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As a 2018 Tesla owner I strongly disagree with the idea that Elon's got a track record of success. The Model Y was their last successful product and it's just a stretched Model 3. FSD is not there. Robotaxi is an embarrassment. Cybertruck failed to deliver the gigacasted exoskeleton and shipped at double the original price point. Tesla has lost its way completely. (Also, Twitter has lost users and revenue ever since he got involved.)
You mean the tele-operated "autonomous Robots" ? Also, I'm waiting for >10 years now for his (really!) self-driving cars he promised would be just about 2 years away - every 2 years.
SpaceX is what gives him leverage but the success of the reusable rockets are the engineers behind it - he's just the ketamine-driven hype-man that drives the stock via publicity now.
I don't launch rockets into space, don't want a housekeeping robot, don't have a Twitter account, don't do ketamine, and have never been laid off from a government job, so I can't speak to any of those things which Elon has involved himself with more recently.
My personal experience with Elon's promises is through the Model 3 which I do own, and essentially none of his promises for it have materialized. It hasn't morphed into a revenue-generating taxi which drives around strangers at night; it can't be summoned from across town (or even across a parking lot); it can't even safely drive itself without oversight, which was a goal only "months away" in 2019.
What exactly would that be a winning track record in - as near as I can tell, his actual track record is in buying companies with an already-successful product team, and managing not to run them into the ground for a while?
You have got to be kidding me, you can dislike someone without being this wrong. Hes literally the richest man in the world, started the largest space delivery company in the planet and has brought extreme returns for his investors in every endeavor he’s undertook.
> literally the richest man in the world... extreme returns for his investors
This isn't really a benchmark for effectiveness at anything beyond making money.
I don't think anyone would dispute that he has an eye for investments (helped along by a healthy dose of the ol' silver spoon), not to mention a certain flair for convincing Uncle Sam to pick up the tab (i.e. a significant part of Tesla's growth relied on federal EV subsidies, and NASA heavily buying SpaceX launch capacity).
Effectively helping elect a dictator who is in love with fossil fuels undercuts at lot of his "wins". Never mind the Nazi saluting, fraudulent advertising, or bypassing safety regulations.
A foreign national buying one of the largest American media platforms and turning it into a right-wing propaganda machine should probably concern you at least somewhat.
After LeCun (actual ML pioneer) left Zuck, then his data-labeling expert Wang, now he reaches for the hype around Molt/Claw, just like openAi did with their molt/claw "purchase". Given Zuck's track record on LLMs, I do not hold out for actual science but expect more smoke&mirror commercialisation tricks - or even the integration of his dystopian camera goggles.
Adds up : We are seeing a clear exodus of both capital and talent from the US - with the current US administration’s shift toward cronyism - and the EU stands as the most compelling alternative with a uniform market of 500 million people and the last major federation truly committed to the rule of law.
That's a bonfire of capital into a gaping hole in the ground with zero chance outside of "military pork" and "overcharging the taxpayer" to ever make their money back.
The brain capital loss here is what's going to spook investors.
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.
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Software need to interface almost all parts and electronics in a vehicle. Since car makers outsourced these parts, interfacing them took a lot of work. Here manufacturers like Tesla were clearly at an advantage since they controlled all components.
That is a nightmare situation for software that already started later in the development process.
The internal EU market is bad (demand is low), the export markets are sensitive and competitive, and traditional Western companies are inefficient. (Which was okay as we were coasting on the post-WW2 globalization economic miracles.
But the inability and unwillingness to let the failing (uncompetitive) companies and industries go (France has a huge problem with this too) led to being stuck between a rock and an eventual hard place.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is not true, since you still need to pay for capex and depreciation. The reason it appears to be free is not because its production doesn’t cost anything, but because at times of a glut there‘s just no one willing to pay much for it. Please make some good will effort to acknowledge the difference between cost and price.
Now, about your question, why people should buy „expensive“ nuclear power: for the same reason that people buy health insurance for: volatility increases risk, and you’re willing to pay an ongoing premium to reduce systemic risks. Over- and undersupply of electricity are risks for a lot of businesses and lots of them spend a lot of money on capex to avoid them, e.g. hospitals that have diesel generators. Generators are for a different failure mode (rare, longer duration outages), but for the high frequency, short time interruptions and/or price spikes caused by unbalanced generation volatility, contracts with a nuclear power company are similar; the capex is just shifted to the power company, and the customer might pay a premium during those times that other sources would deliver energy „for free“.
That said, this is not a black-and-white scenario. Of course we can benefit a lot from solar and wind. I’m not very positive about large scale batteries and lean more towards having flexible consumers, e.g. H2 production for the chemical industry. But right now, we don’t have the choice of nuclear vs. renewables, it’s (renewables + nuclear) vs. (renewables + turbines run with Russian gas or LNG from the US and Qatar). My choice here is clear, and it should not be muddied by the Russian propaganda of nuclear power clogging our electricity grids.
