yard, but have now issue buying from France (soon Poland
| perhaps), then so be it.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The need for cheap reliable electricity is eternal.
| lejalv wrote:
| > The electricity needs of industry cannot be met in a
| market-oriented manner
|
| Do you care to elaborate? AFAIK, the EU electricity
| market is... a market?
|
| The design is debatable, as always with these things.
| Perhaps you wanted to say something precise about
| subsidies?
|
| One important consideration is that Germany profited from
| cheap Russian gas, and continued building Nord Stream 2
| post Russian operations in Ukraine in 2014. This is a bet
| that a huge geopolitical risk would not actualize, which
| it did in 2022.
| jhbruhn wrote:
| Good luck modulating nuclear power plants when there is a
| lot of cheap renewable energy available.
| sazz wrote:
| ...because you don't have to modulate renewable energy?
| patall wrote:
| Ideally, you have 300% renewable energy available and
| then modulate actual production based on demand.
| brnt wrote:
| Renewable is cheap, but not that cheap.
|
| Also, solar production and heating needs are
| anticyclical.
|
| Also, the European grid is big (the biggest!), but not so
| big it can deal with seasons and weather patterns. Yet.
| Or ever.
|
| The idea was that gas would fill in the gaps, until
| energy storage at scale becomes a thing (no, it is still
| nowhere near scale, only gas reserves can fill that role
| right now). Germany is investing heavily in hydrogen to
| fill this gap, but barring fundamental breakthroughs, I
| think it's a pipe dream. A 90% (roughly) total efficiency
| loss means 1000% oveprovisioning of generation capacity.
| That's expensive, even when cheap.
| nkmnz wrote:
| There's no technical need to do that, because someone who
| can always deliver electricity would be able to struck
| contracts with those that always need it, i.e. heavy
| industry, esp. aluminum and chemistry. The reason why
| downregulation was necessary in the 2000s and 2010s was
| regulation ("Einspeisevorrang"), not technology.
| jhbruhn wrote:
| If someone takes it near the power plant, and all the
| infrastructure is there for it. You don't build a (large)
| nuclear power plant just for these customers though.
| Generally, with a high amount of renewable but
| fluctuating supply, we have to get away from the base
| load model, towards a residual load model.
| nkmnz wrote:
| The burden of buffering the fluctuation is on those
| creating the fluctuation, not on those not doing so.
| oytis wrote:
| > It's not as simple as 100% of this is on the car
| manufacturers.
|
| Another big lobbyist is chemical industry. They are very
| reliant on gas.
| V__ wrote:
| Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done it
| this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely
| prevalent. I say this as a German.
|
| This is also reflected in the big political parties, which
| would rather keep these beliefs alive than inspire change.
|
| I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when
| enough other countries implement more progressive economic
| policies.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| I would disagree.
|
| The willingness to change is there, it's mostly the motives
| and what is being targeted where the problems are.
|
| We as a country lost our balls.
|
| Decisions are increasingly made on an emotional basis, and
| the poster child for this has been the politically calculated
| exit of nuclear power based on the Fukushima accident to gain
| an election win.
|
| Most of senior management is trying to act like suddenly they
| are some cool nimble startup CEO that can burn through cash
| until the subscription fees for lane keeping assists and
| heated seats are paying the bills.
|
| It's all buzzwords being thrown around without anyone really
| caring for reality.
|
| Just looking at how the "dress code" changed over the last 10
| years in automotive is funny by itself.
|
| Hefty statements, zero backing and ever shrinking balls.
|
| The bill is going to be huge.
| soco wrote:
| I somehow have the feelings that you two actually agree
| quite a lot. Because there are two populations there: one
| who'd be able and willing to change, and the other busy to
| protect their own accounts and after me the deluge. It's
| all which one of these are at the buttons, and I reckon
| it's the second.
| odiroot wrote:
| > Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done
| it this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely
| prevalent. I say this as a German.
|
| Interestingly it's not only the domain of the conservatives
| (e.g. CDU/CSU) to cut any discussion this way. Social
| democrats (and their voters) use the same argument, just in
| instances where it fits _their_ program (e.g. labour laws).
|
| > I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when
| enough other countries implement more progressive economic
| policies.
|
| The only party suggesting any such policies consistently
| fails to clear the 5% threshold as of late. Evidently, the
| electorate is satisfied with the status quo.
| oytis wrote:
| Yeah, I would call both CDU and SPD conservatives, SPD is
| just a left-conservative with a focus on labour rights. CDU
| is a bigger problem though, because their voter base is
| more loyal, and the only way their voters are going to
| migrate if CDU loses its grip is towards the far-right.
| svara wrote:
| > I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when
| enough other countries implement more progressive economic
| policies.
|
| People do change their minds when the pain becomes too
| intense to ignore, but that is what it takes.
| boondongle wrote:
| For me its as simple as mature companies are extremely
| difficult to reorient towards working at a loss through R&D.
|
| People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing
| any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to
| do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years
| when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They
| may not look so forward-thinking.
| noosphr wrote:
| China couldn't get a local ICE industry running no matter how
| many times it tried in the 70s, 80s and 90s. So they made a
| bet on the next technology.
|
| They not only didn't have a local industry, they knew they
| couldn't make one and adjusted government policy.
| pjc50 wrote:
| They do actually make ICE cars and hybrids as well, it's
| not just electrics.
| hangonhn wrote:
| They do but they were not on par with foreign
| competitors.
| hangonhn wrote:
| > People hold up China as an example but China was not
| displacing any local industry including its own. It's
| incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast
| forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or
| CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking.
