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But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
Exactly this. I thought about getting a T7, but the price is just ridiculous. And it’s not even like you’re paying for quality, there are so many complaints about both minor and major issues.
I've bought a Skoda after owning VW in the past and couldn't be happier. 80% (probably 95% for the things I actually care about) of what VW offers for almost 50% less.
Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession.
German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless bureaucratic structures that just keep on growing.
> Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/business/china-rare-earth...:
> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.
I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."
What metrics are you using to label it as non-competitive?
A story from a german town:
We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore.
It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess.
The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down.
But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit.
They have finally started construction 5 years ago and the costs have doubled multiple times and are now in the hundreds of millions.
They say that hopefully in another 5 years from now they might be finished with construction. For all those years the locals have to take a long detour because the bridge can't be used.
I have recently read how in china they finished the tallest bridge of the world in a 3 year construction and the cost was less than our little bridge here. After hearing about this i realized how doomed we are. We have regulated our selfs into a total standstill. I can understand if we are maybe 10-30% slower due to better environmental protection, but if me are slower and more expensive by a factor 10, then we are just not competitive at all. This reads like satire but it is actually happening.
It seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.
Regulation is slowly strangling most countries. We need to find ways to stop the continuous cancerous growth of bureaucracy. Currently it is impossible to fire any government employees, meaning they keep adding more and more and the old ones just stop working. No more work gets done overall.
Given that France is also starting to suffer badly, one thing to watch is more and more people demanding a cut to EU budget contributions from these countries. Its like 40 billion EUR worth of net transfers. Could make for explosive politics.
Much to my annoyance, despite this being practically a rounding error (like, 1% or so of GDP), the EU budget contributions absolutely did have this effect in the UK.
Most of it caused by "Mama Merkel":
* She inherited a booming economy with very good reforms and plenty of budget surplus
* Let infrastructure to rot
* Energy production cratered and shifted to Russian gas dependency (high profile politicians related) showering Putin with billions every year
* Then tricking Puting to a peace agreement to quietly "rearm" Ukraine to prepare for war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements)
* Nuclear reactor dismantling
* Poisoned relationships with peripheral EU countries by forcing her brand of politics
* Persecution of opposition, branding "far right" anything right of center
* Destroying German identity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8PNgxbTE0o)
* Pushing police state and against free speech
* Failing upwards her protégé von der Leyen to the top of the EU, an incompetent, and unelected nepo-baby
* Forcing Germany and the EU to take in tens of millions (at least) of "refugees" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_schaffen_das ("we can take them", open doors, family "reunification", etc)
* Anti family hard-line feminist
TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever.
Sure, not everything she did was bad. But her legacy is now Germany's nightmare. And EU's, too. Untangling this mess will be very difficult.
Also, she did not initiate a single structural reform in her 16 years of being chancellor. The public sector has become a huge burden for our country. It is just too expensive and just like AI is currently propping up the US economy, the growing public sector is what keeps Germany's economy afloat.
"TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever."
to be honest, this is what enrages me. I feel like I was in a madhouse; the mass media were pushing an image of Merkel as the only adult in the room and the patron saint of liberalism.
I saw, live, how she mismanaged the Eurocrisis, turning a banking crisis into a humanitarian crisis, and how her reaction to the invasion of Crimea was meek.
but if you dared to say something about this, you were seen as a dangerous communist or worse.
I hated her flawed politics for 15 years. But now, surprisingly, I kind of miss her. not because she was good; she was terrible as i said, but the new leadership, especially in Germany, is far worse: Friedrich Merz is a zero, and von der Leyen seems utterly retarded, and i don't mean it in a mocking way, but literally: they are always choosing the worst option for Europe at every step.
dark clouds over europe... but mostly, of our own making.
A failed attempt at Catherine the Great II. I don't understand how everyone could be so blind in regards of relations of top leaders with Russia, like Merkel and Schroeder.
Why is output falling? Are there other countries taking the market share? Or is there more to it?
Article says:
> But a profit warning by German carmaker BMW late on Tuesday was the latest reminder of the industry’s structural challenges as it struggles with the transition to battery cars, weak sales in China and US import duties.
My gut feeling is that the Chinese are now buying locally made EVs. Other nations are buying Chinese made EVs. Except the Americans, who can't afford anything without paying extra money to their Mad King. (This is generalized, obviously there'll be American or Chinese BMW buyers, but a lot less).
Damn, look at that graph of registrations: https://carnewschina.com/2025/10/08/byd-sales-surged-2225-in...
Many reasons.
1) Ever since the Cold War ended, German companies have been shifting production to cheaper places in Europe, so less and less "German" cars are actually built in Germany and show up as German industrial production.
2) Germany used to sell a lot to China, but Chinese companies are upping their game and shifting to EVs, and Germany is losing Chinese market share as a result.
3) Those same Chinese companies are increasingly selling overseas and starting to kick German butt. I went to an EV car show recently, and while Volkswagen Group had a large presence (VW, Audi, Cupra, etc) and some of their EVs looked pretty good, the prices were consistently 20-50% above the equivalent Chinese models.
Export markets for European cars are cratering. The Chinese and Koreans are taking over with really decent, affordable EVs. And while the likes of VW are producing good EVs, it's at the cost of their ICE vehicles and those losses aren't offset by their EV sales.
