Not a scientific study, but here in the UK where we don't have tariffs against Chinese car manufacturers, there are loads of electric BYDs and Jaecoos (the "Temu Range Rover") driving around recently.
Yeah I can get a byd dolphin for half the price of the cheapest tesla. I'm sure the 2 aren't equally comparable, but considering all we need is a second car for my wife to drive at most 20-30 miles per day, I could never justify a tesla for that.
Yeah with China pumping state subventions into car manufacturing, they can outcompete any car manufacturer anywhere in the world. The leading battery technology is in Asia anyways.
The German car industry will not die completely, as the EU can protect its market from chinese manufacturers through regulation. But it will shrink and transform. Probably also back to fossil fuels (yuck), because there the Germans still have a lead (they are trailing with EVs).
I hope they can compete with plugin hybrids. We have a BMW X5 plugin hybrid, bought on the advice of a friend, and it's such a great car. Almost always on electric in town, and for the rare times we go on road trips we never have to worry about range anxiety.
I really feel that plugin hybrids with 40-50 miles of electric range are the ideal car for like 85%+ of Americans whose usual daily commute could all be done on electric. I've heard all the arguments against them, and after owning 2 PHEVs (Chevy Volt before this), I disagree with all these arguments. Yes, I understand that they're more complicated that a pure EV, I know pure EVs will be the future (I'll also be dead in the future), but my ownership experience with PHEVs over the past decade proved they were the perfect car for me. Never had any reliability issues, and despite hearing arguments that they are "the worst of both worlds", they were definitely the best of both worlds for me - all the benefits of an EV (low operating cost, fantastic acceleration, quiet, smooth ride, almost no trips to the gas station) with none of the downsides (didn't need to install an expensive charger at home as the wall charger was sufficient, never had to worry about range anxiety, never had to carefully plan road trips around charger locations).
I think you're directionally correct. But that BMW will likely turn into a maintenance nightmare in 10 years when electronics modules start failing and new replacement parts are no longer available. Might be best to lease it instead of buying for those who can afford that option.
I think the biggest problem with German EVs are not the battery but the software. EVs are practically computers on a wheel and compared to the competitors the software and features it offers are still terrible. I remember VW even had a huge joint venture with Rivian to get things back on track. But seems like it didn’t work out
There’s nothing about EV drivetrain that requires more complicated software than ICE powertrain. It’s just consumerism telling people that their next vehicle (whatever drivetrain) should be an iPad, a home cinema, and a PlayStation all-in-one.
that's not the issue, you can buy the batteries if you wanted to. The problem is that EVs require about 50% less labor than ICE cars and this is the first time since the 80s that German car companies have started to fire anyone or close plants. Car companies here aren't price competitive, software or a battery you can always purchase.
China has the big advantage of having designed these car companies around drastically reduced labor needs and until we adapt to that we're not going to compete on the most important factor which is how much the car costs.
Man, every time where there's a Chinese product category you realistically can't compete with - it's always some excuse of - because Chinese state is subsidizing it and supporting it.
All it does is simply makes the Chinese government sound good and competent.
Oh, nice, a government that does good things that lead to good outcomes! How unusual, how unexpected!
That's basically cheating!
We can't realistically have our government be useful and competent and serve our interests, so there's no way we can compete!
It's an interesting comparison. In China they prop up businesses with cheap loans and help from local governments, in the US it's the VCs. So when Uber was subsidized then everything was ok, but when China state propped up EVs then suddenly it's not ok. These subsidies in the majority of cases are over btw, because competition was too big in China between carmakers, cars in China are ridiculously cheap. Because that's their strategy, you fund a lot of players, like there were 100+ EV makers in China, then you let the market do its job, they optimize or they die, some will die and the best will prevail. Margins are so low in China that they are looking at outside markets where legacy carmakers need to drop the margins and scale up or they will have no chance in competing.
And for the argument that they do it to kill the industry so then they can make cars for more price, the most obvious counterargument is why they didn't do it for everything else that they dominate already? Why are solar panels going down? They dominate the world in solar panels, there is basically no competition and prices are still going down, same with batteries.
Capitalism and free markets failed to deliver, lots of cope around that mental model. If it was superior, it would’ve succeeded. China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity, and it shows. Play to win.