|
| I would add that despite joint ventures, China's domestic
| internal combustion engine industry never really caught up.
| In fact their best engines were made by wholly domestic
| companies but those were not nearly as good as those made by
| Western and Japanese companies.
|
| As Warren Buffet noted over a decade ago, BEV is an
| opportunity for China to simply skip over all of that and
| just leapfrog everyone else. So it's even better than
| greenfield. It's green field for them while allowing them to
| completely disrupt existing foreign competitors.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's the standard innovators dilemma nonsense, with the added
| drama of the car case that the innovator (Tesla) shot itself in
| the foot due to a madman in charge.
|
| The entire ecosystem of automaking is just like tech - clusters
| of complimentary industries. There's a symbiotic relationship
| between Mercedes, Ford, BMW, GM, etc and their suppliers --
| many of whom in the american case were former subsidiaries of
| the automaker.
|
| That's why Ford, GM, Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, etc have a hard
| time closing the deal on EV. The American car companies are
| more fucked because they've engineered the business around
| compliance requirements to mostly only make trucks. It's hard
| to eat your children. Meanwhile, BYD isn't run by a bipolar
| drug addict, and they are going to back up the truck, slowed
| down only by protectionism. I drove one when traveling, and it
| felt like driving a Tesla in 2015.
|
| For companies building cars in Germany, the US and to some
| extent Japan & Korea, we're living in a do-over of 1976, except
| China is Japan.
| jandrese wrote:
| There is another dimension to this. All of the legacy auto
| manufacturers, without exception, have been dragging their
| heels on EVs. Lots of people talk about corporate inertia and
| shareholders and whatnot forcing the companies to be
| irrational, but I don't think that's entirely correct.
|
| I think the executives at these companies have long since
| identified that EVs are a far more fundamental existential
| challenge than people normally understand. The reason I think
| so is that Internal Combustion Engines are the primary
| barrier to entry into the car market. In an all electric
| world they are once again open to competition from startups
| who can source the same commodity motors, batteries,
| controllers, and the like. The barriers to entry drop and it
| becomes a brand new world of competition from all sides. The
| only major stumbling block being regulatory (crash testing,
| etc...). Nobody in the industry wants that, so the best
| solution is to fight the EV adoption as long as they can. Had
| Tesla not been a company they would still be dragging their
| heels with compliance cars to this day.
|
| Of course countries without existing ICE manufacturers to
| protect, like China, are free to take control of the EV
| market and dominate the auto industry in the coming decades.
| An existential crisis for legacy automakers.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| How can manufacturers fight EV adoption? If an EV is a
| superior offering it will find its market. Germans are free
| to buy Teslas, BYDs or domestiv EVs. There are reasons why
| the EV market share in Germany was still only 4.1% in 2025
| (most likely: high electricity prices, relatively low
| gasoline price) but manufacturers "fighting adoption" is
| not one of them.
| adrianN wrote:
| Manufacturers have large marketing budgets. Presumably
| all that money influences which cars people want to buy.
| jandrese wrote:
| Domestic auto manufacturers can also set high prices on
| their EV offerings to prevent them from effectively
| competing and lobby the government to put high tariffs on
| competitive foreign EVs, or even completely block them at
| the border.
|
| People will come in to say that the batteries are
| inherently expensive, but that's not really true anymore.
| Manufacturing costs have plummeted over the past few
| years, but you wouldn't know that in the west.
|
| I think it is a market failure that there have not been
| more Tesla-like startups that come in to eat their lunch.
| I get that even when you don't need to make an engine the
| startup costs are high, but there is a crapton of money
| sloshing around the markets right now looking for the
| next big company. We need someone with the gumption to
| execute.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Germany has different factors. But in the US, lobbying
| has established BYD as a national security threat.
| fmajid wrote:
| Not all. Renault is doing pretty well.Stellantis is now
| scapegoating EVs for its massive losses, when the real
| reason is that their products are garbage and in a fit of
| hubris they actually raised the prices in the US.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| No, it's just disruptive and political.
|
| Ford built a world class product in the F-150 lightning,
| but their dealers and customers rejected it. A big part of
| it is that it's a threat - you don't need mechanics to fix
| electric cars.
| theK wrote:
| Its not only the automotive lobby to be fair.
|
| Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production,
| batteries and lately heat pumps.
|
| So yeah, the legacy industry lobbies are the problem but not
| exclusively the automaker ones.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| > Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production,
| batteries
|
| Was it lobbies, or costs which aren't competitive with China?
| theK wrote:
| Afaik, It was lobbies and conservative goverents that chose
| to put the question up to the "free market", completely
| disregarding the fact that the competing geographies where
| heavily subsidizing those industries.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| This is a very well researched essay regarding the solar
| panel industry in China and Germany:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo I really
| recommend watching / reading sober assessments like this.
|
| This is the strategic decision that was the last nail in the
| coffin for European battery cell manufacturing:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-
| battery...
|
| It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to
| high end production. Not every industrial environment can
| produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are
| too high to overcome the difference.
| pkos98 wrote:
| As a German, I genuinely cannot comprehend this short-
| sightedness and ignorance:
|
| Our current Chancellor (Merz) publicly boasts that Germans work
| too few hours and calls on them to work more [0] implying this
| would generate more tax revenue. Yet working has arguably never
| been less rewarding for workers: Germany currently has the 2nd
| highest tax wedge among all OECD nations ([?]48% for a single
| worker, nearly 13 percentage points above the OECD average)
| [2][3]. This is compounded by demand-side welfare measures for
| low earners such as Wohngeld (housing benefit) and pension
| supplements like Mutterrente ("Mothers' pension"), creating a
| massive redistribution from working people to non-working
| people.