In general the ICE car market is not just car manufacturers but many thousands of companies all over the place that make parts and components. Quite a few of those are becoming redundant and quite a few more are facing stiff competition from abroad. Anything to do with components for petrol or diesel engines is going to face year on year declines.
What's currently happening in the market is price parity before incentives, before considering benefits from lower maintenance, and before considering benefits from lower energy cost. An EV is simply becoming the cheaper vehicle to buy. And with all that included, EVs are far cheaper overall. That's not a trend that's ever going to revert. It's only going to get worse and it's going to have some obvious effects.
A lot of this applies to US car manufacturers as well BTW. The current tariffs are distorting the market dynamics. But that's unlikely to last very long. GM and Ford will need to keep up internationally if they want to stay relevant in foreign markets.
Germany is merely ripping off the band-aid right now (or having it ripped off for them). Short term disruptive but it needs to happen at some point.
Yes. German car makers have been very dependent on the Chinese market to sell their cars too. Now that China is pushing for domestic electric vehicles, German car makers are falling behind.
A lot of the industrial economy was based on cheap pipeline gas from Russia and there have been some issues with that policy recently
Reasons I can think of (as a German) from the top of my head:
- Crumbling infrastructure
- Decades of missing investments in education and the public sector
- no digitization
- Unwillingness to move away from ICE vehicles
- Slow internet access and slow build out of fiber network
- Killing future industries (solar, battery ...) by cutting funding/subsidies early
- low wages in European comparison
Like many traditional car makers they are struggling with the EV question. Presumably they want to switch to EVs, but in a company built on building ICE vehicles that comes with a lot of resistance from inside the company.
All things considered they aren't doing too bad, both Volkswagen and BMW are in the global top 7 EV brands by sales. But BYD is far ahead of everyone else, selling nearly an order of magnitude more EVs than any German brand. Which hurts Germany especially since they used to sell a lot of cars in China, BYD's home turf
People don’t see a forest from the trees, the answer is simple;
They cut off their main energy supplier and opted for a much more expensive one.
Like other developed countries, entrenched interests continued entrenching, stifling innovation.
Other countries like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia "diversified" by pushing into German automotive supply chain and are sinking along Germany. German automotive was so self confident still 15 years ago that you can see this confidence in drivers of their cars until today on roads worldwide.
They seppukued by walking away from cheap RU gas.
Cheap RU gas isn't just power, it's cheap industrial feedstock/inputs. Renewable/nuclear does not replace this. So all the wank about their energy policy is distraction. TLDR:
Competitive Germany industry needs cheap RU gas.
Healthy German economy with 40% trade GDP needs US + PRC, then RoW markets.
PRC market going away.
Germany "chose" (maybe pressured) into expensive US gas to keep US market, because doesn't matter manufacturing cost if you lose biggest future market, and can't manufacture without reliable source of gas. The lockin is DE gets US gas and US market access.
But Germany with expensive US gas = will eventually lose competitiveness in most other markets, so sectors will crater. Double whammy of other (PRC) being more competitive and DE making it self even less competitive.
No more cheap gas
While it may not be intuitive, exports are about 20% of GDP in China and about 42% in Germany so roughly twice as high in Germany. That makes Germany more exposed to global trade disruptions and geopolitical shifts.
> But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
Do you have more details? From what I gather as an American from 5 minutes of Googling is that Ford sells a van in Europe that's a re-badged VW T7, but it's not like VW is selling Ford stuff.
Sorry, the T7 is actually the multi van now, which is VW based
The old transporter and panels vans were called T6 and this is where confusion lies. None the less, the Transporter etc are Fords.
Re T naming convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Transporter_(2024) Straight up based on the ford platform Vw Transporter Panel Van £38,620 Ford Ford Transit® Custom £33,350
As far as I understand, the VW Amarok is based on the Ford Ranger, the VW T7 Transporter (their Commercial vehicle) is based on the Ford Transit Custom. The T7 Multivan and California are still built on their own VW platform.
Strange considering that Germany's PMI (Purchasing managers' index) has been recovering this year: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/manufacturing-pmi
> as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is set to meet the bosses of the country’s carmakers on Thursday in Berlin to discuss the woes of the struggling sector.
Consumers will definitely profit from that, there's no way they will tax Chinese imports even more, no way i tell's ya!
They will ask the EU to remove environmental protections like the end of new gas / diesel cars by 2035.
They need their own AI bubble...
Their public media broadcaster has ever increasing and absurd budget, these temporary bubbles are nothing in comparison.
The trend is fairly consistent since 2018, though, according to the graph in the article.
Cutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households).
> Cutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households)
Brussels checkmated itself trying to maintain industrial power while appeasing its anti-nuke reactionaries.
Europe cedes sovereignty with gas. (Whether it buys from America or Russia isn’t structurally relevant. Militarily the distant and rich master is obviously preferable.) The answers are solar, wind and nuclear. Germany is singularly responsible for fucking up the last, and with its Russian gas appeasement, undermining the former.
But it is necessary to do anyway? Just accept the losses and move on. Eventually solar will take over everywhere regardless of what anyone does, or doesn't. A few years of perturbations don't matter.
Rising energy costs and green policies make European manufacturing non-competitive.
Politicians ruining their countries.
Wait until you hear about closing of the Dutch gas fields. 40 bcm3 ~15% of EU gas consumption closed due to cracks in 5000 houses in Groningen.
Read history what will happen when Germany enters depression.