It was the market that delivered BYD and Xiaomi. The government did his part with industrial policy and inviting Tesla to China to help start the ecosystem, but the brutal competition between Chinese auto makers following the rules of capitalism and free-market made those who survive the ones that can compete with other global companies. Before that they just subsidised and all they got were regional "champions" that siphoned out the funds and created shitty products no one wanted.
After Tesla came with special laws allowing it to work without Chinese co-ownership, but with a mandate to source from Chinese suppliers, this created the ecosystem needed for the next iteration, by the capitalist urge of Elon to get into the market and by free-market economy of suppliers to Tesla that are up to the standards to supply it.
The government set up the battlefield, and let the free-maket filter the strongest to survive.
In the Western countries the government and regulations are frequently the bane of the car companies. Good luck opening a mine or a battery factory in Germany, regulation, unions, green mandates, 36 hr. week. You can't fight with 1 leg tied.
This narrative overweights free market competition in China and any influence Tesla or Musk might have had versus the $230B in subsides provided to the Chinese EV industry over 14 years, over $1.5B provided to CATL alone.
These corporate fads always run in cycles. Any large organization needs some resource managers but what is the optimal span of control? What tends to happen is that businesses lay off a bunch of managers and flatten the hierarchy. This does increase efficiency for a while. But then it becomes harder to keep individual contributors on track and focused towards key goals so the executives eventually end up hiring more managers again.
At least I hope they leave the corporate culture baggage that has ruined the German car industry behind and do not transplant it into other companies. In which you stick to your old guns and hope that politics protects you with tariffs against any future developments from international competitors on the car market. (It failed. Now the Chinese make better cars than the Germans.)
If by heavy subsidies you mean - encouraging internal competition, securing cheap energy and educating thousands of engineers then yes, Chinese cars are subsidized.
If by heavy subsidies you mean pocketing 150 billions of dollars from EU R&D budget for innovation that have never happened then no, Chinese cars manufacturers are not subsidized.
> Thanks to heavy subsidization of the industry by Chinese government to gain an competitive advantage.
You can't have a functional government that serves the interests of it's people and enables the country to dominate increasingly more sectors!
It's basically cheating!
The government has to be dysfunctional, and should only collect disproportionate taxes with the idea that they'd be wasted extremely inefficiently.... on god knows what, some bullshit, some "social programmes" and "culture" and the dumbest things imaginable - whatever they might be, but not anything that's actually ... you know good for the country!
I remember seeing a video that labels these people as doing bullshit jobs. As an example in UPS the people that actually delivers the packages are the ones doing the real work. However between those workers and CEO there are like ten or more levels of management and all those people just sitting at an office doing basically nothing.
Same with VW or with any other traditional German company. Sometimes to justify their job they would create problems that doesn’t exist and come up with a solution
I don't know what is the right amount of management, and I'm sure there are some management roles that add no value, but it seems to me that you cannot have UPS function with just a CEO and, say, 10000 delivery drivers and no middle managers.
its just people underestimating what people do in their actual jobs. Every thing has a huge long tail of work. things like 'accounting' is obvious but there are entire jobs around just buying stuff, around logistics, around fleet management, around managing your staff (HR), there are LOTs of specialized roles and they're not all dumb because you think they don't do anything.
Even in accounting there are many roles and subspecialties!
I think you misunderstood my comment, I was talking about different layers of management. Not different roles like accounting or sales etc. but there is absolutely no reason to have 10 different layers of management.
for someone like VAG or UPS why not? You can only remember/cram so much context into a single persons head, at some point you gotta split it up. In IT, you rarely see companies having managers with more than 6 direct reports. Of course in retail that number can bump up. But if you have a 4 or 5 thousand employees - you'll have 6 layers. Of course there are ways around it (I worked at F500 where i only talked to my boss rarely, and was managed by others on my team).
VAG employs 600,000 people - that you have 8 or 10 layers is not absurd.
Sure, but as a point of comparison the Roman Catholic Church has even more people worldwide and manages to make do with only 4 management layers. (I'm referring to those in religious orders only, not secular employees of various Catholic businesses and charities.)
It is indeed an accurate description. I live in a neighboring country. Germany's energy failure costs me the equivalent of about an entry level Macbook Pro every year.
I don't have kind words for SPD/Die Grünen in specific, or, to be frank, Germany in general.
Out of the last 28 years they have spent only 4 in the opposition. SPD together with CDU are the two major parties shaping Germany. As opposition they also always had a majority veto right.