|
| Meanwhile, the German government has spent years failing to
| fully prosecute the CumEx/CumCum tax fraud scandal, a scheme
| through which banks and investors systematically robbed the
| German state of an estimated EUR36 billion in tax revenues
| [4][5]. The contrast could not be more glaring: squeeze workers
| harder while letting financial fraudsters off easy.
|
| I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking
| for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a
| future here.
|
| - [0] Merz urges Germans to work more CGTN (Feb 2026):
| https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must...
|
| - [1] EUFactCheck Merz's claim rated "Mostly False":
| https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-wor...
|
| - [2] OECD Taxing Wages 2025 Germany:
| https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
|
| - [3] Tax Foundation Tax Burden on Labor, OECD 2024:
| https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo...
|
| - [4] CumEx-Files Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
|
| - [5] Stanford GSB CumEx and CumCum Scandals:
| https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-fin...
| master-lincoln wrote:
| > I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am
| looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself
| building a future here.
|
| You quit your job at a large US company because you do not
| see yourself building a future in Germany?
| pkos98 wrote:
| Not only, but also due to this. Relocation through
| switching teams is not possible. Compensation took a big
| hit due to dollar depreciation.
|
| Worst case I'll end up being on unemployment insurance for
| a year, ~ 2800 EUR per month while travelling the world in
| my late twenties...
|
| When property costs 1 million+ (the case in Berlin/Munich),
| financially it really doesn't matter whether I net 6500 EUR
| month working 50+ hours for FAANG or 4500 EUR working 35
| hour weeks for a German corporate, even though the gross
| salary for the FAANG job is twice the German job.
| alberto-m wrote:
| > When property costs 1 million+ (the case in
| Berlin/Munich), financially it really doesn't matter
| whether I net 6500 EUR month working 50+ hours for FAANG
| or 4500 EUR working 35 hour weeks for a German corporate
|
| Financially in the first case you can afford a mortgage
| on said property (barely, with some help from
| parents/partner, maybe aiming for something slightly out
| of the very city centre), in the second case you cannot.
| Also, 4500 net for a 35-hr week is something you will not
| easily find in a German corporate: at that level,
| levels.fyi only lists non-German multinationals. Unless
| you become a contractor, or rise really high on the
| corporate ladder.
|
| But I agree on the rest of your comment, and I have also
| left Germany because of the massive amount of money that
| the government feels entitled to take from the pockets of
| the so-called "top earners" (i.e. anybody making the
| equivalent of 70'000 $) while giving back barely anything
| in terms of services.
| kakacik wrote:
| Unemployment office doesn't require you to constantly
| seek new jobs, prove that and keep going to unemployment
| office (to prevent exactly this? We have this here in
| Switzerland. They do give more here but costs are massive
| compared to Germany, and economy and society is way more
| nimble than glacial Germany it seems.
|
| If that is lacking, German population mentality is worse
| that I thought, less efficient, more incompetent social-
| state-feed-lazy-me model, which is of course
| unsustainable. Ungood in global times, very ungood.
|
| I have a friend who works quite high in sales for BMW
| directly in Munich, and even despite his general
| politeness he... isn't happy where company and Germany
| overall is heading. Was a big proponent of green deal
| before when everything was rosy, finally understood what
| a shoot-your-own-feet idiocy that was. Eastern wing of EU
| was screaming all this since beginning since this is by
| far the #1 issue they have with EU, but nobody in
| Brussels or Bonn gave a nanofraction of a f#ck..
| patall wrote:
| I never understand those calculations. You can buy houses
| in Berlin from around 350k. Maybe not in that area you
| are looking but still. With something like 600 to 800 sqm
| ground, house around 100 sqm, quiet neighborhood, 10 min
| walking to S-Bahn (i.e my grandmothers neighbors house
| that was sold a few month ago). Probably add 100k for
| renovation. But with 3.5k of savings a month (from 6.5k
| easily possible), you have paid it of in ~10 years.
| healthy_throw wrote:
| Close to S-Bahn but then more than 1h commute?
| brnt wrote:
| I understand that everything and everyone in Berlin is a
| 1hr commute.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| That is a very popular opinion and I've held it too for a very
| long time. Until I read an issue [1] of The Economist in 2020
| and did some digging afterwards.
|
| Turns out, the real moat of any successful car industry so far
| wasn't brand recognition, lobbyists, tariffs, or the pleasing
| sound of a shutting car door. It's the combustion engine
| itself. Or rather the industry you're embedded in that provides
| the metallurgy and chemistry to reliably produce high quality
| engine blocks and seals. Because your engine needs to withstand
| high pressures and temperatures that go from below freezing all
| the way up to way over 2000K. And you also need the know how
| and experience to build all of that together.
|
| None of that can be exfiltrated as a zip file or wished into
| existence by party officials.
|
| The EV sidesteps all of that in one go. Now it's all down to
| who has the best batteries and who can do high quality assembly
| real cheap. Both points go to China.
|
| Why? The same reason: The surrounding industry. It's what you
| get from doing (even simple) electronics for decades,
| cultivating a competitive industry for assembly and high
| quality battery cells.
|
| The only hope for the incumbents was hydrogen instead of
| batteries because this again is engineering and seals.
|
| The alternative would have been to become really good at
| batteries themselves. However, Europe's best chance to get
| there, Bosch, decided in 2018 not to go that way [2].
|
| Once you let all of that sink in, you realise the inevitability
| of the current situation.
|
| And they knew. All this time they knew. The rest was song and
| dance for politicians and shareholders.
