alt Hacker NewsGermany’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.
Replies
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 Mütterrente ("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 €36 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...
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.
If people don't want to buy the EVs they're forced to make, what's their next move, in your view?
> 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
It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future and your entire thesis depends on it to be true.
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.