Oh no, not at all. When CDU and SPD were both very strong (until about 2005-2010), they never once had a coalition, and CDU won elections more often than SPD.
Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Helmut Kohl were CDU chancellors without SPD for a total of 36 years. Merkel had one election period out of four without SPD, so there was a total of 40 years of no SPD. That is much longer than "almost never" for a country that is about 80 years old.
There were SPD chancellors for 24 years total, CDU the rest. German politics have been traditionally mostly CDU dominated.
Well, what did we expect from the clowns we elected, when few of them ever worked an actual job? Election after election, we are voting for the same incompetent corrupt people. Really what do we expect? And what do we expect to happen, when we elect the very people, who time and time again lied to use for decades? Also thanks to all retirees, who fill their ballot papers with the mindset of: "I always voted for them!".
I guess we have had a good run for far too long, so that complacency is finally catching up with us. The only sad thing is, that many people, who deserved better have to suffer for it.
But lets not be too sad about some middle management being let go. They are often part of the problem. Let us rather be sad about educated and capable people losing their jobs and dropping into a very difficult job market, which they might not recover from.
Not a scientific study, but here in the UK where we don't have tariffs against Chinese car manufacturers, there are loads of electric BYDs and Jaecoos (the "Temu Range Rover") driving around recently.
Yeah I can get a byd dolphin for half the price of the cheapest tesla. I'm sure the 2 aren't equally comparable, but considering all we need is a second car for my wife to drive at most 20-30 miles per day, I could never justify a tesla for that.
Yeah with China pumping state subventions into car manufacturing, they can outcompete any car manufacturer anywhere in the world. The leading battery technology is in Asia anyways.
The German car industry will not die completely, as the EU can protect its market from chinese manufacturers through regulation. But it will shrink and transform. Probably also back to fossil fuels (yuck), because there the Germans still have a lead (they are trailing with EVs).
Germany's new hot industry is defense technology.
German car industry can produce state of art ICE, because they can manufacture the heart of ICE - the engine.
German car industry is trailing with EVs, because they can not manufacture the heart of EV - the battery.
I hope they can compete with plugin hybrids. We have a BMW X5 plugin hybrid, bought on the advice of a friend, and it's such a great car. Almost always on electric in town, and for the rare times we go on road trips we never have to worry about range anxiety.
I really feel that plugin hybrids with 40-50 miles of electric range are the ideal car for like 85%+ of Americans whose usual daily commute could all be done on electric. I've heard all the arguments against them, and after owning 2 PHEVs (Chevy Volt before this), I disagree with all these arguments. Yes, I understand that they're more complicated that a pure EV, I know pure EVs will be the future (I'll also be dead in the future), but my ownership experience with PHEVs over the past decade proved they were the perfect car for me. Never had any reliability issues, and despite hearing arguments that they are "the worst of both worlds", they were definitely the best of both worlds for me - all the benefits of an EV (low operating cost, fantastic acceleration, quiet, smooth ride, almost no trips to the gas station) with none of the downsides (didn't need to install an expensive charger at home as the wall charger was sufficient, never had to worry about range anxiety, never had to carefully plan road trips around charger locations).
I think you're directionally correct. But that BMW will likely turn into a maintenance nightmare in 10 years when electronics modules start failing and new replacement parts are no longer available. Might be best to lease it instead of buying for those who can afford that option.
I think the biggest problem with German EVs are not the battery but the software. EVs are practically computers on a wheel and compared to the competitors the software and features it offers are still terrible. I remember VW even had a huge joint venture with Rivian to get things back on track. But seems like it didn’t work out
>EVs are practically computers on a wheel
There’s nothing about EV drivetrain that requires more complicated software than ICE powertrain. It’s just consumerism telling people that their next vehicle (whatever drivetrain) should be an iPad, a home cinema, and a PlayStation all-in-one.
> EVs are practically computers on a wheel
aren't all cars these days?
Is the Chinese automotive software better than the German equivalent?
that's not the issue, you can buy the batteries if you wanted to. The problem is that EVs require about 50% less labor than ICE cars and this is the first time since the 80s that German car companies have started to fire anyone or close plants. Car companies here aren't price competitive, software or a battery you can always purchase.
China has the big advantage of having designed these car companies around drastically reduced labor needs and until we adapt to that we're not going to compete on the most important factor which is how much the car costs.
They're also making cars that people want to buy for a price they can afford. Toyota aren't making any cars I want to buy (at any price).