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/technology-
| quarterly/2020/01/02/ch...
|
| [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-
| battery...
| twoodfin wrote:
| If the platform, power train, manufacturing is commoditized,
| shouldn't that in theory be great news for existing brands
| with consumer trust and design competence?
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| That's the current hope. But do you know who also had
| consumer trust and design competence? Telefunken, AEG,
| Braun, Grundig, Blaupunkt, Loewe ... How many products of
| those brands are produced in Europe today, if at all? None
| of them had a moat as deep as the combustion engine.
| menaerus wrote:
| I agree with some of your points, they make sense, but
| China has been building combustion engines too, for a
| very long time which is why I don't think that
| sidestepping the technology with EV was the main reason
| for their success
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| They had been trying to for decades but were never able
| to make even remotely competitive combustion engines.
| Nothing that would get VW, Toyota or Ford in trouble. The
| article I posted is sadly paywalled, but it's basically
| about exactly that.
| healthy_throw wrote:
| The article is outdated. Horse Powertrain is already one
| of the largest ICE manufacturers in the world.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| They didn't know.
|
| The reasonable approach to EVs becoming economically feasible
| would have been to cut through the noise and treat it as an
| add-on to the existing portfolio without compromising the
| core competence: internal combustion engines.
|
| This they knew.
|
| Dieselgate put them in a hopeless position in the discussion
| around all encompassing electrification demanded by the
| governent plus the greedy, short sited pressure from markets.
|
| This led to massive (and forced) investments rushing out
| electric models nobody asked for by the dozens.
|
| Compromising quality and a sound growth strategy along the
| way.
|
| The worst possible timing for Dieselgate to hit - steering a
| whole country and all industry-related countries into an
| existential crisis.
|
| It is delusional to think german car manufacturers will be
| anywhere near competitive in the much simpler EV
| mass(!)market - so thinking to order a whole industry, which
| is built around a way different technolocal foundation, to
| just make electric cars from now on without really looking
| into a viable charging infrastructure is still beyond me.
|
| Plus ICE cars won't be going away anytime soon and very few
| have the balls to call this out.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If people don't want to buy the EVs they're forced to make,
| what's their next move, in your view?
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| This word-for-word applies to the US car industry too. The
| Europeans would do well to see the current state of US car
| manufacturers as a cautionary tale.
| thrance wrote:
| This is exactly what happened with a minor nitpick: the
| lobbyists and shareholders that orchestrated it obtained what
| they wanted (a quick buck) and got out unharmed, free to think
| about their next enterprise. The workers will be the ones to
| bear the cost, along with the environment.
| Suckseh wrote:
| China took over exports and manufactoring capacity 5 fold of what
| germany was doing in core industries: manufacturing, machine
| building and chemicals.
|
| Its not just innovation, we missed and our stubbornes of just
| keep doing what we good at, its also china catching up and steam
| rolling us.
|
| When I bought an EV, people around me told me the same thing and
| still do: they like the sound of engines, these EVs are not
| suitable for daily use, EVs will burn down, we hate renewable, we
| hate cables, we hate...
|
| To match china, we would not only need to work a lot more, we
| would also need to work on saturdays, break a lot of labor laws
| we build up, reduce salary despite working more, reduce energy
| costs massivly and automate as much as possible.
|
| A nitting machine from germany costs 60k. In china, with the same
| quality (because they catched up) is 20k. 20k!
|
| And were i'm from (bavaria) most young man want to become
| Mechanical engineers because of BMW and co. No one wants to do IT
| (lets ignore the AI elephant in the room).
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Copy the model of ASML. Build something really complicated that
| no one else can easily copy.
| doug_durham wrote:
| First what would that be? Second you can't sustain an entire
| country on one company
| andsoitis wrote:
| It's a model to copy. Ie move higher up the innovation
| chain.
| bluGill wrote:
| China is copying them though. They are still behind, but they
| are catching up.
| sekai wrote:
| > China is copying them though. They are still behind, but
| they are catching up.
|
| They have been "catching up" for the past 20 years.
| norman784 wrote:
| For that you also need to reduce the bureaucracy.
| kindkang2024 wrote:
| This reminds me of [?] Qian (Heaven), one of the 64 hexagrams
| from the I Ching -- one of the most ancient books from China,
| written 3000 years ago. I think it speaks directly to this:
|
| Shang Jiu :"Kang Long You Hui " -- The arrogant dragon will
| have cause to repent. Honestly, what you described -- people
| around you hating EVs, hating renewables, hating cables --
| that's exactly this. This arrogance always leads to regret.
|
| Yong Jiu :"Jian Qun Long Wu Shou ,Ji " -- A flight of dragons
| with no single head brings good fortune. China catching up
| isn't zero-sum -- it's Qun Long Wu Shou in action. Multiple
| strong players competing drive knitting machines from 60k to
| 20k at equal quality. No monopolist -- the consumer, the
| market, humanity wins. That's literally what the I Ching calls
| "good fortune."
|
| Tian Xing Jian ,Jun Zi Yi Zi Qiang Bu Xi -- Heaven moves with
| relentless power; so must we strengthen ourselves ceaselessly.
| The answer isn't protectionism or nostalgia. It's joining the
| flight of dragons.
|
| Competition, when no single dragon monopolizes the sky, brings
| fortune for all.