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.
The original plan was to only shut the reactors down when enough renewable energy sources would be available to replace them. The Merkel government wanted to prolong the initially planned phase outs. Then Fukushima happened. Bad optics. So after pressure from the populace they instead of prolonging their runtime (as they wanted initially), they shut them down, but earlier than planned.
What are you talking about? Greens are neither pro-gas nor pro-Russia. They were amongst those warning previous governments of energy dependence on Russia, and were basically the most decisively pro-Ukranian party in the previous government.
They also weren't the ones who made the decision to shut down the remaining nuclear plants, despite what "conservatives" would like you to believe.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
Germany also has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. It is so expensive it is making some industries unprofitable. BASF, a major German chemical company, has implemented plant closures due to high production costs.
Most countries choose either cheap and dirty or expensive and clean for electricity but Germany chose expensive AND dirty.
What you call "aid from abroad" is generally called a functioning wide area synchronous grid (https://en.wikipedia.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.
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.
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.
What gaga show? Bavarian industry is being subsidized via cheap electricity from the north, who in turn is paying higher prices than they would otherwise.
Bavaria has been subsidizing the north for decades and yet you think you can betitle us?
This is not just about electricity. We are talking about billions of EUR in transfers. The money is flowing one direction only. So called “solidarity” is a hard ask given this arrogance.
The money is flowing in one direction only now, but what the "Stammtisch" likes to forget is that Bavaria has benefited from transfers until as recently as 1992, and from 1950 to 1986 (36 years!) the money also flowed in only one direction - but the opposite one, from other states to Bavaria. (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich#Fin...)
You are accusing me of belittling "you", after you wrote "gaga show".
That's ironic. And no, money is not flowing in one direction only. As I already wrote, Bavarian industry is effectively massively subsidized by the north investing massively in renewable energy production and overpaying for their own energy because demand is driven by the south (who is fighting tooth and nails against building their own wind turbines for ideological reasons).
Greetings from Hessen (another Geberland, just like Bavarian, but without the Bavarian exceptionalism, which most of Germany just sees as arrogance)!
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.
Those "perfectly safe" reactors were hopelessly outdated (the ones last shut down in 2023 were built from 1982 to 1988/89) and nearing the end of their useful life. What no one mentions about nuclear power in Germany: since they weren't allowed to start a nuclear weapons program of their own, one of the reasons for having a civilian nuclear program was already missing, so the German nuclear plants were mostly showcases of Siemens nuclear technology. Once Siemens decided to completely withdraw from this sector in 2011, there was no pro-nuclear lobby in Germany anymore, so the fate of the remaining nuclear reactors was sealed, although some more political theater followed (and still continues).
Of course, this was just the final chapter of a story that began way back in 1986, when Chernobyl led to no further reactors being built in Germany and other countries shelving their plans for nuclear power. If you think the situation in Germany is curious, then look at Austria, who already in 1978 decided to "temporarily" mothball a 100% completed nuclear power plant, a decision which turned permanent in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Austria). Or Italy, which shut down all four of its nuclear power plants (from the 60s and 70s) by 1990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Italy).
They were absolutely not hopelessly outdated. Nuclear reactors can last 60 to 80 years.
When I checked electricity maps today Germany was emitting 17 times as much CO2 per Watt of electricity as France. That is what idiotically shutting down nuclear reactors instead of coal plants does and German environmentalists should be ashamed of themselves.
German electricity is also some of the most expensive in the world and is causing companies to close plants in Germany. BASF, a major German chemical company, has implemented plant closures due to high production costs. Germany's energy policy is a disaster that has made electricity both expensive and dirty.
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.
Nuclear reactors are about the most expensive way of producing energy. If you want cheap energy you certainly want to phase out nuclear, which is only viable with massive subsidies or externalities paid for by the tax payer.
Yes and nuclear was especially funded like that by countries with nuclear weapons. Is not a coincidence that there's so much overlap between countries with much nuclear power and weapons.
Not that nuclear power plants create weaponisable isotopes, they don't, but having a healthy functioning nuclear industry really helps.
Conflating nuclear power and nuclear weapons is the mistake Germany made that led to their deeply stupid decision to shut down their perfectly safe nuclear reactors.
Personally I think we do need nuclear weapons but not nuclear power. We can't rely on the US anymore for a nuclear umbrella so Europe needs to have its own (and just the UK/French ones is not enough).
It's the only real deterrent against Russia. But nuclear power I'm not in favour of due to the long-term waste and potential safety impact.
The decision was made in response to Fukushima, 15 years ago. Generational trauma from Chernobyl probably played a role as well. How does this relate to nuclear weapons at all?
Renewables have been built on the back of decades of subsidies, tax credits, mandated purchase obligations (RPSs), and net metering policies that shift integration costs to non-participants. Singling out nuclear here is intellectually dishonest unless you apply the same standard to all sources.