And yet the Toyota RAV4 hybrid is selling so fast in the USA that customers can barely find one at a dealership.
Man, every time where there's a Chinese product category you realistically can't compete with - it's always some excuse of - because Chinese state is subsidizing it and supporting it.
All it does is simply makes the Chinese government sound good and competent.
Oh, nice, a government that does good things that lead to good outcomes! How unusual, how unexpected! That's basically cheating!
We can't realistically have our government be useful and competent and serve our interests, so there's no way we can compete!
It's an interesting comparison. In China they prop up businesses with cheap loans and help from local governments, in the US it's the VCs. So when Uber was subsidized then everything was ok, but when China state propped up EVs then suddenly it's not ok. These subsidies in the majority of cases are over btw, because competition was too big in China between carmakers, cars in China are ridiculously cheap. Because that's their strategy, you fund a lot of players, like there were 100+ EV makers in China, then you let the market do its job, they optimize or they die, some will die and the best will prevail. Margins are so low in China that they are looking at outside markets where legacy carmakers need to drop the margins and scale up or they will have no chance in competing. And for the argument that they do it to kill the industry so then they can make cars for more price, the most obvious counterargument is why they didn't do it for everything else that they dominate already? Why are solar panels going down? They dominate the world in solar panels, there is basically no competition and prices are still going down, same with batteries.
Capitalism and free markets failed to deliver, lots of cope around that mental model. If it was superior, it would’ve succeeded. China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity, and it shows. Play to win.
It was the market that delivered BYD and Xiaomi. The government did his part with industrial policy and inviting Tesla to China to help start the ecosystem, but the brutal competition between Chinese auto makers following the rules of capitalism and free-market made those who survive the ones that can compete with other global companies. Before that they just subsidised and all they got were regional "champions" that siphoned out the funds and created shitty products no one wanted.
After Tesla came with special laws allowing it to work without Chinese co-ownership, but with a mandate to source from Chinese suppliers, this created the ecosystem needed for the next iteration, by the capitalist urge of Elon to get into the market and by free-market economy of suppliers to Tesla that are up to the standards to supply it.
The government set up the battlefield, and let the free-maket filter the strongest to survive.
In the Western countries the government and regulations are frequently the bane of the car companies. Good luck opening a mine or a battery factory in Germany, regulation, unions, green mandates, 36 hr. week. You can't fight with 1 leg tied.
This narrative overweights free market competition in China and any influence Tesla or Musk might have had versus the $230B in subsides provided to the Chinese EV industry over 14 years, over $1.5B provided to CATL alone.
https://ev.com/news/csis-study-finds-chinas-ev-industry-boos...
https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...
Last time the Germans got into defence technology, it didn’t end well for the whole world. Let’s hope it wouldn’t be the case this time
Well, the intention is much more really-actually-defensive this time.
Germany is currently the world's fourth biggest weapons exporter, and AIUI that's roughly how it has been for decades.
The BYD cars are in Germany too, I see them quite often in cities
https://archive.vn/uomrZ
Credit Suisse went down 2 years ago in Switzerland, flooding the market with finance and IT people...
I didn't realise that the firm no longer existed, but yes:
"UBS Completes Historic Takeover as Credit Suisse Ends" (May 31, 2024) <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-31/ubs-compl...>
But do they dual-wield?
Yeah, the title is worded quite oddly.
Only handaxes.
Going for the extra crit chance.
These corporate fads always run in cycles. Any large organization needs some resource managers but what is the optimal span of control? What tends to happen is that businesses lay off a bunch of managers and flatten the hierarchy. This does increase efficiency for a while. But then it becomes harder to keep individual contributors on track and focused towards key goals so the executives eventually end up hiring more managers again.
At least I hope they leave the corporate culture baggage that has ruined the German car industry behind and do not transplant it into other companies. In which you stick to your old guns and hope that politics protects you with tariffs against any future developments from international competitors on the car market. (It failed. Now the Chinese make better cars than the Germans.)
There is no chance that they will leave it behind.
No chance. Hiring these people will be toxic for any companies.
> Now the Chinese make better cars than the Germans.
Thanks to heavy subsidization of the industry by Chinese government to gain an competitive advantage.
If by heavy subsidies you mean - encouraging internal competition, securing cheap energy and educating thousands of engineers then yes, Chinese cars are subsidized.
If by heavy subsidies you mean pocketing 150 billions of dollars from EU R&D budget for innovation that have never happened then no, Chinese cars manufacturers are not subsidized.