|
| Curious about the I Ching and want to know more? Visit
| https://ichingdao.love/i_ching/hexagrams/01 ^_^
| varjag wrote:
| China buys the bulk of its precision machining capacity from
| Germany, Japan and Italy. Domestic designs are not up to snuff.
| mg wrote:
| German chancellor Friedrich Merz ... lashed out at
| German workers to "simply do a little more,"
|
| Germany literally pays people to do nothing.
|
| A friend of mine, an engineer who works in the German car
| industry, recently told me that nowadays he has a lot of free
| time. Because the company he works for has so few orders that the
| company is granted "Kurzarbeitergeld" - the government pays 60%
| of the salary if the employees work less.
|
| That blew my mind. If I had fewer orders, I would work _more_ to
| increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working
| _less_ as a reaction to losing market share seems completely
| counterproductive to me.
| niemandhier wrote:
| That is true for RnD not for Factory workers. Germany has quite
| strong workers rights, so mass layoffs are not a possible
| solution to safe money if facing lacking orders.
|
| Essentially companies get some of the money back they and their
| employees paid as taxes.
| mentalgear wrote:
| The problem is they don't get rid of their ICE cars any more -
| most of the world is transitioning to EVs and China - their
| previously biggest importer - has strict EV quotas and no one
| wants to buy German EVs that are too expensive and less capable
| than Chinese made EVs.
|
| Germany was ahead in EVs and solar - both industries have been
| cuto off by conservative/free-market ICE lobbysts and these 2
| huge global markets are now dominated by China instead.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > has strict EV quotas and no one wants to buy German EVs
| that are too expensive and less capable than Chinese made EVs
|
| Both China and the US have enacted trade barriers against EU
| originated auto drive goods.
|
| A Chinese VW ID4 is manufactured in Shanghai and an American
| one in Tennessee. And that is the crux of the issue -
| consumers are still open to buying a German badged product,
| but it won't be "Made in Germany".
|
| And where else can Germany export?
|
| The individual EU states are protective about exports by
| leaning hard on nationalism and union support as seen in
| France (Renault+Stellantis) and Italy (Stellantis), India
| demands China- and US-style JVs and domestic manufacturing as
| well even despite the EU FTA, Japan and SK prefer buying
| domestic, Russia is blocked due to sanctions, ASEAN+Africa is
| flooded with Chinese, Japanese, and Indian manufactured cars
| already, and South American is flooded with Chinese,
| American, Japanese or domestically manufactured cars.
|
| Germany Inc will remain in Germany as long as Germany makes
| itself attractive. Otherwise, they will leave, as they have
| already done so for the US, China, the CEE, and increasingly
| India.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The VW EVs aren't bad, apart from poor UX design, which they
| have realized.
| atmosx wrote:
| Broadly speaking they're not _as far away_ from Chinese EVs
| as we all make it here to be. However, the problem is that
| the stockholders of all these companies expect 500% YoY
| growth which isn't sustainable. Not to mention the cost of
| a car has grown significantly while all German cars have
| degraded substantially in quality. For example, you can
| expect Porsche to sell FOREVER the number of cars they
| manage to sell in the 00s and 10s: 2000:
| ~54,600 (happy) 2007: ~98,600 (happy) 2019:
| ~280,800 2025: 280,000 (CRISIS!!!)
|
| I mean... It's a freaking sports car! Why on earth would
| you expect to sell more units than these?
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Broadly speaking internet commentary about cars is crap
| and the differences between any two competing products
| (i.e. ignore the dishonest comparisons between a Chevy
| Cobalt and a Toyota Landcruiser) are way, way smaller
| than the online fanboys, shills and people with a very
| expensive purchasing decision they want to feel validated
| in will lead you to believe.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| They are on par or better than their Chinese counterparts
| but they are a hard sell being 30-50% more expensive.
| oytis wrote:
| Depends on your position I guess. If you are a worker at a
| conveyor belt, it doesn't make sense to work more to produce
| more cars nobody needs. I think originally this policy was
| designed to save jobs during _temporary_ downturns, not to save
| industries going downhill
| pc86 wrote:
| If anyone can predict whether a downturn is temporary or an
| industrial shift you can make enough money to never work
| again.
| oytis wrote:
| Government support for reduced working hours is also
| limited to 12 months
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| If you start with a couple hundred thousand $, I can see
| that. But if you start with like $10,000, how do you stop
| market fluctuations from eating your money before your
| correct prediction turns into runaway compounding gains?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It makes sense for production line workers. Less so for R&D,
| but I've seen it affect R&D as well.
|
| By the way, it's not 60% of the salary that the state pays -
| it's 60% of the difference in salary due to reduced hours.
| maqnius wrote:
| Depends on where you work in the industry, there's a huge level
| of division of work. Upstream departments should work more on
| new products and marketing etc. But a little more downstream,
| there isn't much todo if not enough cars are ordered.
|
| The intention of Kurzarbeitergeld is to prevent large layoffs.
| I honestly can't tell if that makes sense in the long run, but
| it seems reasonable for a political party trying to make it to
| the next term.
| thi2 wrote:
| Kurzarbeit is only available for a limited time and has the
| target to avoid layoffs resulting in much higher costs in
| unemployment payments.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| It's 24 months at the moment, which is way too long. A buffer
| period for companies to allow for necessary adjustments
| should be one quarter, max two.
| ericol wrote:
| When my eldest daughter was in high school (~2010, Argentina)
| there was a provincial policy where if every single student had
| a result below a certain score in a test, the scores had to be
| re assessed against the maximum result.
|
| The resulting situation here was that she was constantly
| bullied into underperforming. Both cases are actually similar
| in that each individual has a personal incentive to
| underperform - the difference is that in your friend's case the
| policy is granted at the company level so no single employee
| can defect and break it for the rest, while in my daughter's
| case one high scorer could invalidate the reassessment for
| everyone, which is exactly what made defection punishable and
| the bullying emerge naturally.