A grid running 70%+ renewables needs massive storage, transmission overbuild, and firm backup capacity costs that don't appear in solar/wind LCOE figures but are real and substantial. Nuclear provides firm, dispatchable, carbon-free baseload with a ~90%+ capacity factor. Solar capacity factors are 20-30%, wind 30-45%.
The OECD's 2020 Projected Costs study shows that at a 3% discount rate with a $30/ton carbon price, nuclear was the cheapest dispatchable option in most countries. Nuclear becomes comfortably cheaper than coal and gas under carbon pricing at low discount rates.
> 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.
The problem is that there wasn't a correction of these business policies. It still is the same as before, engineering talent gets outsourced and software and more frequently also hardware parts is something that Germany despises completely by now. You are in sales or legal, anything else is secondary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, yeah. The primary market of pickup trucks is men cosplaying the rugged, outdoorsy, blue-collar vibes. The truck is an extension of their masculinity. Selling EVs to those people? Virtually impossible.
Had Ford designed an affordable yet semi-luxury sedan or crossover, it would've sold like hot cakes.
I think the minivan is the perfect vehicle for electrification. It's used mostly for short trips. Getting rid of the engine means you can greatly shorten the nose and improve cargo area, or just make it easier to park. People don't use them to tow. The people who own them have a garage. Yet nobody seems all that interested in making one. The EV Hummer doesn't count, it's a giant expensive monstrosity. You want something affordable and kinda boring but practical.
Ford did design an affordable semi luxury electric crossover, the mach-e. It did not sell especially well. $40k is about as cheap as semi luxury crossovers come in the US
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
What does it mean "remotely competitive combustion engines"?
China has been building ICEs for decades, that's for sure, and if they had not been anywhere to remotely competitive people wouldn't be buying them and therefore OEMs wouldn't be producing them, no? But they do. And still do.
The last notable example is [1] twin turbo-charged 4.0 V8 from GWM reportedly delivering 450kW and 800Nm of torque. You can't build such an engine without the very deep expertise in materials, mechanics, chemistry, and everything it takes to manufacture such a beast.
GWM builds traditional gasoline and diesel engines too but then you have other similar OEMs like Geely, BYD, MG, Chery which have been doing the same.
And then you find out that China builds their own diesel engines too but for heavy machinery like trucks, vessels, tractors, ... [2]
So, I see no evidence that they are not capable in manufacturing ICEs. Quite the contrary. Reason why we don't see it in European or American markets, or have not so far, is of a different kind and not competitiveness.
Their wikipedia lists many engine models, all of which seem to be either small industrial engines or engines for range extenders only. This does not sound like a portfolio that can compete with the legacy OEMs but it does explain how they ship so many units.
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.
WHY?! Dieselgate would have been the perfect time for VW to justify abandoning ICE, especially diesel, and shift to fully electric. But no, they just doubled down on ICE and diesel engines. You can't fix stupid.
Of course, in practice, VW couldn't have done that due to it being run by ICE unions who want to keep their jobs at all cost. Maybe they could have spun off the EV business into a new car brand without the shackles of the unions tying them down to dated tech.
It's not just the unions wanting to keep ICEs which are far from dated plus absolutely necessary to keep and further develop.
A monolithic EV-only approach simply isn't feasible since not everyone can switch to an EV - above all, the current state of charging infrastructure is lightyears behind.
Ditching ICEs is the worst thing that could happen. It's really just common sense that happens to be unpopular.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Mütterrente is a good idea, because it rewards having children which end up paying the pensions. This leads to sustainable population replacement. If anything, this should be expanded to fathers as well (I don't mind mothers receiving more).
What's not such a great idea is paying the Mütterrente retroactively. Pensioners can't have children retroactively to stock up the tax base, so all this does is increase the tax burden for the current generation, which discourages them even more from having children.
> In Germany, the tax wedge for the average single worker decreased by 5 percentage points from 52.9% to 47.9% between 2000 and 2024. During the same period, the average tax wedge across the OECD decreased
by 1.3 percentage points from 36.2% to 34.9%.
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.
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.
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..
6500 EUR net in Berlin/Munich would equate to ~140k EUR gross. For a FAANG salary, considering that startups pay these figures for similar expertise, I would expect more. What level is that if you don't mind sharing?
Intermediate lvl, not Amazon.
And indeed I’ve also observed this to be the case, too startups pay such base salaries (eg Gitlab and Neon did) for similar lvl. But there aren’t too many such openings.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
You can pretty much see the writing on the wall; sure, one can bury one's head in the sand, but it is almost certain that in say 15-20 years, BEV will become the majority of vehicles on the road even if the US and Germans fight to the very end to keep ICE alive.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
dont give these OSINT quality signals away ... that's one of the indicators that allow you on first scan to id (potentially) low quality content. Ie: fully llm gen; the author doesnt look over the docs or doesnt care for 'details'.
Thx for the link - sounds great !
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