I‘m interested in reading about the 150 billions. Do you have a good source?
> Thanks to heavy subsidization of the industry by Chinese government to gain an competitive advantage.
You can't have a functional government that serves the interests of it's people and enables the country to dominate increasingly more sectors!
It's basically cheating!
The government has to be dysfunctional, and should only collect disproportionate taxes with the idea that they'd be wasted extremely inefficiently.... on god knows what, some bullshit, some "social programmes" and "culture" and the dumbest things imaginable - whatever they might be, but not anything that's actually ... you know good for the country!
I remember seeing a video that labels these people as doing bullshit jobs. As an example in UPS the people that actually delivers the packages are the ones doing the real work. However between those workers and CEO there are like ten or more levels of management and all those people just sitting at an office doing basically nothing.
Same with VW or with any other traditional German company. Sometimes to justify their job they would create problems that doesn’t exist and come up with a solution
I don't know what is the right amount of management, and I'm sure there are some management roles that add no value, but it seems to me that you cannot have UPS function with just a CEO and, say, 10000 delivery drivers and no middle managers.
its just people underestimating what people do in their actual jobs. Every thing has a huge long tail of work. things like 'accounting' is obvious but there are entire jobs around just buying stuff, around logistics, around fleet management, around managing your staff (HR), there are LOTs of specialized roles and they're not all dumb because you think they don't do anything.
Even in accounting there are many roles and subspecialties!
I think you misunderstood my comment, I was talking about different layers of management. Not different roles like accounting or sales etc. but there is absolutely no reason to have 10 different layers of management.
for someone like VAG or UPS why not? You can only remember/cram so much context into a single persons head, at some point you gotta split it up. In IT, you rarely see companies having managers with more than 6 direct reports. Of course in retail that number can bump up. But if you have a 4 or 5 thousand employees - you'll have 6 layers. Of course there are ways around it (I worked at F500 where i only talked to my boss rarely, and was managed by others on my team).
VAG employs 600,000 people - that you have 8 or 10 layers is not absurd.
Sure, but as a point of comparison the Roman Catholic Church has even more people worldwide and manages to make do with only 4 management layers. (I'm referring to those in religious orders only, not secular employees of various Catholic businesses and charities.)
They found out that manager do not, in fact, design, manufacture, test or sell cars.
Also, wielding axes in a working environment is a big no-no, no wonder they're out.
managers shmanagers
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Welcome to Germany? The best part is the drone situation. Both parties are buying from China.
It is indeed an accurate description. I live in a neighboring country. Germany's energy failure costs me the equivalent of about an entry level Macbook Pro every year.
I don't have kind words for SPD/Die Grünen in specific, or, to be frank, Germany in general.
> I don't have kind words for SPD/Die Grünen in specific, or, to be frank, Germany in general.
because they've governed Germany for the past decades ... wait ... they have not?
Out of the last 28 years they have spent only 4 in the opposition. SPD together with CDU are the two major parties shaping Germany. As opposition they also always had a majority veto right.
they wrote SPD/Die Grünen, not SPD/CDU
To be fair I also blame all of Germany.
SPD has been part of almost every government formed since the WWII
Oh no, not at all. When CDU and SPD were both very strong (until about 2005-2010), they never once had a coalition, and CDU won elections more often than SPD.
Yeah right, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt are from CDU
Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Helmut Kohl were CDU chancellors without SPD for a total of 36 years. Merkel had one election period out of four without SPD, so there was a total of 40 years of no SPD. That is much longer than "almost never" for a country that is about 80 years old.
There were SPD chancellors for 24 years total, CDU the rest. German politics have been traditionally mostly CDU dominated.
Gerhard Schröder, German social democrat/SPD and later Putin associate.
Well, what did we expect from the clowns we elected, when few of them ever worked an actual job? Election after election, we are voting for the same incompetent corrupt people. Really what do we expect? And what do we expect to happen, when we elect the very people, who time and time again lied to use for decades? Also thanks to all retirees, who fill their ballot papers with the mindset of: "I always voted for them!".
I guess we have had a good run for far too long, so that complacency is finally catching up with us. The only sad thing is, that many people, who deserved better have to suffer for it.
But lets not be too sad about some middle management being let go. They are often part of the problem. Let us rather be sad about educated and capable people losing their jobs and dropping into a very difficult job market, which they might not recover from.