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is the natural result of "equity" which is the academic
| jargon term for "forced equality of outcome". High achievers
| are attacked. People who push us forward are demonized. The
| low achievers are never pushed to be better. And the average
| drops.
| atmosx wrote:
| So let me get this straight: you have exactly one data point,
| and the second data point using is a German chancellor widely
| regarded as one of the worst by many measures. Right?
|
| This is FUD. They said the same about the Greeks in 2008, it is
| complete BS. In any given org, passed a certain size you'll
| find ppl who slack a lot and people who work for three.
| Unfortunately that seems to the nature of large orgs, nothing
| special about Germans...
|
| ps. I'm having a DejaVu. This is the exact same narrative Greek
| politicians used against the Greek population to justify them
| become poor overnight.
| danans wrote:
| > If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the
| quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a
| reaction to losing market share seems completely
| counterproductive to me.
|
| That may work if you are a sole proprietor or small business
| person, but that's not how shareholder owned corporations work.
|
| A sole proprietor is willing to work more if business drops
| (effectively lowering their compensation rate) because they are
| the beneficiary of any future gains that may (or may not)
| result from their short term sacrifice. If they want their
| employees to do the same they have to give them the same deal.
|
| A large corporation can't easily make its employees work much
| longer for the same pay (except in the very short term), nor
| can it easily get shareholders to be OK with increasing
| spending on labor. This usually ends with massive layoffs when
| it can't sustain itself anymore.
|
| That's one reason that smaller companies can be more nimble.
| 113 wrote:
| > If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the
| quality of my product
|
| Really? Because most of the time what you see is huge layoffs
| and gutting the company's assets.
| blks wrote:
| The worker who's put on this reduced salary instead of being
| fired doesn't have orders nor he has a product. He works for a
| wage.
| riedel wrote:
| Actually this is not as easy as it sounds. Quite a few
| companies opt not to go into 'Kurzarbeit' because it means that
| you go under extra scrutiny as it is only there to stop major
| layoffs, which would cost our social insurance system even
| more. There is typically enough mechanisms to make it
| unattractive enough, that even unions accept unpaid leaves
| instead. IMHO there is bigger productivity problems. After
| COVID sick leave has massively increased. Many women do not
| work as much as they want because child care is still sketchy.
| There is often simply no incentive to work more because
| engineering careers are quite limited: general pay compared to
| expenses is really good, but top performers earn considerably
| less than in other countries.
| ramboldio wrote:
| A very key problem is the common narrative that green policies
| and the EU allegedly caused the downfall of the car industry (->
| "Verbrennerverbot").
|
| In reality, a way bigger impact seems to be that the Chinese govt
| stopped buying German cars once they could build their own (which
| they have been always transparent about).
|
| Unfortunately, this misdiagnosis leads to the wrong conclusion to
| double-down on a obsolete business model of the car industry,
| instead of diversifying away from it.
| Tade0 wrote:
| This. China is a much larger economy and by far the single
| largest car market in the world - selling more vehicles
| domestically than the EU and USA combined.
|
| That being said just like Germany they're largely export-
| oriented and if local demand ever weakens, they'll struggle all
| the same.
| jansan wrote:
| It's both. Of course the massively shrinking share of the
| Chinese market is a big chunk of the problem. But the whole
| mindset here in Germany is completely delusional with the idea
| to be leaders in environmental technology and sustainability
| solutions.
|
| My favorite example of this delusion is Porsche who somehow
| thought that selling their bread-and-butter model Macan
| exclusively as an EV was a good idea. I still cannot understand
| how they arrived at this decision.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| What would the appropriate strategy have been after realizing
| China had decided to squeeze foreign cars out of the market?
| The "obsolete business model" still sells many cars world-wide.
| svara wrote:
| How large a demand for cars does the Chinese government have do
| you think?
| niemandhier wrote:
| There is little the US could have done more to harm Europe and
| Germany in particular than engaging in the Iranian conflict.
| Qatar was supposed to be the replacement for lacking Russian
| deliveries.
|
| In addition the current government is pro fossile fuels, and
| parts of it are the same south germans that keep building natural
| gas power plants.
|
| Those plants play an important part in driving up electricity
| prices in the whole country, since the same people that insist on
| using natural gas also refuse to split the country into
| electricity price zones.
| alephnerd wrote:
| You could have invested in nuclear instead of adopting a
| broadly popular anti-nuclear policy.
|
| The EU could have also enforced the JCPOA as one of it's
| guaranteers but decided to be inward facing instead of treating
| the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as the wake up call that it should
| have been.
|
| We have been saying for almost 20 years that we in the US are
| shifting East, but Western and Northern European states like
| Germany did nothing to prepare for such a world.
|
| At least the French establish military bases, conduct coups,
| and attempt to project hard power abroad in order to protect
| their interests.
| niemandhier wrote:
| About 40% of the uranium used in Germany came from Rosatom,
| either directly from Russia or from Kasachstan.
|
| That would have helped us to reduce co2, but not to get
| independent from Russia.
