alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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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...
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.
> 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.
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.