|
| Also: Natural gas is used heavily in chemistry and the steel
| industry, electricity alone does not help, although I admit
| not raising the point in the previous comment.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Germany could have sourced from Niger - who's entire
| uranium supply chain is owned by hook and by crook by
| France's Orano.
|
| > Natural gas is used heavily in chemistry and the steel
| industry
|
| Absolutely, and Germany could have defended it's ability to
| access NatGas from outside Russia or the MidEast if they
| collaborated like France's TotalEnergie and their Indian JV
| partners did when expanding capacity in Mozambique and
| Angola.
|
| ---
|
| The reality is German politicians are a reflection of the
| German people (as you guys are fond of telling us
| Americans).
|
| Germans would gladly choose vassalage instead of restarting
| and expanding conscription, investing in industrial
| subsidizes, and adopting a hard power foreign policy
| strategy.
|
| Merz only started these kinds of policies in mid-late 2025,
| and while it is a good start, it is too little too late.
|
| Germany used to have one of the most respected armed forces
| in NATO and was the linchpin of the Yugoslav Wars, but
| German voters decided to whittle away that legacy.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Still outside of EU dependency. Who wants that if you can
| generate all in your own country via offshore and solar ?
| And Germany is already on the right path, the last
| several years at certain peaks, Germany actually had to
| export clean energy because it was generating too much.
| niemandhier wrote:
| Niger is at odds with France since the coup d'etat 2023
| and is considering selling to Russia. France itself is
| only a reliable partner until LePen gets into office.
|
| https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/0
| 7/t...
|
| Mozambique and Angola are together to small to be
| replacement for Russia. In addition both already supply
| the European gas network and thereby Germany. Shortening
| supply will always increase prices.
|
| German politicians are indeed a reflection of their
| people, as it's suppose to be the case.
| sofixa wrote:
| > The EU could have also enforced the JCPOA as one of it's
| guaranteers but decided to be inward facing instead of
| treating the 2014 invasion of Ukraine as the wake up call
| that it should have been.
|
| Is this about JCPOA or the 2014 occupation of Crimea?
|
| JCPOA was being enforced by its EU members, but when the US
| pulled out, it fell apart. EU based companies couldn't
| continue to take part of the lessened restrictions because of
| the fear of direct US sanctions on them, which made Iran
| mostly uninterested in continuing its participation. It was
| entirely the fault of the US.
| pmarreck wrote:
| To quote my 4.5 year old son:
|
| "Daddy, look, another stinky gas car!"
|
| The kids already know it.
| ShellackGobln7 wrote:
| The thesis here is that Germany is suffering because they didn't
| out-compete China on EVs? Really?
|
| Maybe these writers should go invent a new battery! No amount of
| German Engineering is going to beat the costs of Chinese scale.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I have some experience with the German automotive industry
| (having worked at a company that is a service provider for much
| of the German giants), I can instantly confirm a few things,
| which are known by some and suspected by most:
|
| Historically VW has been the "people's car" - a good car that
| people could afford and for the longest period that was the case:
| affordable and rock-solid. Around the late 2000s, that changed.
| VWs are no longer affordable and when problems hit, they hit hard
| - they are both time consuming and unless covered by a warranty,
| expensive. Also hard to fix even if it's something simple. That
| problem is cascading down the entire VW Group and it is hurting
| everyone along the way. Some companies under the VW Group are hit
| very hard by this. At the same time, the second big player,
| Mercedes, was never really affordable but lately their image of a
| tank-solid machine has cracked, suffering from a similar,
| brutally over-engineered, unmaintainable, engineering maze as VW.
| BMW is in a similar state as Mercedes but with a slightly
| different twist: BMW's are not to everyone's taste and I am
| saying that as an owner myself. But these days even the most die-
| hard fans acknowledge that the modern designs are absolutely
| atrocious. Top Gear were making fun of the Porsche Panamera back
| in the day but looking at new BMWs, I'd pick the Panamera in a
| heartbeat. In addition to their hard push for anti-consumer
| practices and outrageously over-engineered solutions.
|
| All of this has painted German cars in a negative way - expensive
| and finicky. Most of the customers were happy to pay a higher
| price for quality and creature comforts but there is a line
| between comfort and something dumb like having to visit a
| mechanic in order to swap a dead battery - something which should
| have been a simple operation that you can do on the side of the
| road if it comes down to it. And even though I am happy with my
| current car and I don't plan on changing it anytime soon, if I
| were in the market for a new car, I'd definitely consider other
| options, knowing what I know.
|
| My suggestion to the big-3 which will start solving problems:
| KISS.
| arethuza wrote:
| About 20 years ago I can remember a German colleague describing
| the quality of engineering by Mercedes as a "national
| disgrace". I wonder what he thinks now!
| chewz wrote:
| Agreed. No plans to buy German car anytime soon.
| thi2 wrote:
| I've mostly worked in smaller companies (max 250 employees) and
| recently joined one of the larger corporations (not automotive
| related).
|
| The main issue I notice is how bad the communication is and how
| little can be done & decided. Before deploying a new Jenkins
| pipeline I need to speak to two different teams. It's insane how
| much time is lost doing meetings and syncs.
| delichon wrote:
| > Before deploying a new Jenkins pipeline I need to speak to
| two different teams
|
| It doesn't sound excessive that there would be two teams using
| a Jenkins pipeline that would need to be consulted.
| rramon wrote:
| Germany could turn it around with laxer laws about permanent
| residency and new infrastructure. Allow people to live
| permanently in mobile homes, vans and caravans which they can
| rent to won from automobile makers, invest in campsites. The good
| future imo isn't megacities but distributed cities with families
| and social circles congregating.
| mingusrude wrote:
| I don't think trailer parks is how most people envision the
| future for a leading European country.
| fnord77 wrote:
| sounds like "live like the homeless"
|
| Bitter german winters would make living in trailers miserable
| slaw wrote:
| Isn't it easier to fix housing issue and build more apartments?
| baggachipz wrote:
| Looks like they're taking a page right out of the USA playbook:
| Chase quarterly profits at the expense of the future, enrich
| large investors via stock buybacks, lay off workers, and rely on
| the government to subsidize the behavior. Probably not the model
| to emulate, but here we are.
| tsss wrote:
| Germany is a country that never moved past 1918, both in
| technology and society. All the successful industry is from that
| time and the mindset is too. They may have gotten rid of the
| Emperor but the top-down government and Prussian subservience are
| strong as ever. It's no coincidence that the GDR was even more
| controlling than the Soviet Union and crashed even harder. The
| German federal republic, too, is turning more and more into a
| paralyzed command economy. The entire public sector, health care,
| and all large corporation certainly work that way and it is the
| reason for their unfathomable inefficiency.
|
| Ignoring EVs is a symptom and not a cause of the problems. It is
| impossible for these corporations to pivot or innovate, no matter
| in which direction.
| intalentive wrote:
| Where is Germany going to get the fuel to power an ICE fleet?
| Where is Germany going to get the electricity to power an EV
| fleet?
|
| Germany faces much bigger problems than the auto lobby.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I don't know what the German carmakers are going to do, but I'm
| wondering if they should put eyes on some Chinese EV carmakers
| that are going to go defunct -- quite usual in Chinese
| manufacturing philosophy, and buy them cheap. Then they can use
| the tech to export cars back to EU.
| tsss wrote:
| They would just smother whatever is left of the Chinese company
| with their overbearing management.
| amai wrote:
| China will not allow that. China is not as stupid as Germany
| and allows critical companies to be sold to the competitor. As
| an example, see
|
| https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/case-studies/mid...
| chmod775 wrote:
| > Having ideas is difficult and expensive. Let's lobby instead!
|
| > [..] spends around EUR10 million a year on lobbying - which
| sounds like a lot, but amounts to just 0.05% of VW's EUR21
| billion R&D budget.
|
| > The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain,
| whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap
| and reliable.
|
| Complete non sequitur. This could more easily be read as "they
| don't care much about lobbying and are hard at work doing R&D
| instead", but then that would go very much against narrative the
| author is trying to spin for us here.
|
| Also I distinctly remember industry voices being very much pro-
| electric, while it was dinosaur politicians fetishizing ICE cars
| and fighting to keep production going, long past the point VW
| even _wanted_ to focus on them.
|
| I don't think this one was a lobbying problem for once.
| enopod_ wrote:
| This. VW actually invested a lot into EVs and now they're
| outselling every other EV maker in the European market.
| Mercedes and BMW also invested a lot. All of them have brand
| new and pretty competitive EV platforms. Heck, even Peugeot
| make decent EVs. The only manufacturers lagging behind at this
| point are the Americans. Tesla basically stopped investing into
| EVs and their tech is outdated, in Europe they get absolutely
| butchered by VW and in China they're only able to keep sales
| level because the market is growing so fast. But soon Tesla
| will get annihilated in China too. Other US car makers that
| build EVs on scale are nowhere to be seen, besides maybe
| Rivian.
| adverbly wrote:
| "The engine of X's wealth is blocking its future" is a pretty
| common theme these days...
|
| Pensions, patent/IP law, land ownership crowding out
| affordability...
|
| _Birth rate drops dramatically_
|
| _Shocked pikachu face_
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You see low birth rates in places with relatively affordable
| cost of living and high levels of economic opportunity.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Like which places?
| grigio wrote:
| EU destroyed all its industries (Olivetti, Ericsson, Nokia,..)
| and automotive isn't an exception
| sofixa wrote:
| The EU didn't have anything to do with the destruction of any
| industry, really. And especially none with _Nokia_?? Terrible
| product decision making destroyed Nokia 's consumer business,
| not the EU. But Nokia and Ericsson are still there and quite
| strong in networking. You just don't see them because they're
| not consumer oriented businesses.
|
| Also, there are many industries still flourishing across the
| EU. Airbus, Renault, Zeiss, ASML, ThyssenKrupp, Saint-Gobain,
| Nestle, Siemens, Sanofi, IKEA, Inditex, Schneider Electric, etc
| etc etc.
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| Problem is: this list gets shorter every year, without any
| new additions in the recent decades (!)
| steviee wrote:
| > It would be great to see a politician as angry about lobbying
| as Merz is about work-life balance.
|
| Love it! Merz (and our minister of commerce Reiche) is a desaster
| for Germany and all of Europe. Tump attacks Iran and Gas prices
| hit 2,12EUR (and even more) per liter and still they think
| betting on fossil fuels from their dictatorship-friends is a good
| thing.
|
| Saving Earth is just not cost-effective (at least not for the
| "right" people).
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Everybody underestimated the ability of Chinese auto
| manufacturers to come up to speed. In a recent interview with the
| CEO of Ford he said something similar.
| amai wrote:
| ,,The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain,
| whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap
| and reliable.... Following this logic, German firms will keep
| pushing for carveouts instead of innovating, and catching up will
| become impossible."
|
| Nostalgia is not a strategy!
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