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Discussion (42 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I hate that tax money is wasted for this garbage company. Germany and the ECB has been financing VW group by buying their bonds. VW group has hundreds of billions of debt. German Central Bank president recently said (translated): "[It is] currently in the midst of a restructuring process. However, I also see opportunities — for instance, in the defense industry."
Profit margin Volkswagen: 2.21% Profit Margin Toyota: 7.59%
When I compared ICE compact cars some years ago, the Audi A1 (Volkswagen Group) was the only German contender with respect to quality, repair costs, failure statistics, etc. But it lost out to a Toyota, because the Audi was more expensive.
Michael Burry's march BYD analysis was interesting. It said this (and much more): "BYD is potentially the lowest-cost producer of vehicles in the world thanks to its vertically integrated model at scale. BYD controls its supply chains and saves margin at every step. It makes its chips, batteries, bodies, motors, etc. [...] Factories are being built in Thailand, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey. Europe put a 17% tariff on BYD cars [...]. Once local production is in gear, the tariff will disappear - a major future competitive advantage in Europe given BYD’s low cost advantage. [...] massive overseas spend [...] BYD has ~29% more revenue than Tesla and ~1/12th the market cap."
> without actually being a concrete automotive related issue in the first place...
VW's market share in China (it's largest market) has collapsed - in 20 years it went from around 20% of all cars in China to 10% and current deliveries this year in China have fallen by 36%. This is a huge fall for a company whose Jetta was literally China's Model T.
VW Group has been dependent on China, much of Europe, and the US for almost 2 decades. It lost the American market in the 2010s when Diesel-gate pushed it's American ICP to Toyota, Nissan, and Tesla and it lost it's Chinese marketshare when China began the NEV policy back in the 2010s. And European car sales haven't recovered to pre-COVID amounts.
It isn't entirely an automotive issue, but it is very much a management issue. And nothing can be done about it - voting share is split between Lower Saxony, the Qatari royal family (17% voting share), the Porsche family, and IG Metall. Given the degree of state ownership in VW, it'll make GM's collapse look like a cakewalk.
The pieces were there but didn't catalyze until then.
Auto industry/dealerships for trad cars is not looking good.
In the US market, I think Hyundai (and to a much lesser extent Kia) is probably the most interesting OEM. EV sales that aren't declining, the highest American-made percentage vehicles (relevant given recent policy changes), a manufacturing partnership with Waymo, widespread consumer awareness, and relatively lower prices than their competitors. It'd be nice if they provided a better repair situation than Tesla, but that's the current industry I guess.
Toyota is releasing a full EV highlander, Honda is releasing the 0 series, Kia has some new EVs coming out.
Next year is going to be a huge EV shift.
Tesla is screwed.
Deja-vu
In 2025 BYD sold 4.6 million vehicles. Tesla sold 1.66 million. That particular war is already over. Tesla lost it.
Toyota has been the best selling automaker for the last 6 years straight. In 2025 Toyota had record sales with 11.3 million vehicles sold: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
BYD was 6th: https://carnewschina.com/2026/02/26/three-chinese-automakers...
Tesla isn't in the top ten.
BYD may very well be pulling ahead on battery tech and vertical integration right now.
In a few years Tesla's primary moat will be political
Doubling the estimate from 50k to 100k is pretty wild, though I had read last week it was 100k on the tdi-club forum thread "What's left for Volkswagen?" [1]
[0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group [1] https://forums.tdiclub.com/index.php?threads/what%E2%80%99s-...
It’s time for leaner structures, smaller teams, faster decisions, and shorter development cycles. Volkswagen, like no other company, symbolizes the lethargy of the German economy and business environment.
Hopefully, the seven years with barely any economic growth will end soon.
A car development cycle is/was seven years in Germany. And that was totally fine. When the "Golf 7" comes up, the "Golf 8" doesn't come out only 2 years after.
What happened is the EU (and Germany in particular) left only two development cycles to the biggest industry in Germany (and hence the biggest industry in Europe) to entirely change.
For the EU said: "In 14 years you're forbidden to sell a single brand new ICE car in the EU" (of course they recently changed that tune, but too little, too late, the damage is done).
But that's not all: not happy to drown the german car industry, they decided that the corpse wasn't drowning quickly enough and Germany decided to shut down all their nuclear reactors (I think they recently reversed their stance on that too) and become depending on Russia as a major energy source (which the US warned Europe / Germany to not do).
Of course the shit hit the fan: Russia attacked Ukraine and everything turned to shit.
And now it's estimated German car makers pay their energy price 7x more than was chinese car makers pay their energy.
So, no, it's not all "the lethargy of German economy and business". Germany was (and to some extent still is) producing incredibly fine driving machines: not just VW but Audi, Porsche, BMW and Mercedes.
And those cars did what was asked of cars: drive very finely.
It's eurocrats/bureaucrats and german politicians who killed the german car industry.
P.S: I've got nothing against EVs... But don't be an ideological idiot about it: don't kill your main industry while handing the keys of the kingdown to China. The shift was way too quick. The EU should have been way more cautious and shouldn't have stupidly closed so many nuclear plants (to moreover start burning more coal again).
Though I do see another option emerging: people just not buying cars at all. More and more friends are relying on public transit alone. That's an even better option for the environment and climate of course.
For the economy it's not so good but it'll have to cope. If people don't buy cars it means they'll have lots more money to spend on other things anyway.
Thats of course complete BS, the change to EVs (and more economical ICEs and Hybrids in between) could be seen decades away! And VW knew it, they just chose to ignore it and continue down the easy (lazy) path.
There is nobody to blame other than VW management, the Piechs and Porsches in particular.
the only actual story here is that the market trend (both tesla in the US and all chinese EVs) pointed towards EVs being the future and German/Japanese brands have not been willing to give up their cash cows to EVs. The brand value will remain (e.g. germany MIGHT be ok), but the value and reliability differentiators will disappear.
EU did the Green Deal, though, which is way worse than shutting down a few nuclear reactors that after all didn't produce that much energy anymore and were anyways planned to be shut down.
This is a choice some countries did in the past due to Chernobyl and Fukushima.
The "fatality" was performed successfully by the Greens.
It's bad enough that nuclear proponents ignore the massive cost of nuclear compared to renewables once you factor in building costs, insurance and storage imho. But then to pretend like the conservatives didn't have a choice but to bungle the nuclear exit really is too much.
The CDU never listened to the greens when it came to not killing the solar industry and serving it to China on a golden platter. Or not killing our rail infrastructure by continually delaying maintenance so that we would have to do much more costly repairs later.
But in this instance, they do, and do it in a way that is a gift to the energy companies, and instead of noticing the obvious corruption at play, people still blame the greens.
When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014 absolutely nothing happened. Covid showed that Europe is eating boogers with their pants down, so both Trump and Putin decided to go on the rampage.
Everyone else struggles with health insurance up more than 100% in 10 years, Döner up 100% in 6 years, electricity costs etc.
But we feel good about the "rules based international order", which only the EU follows right now, dictated by public servants with inflation-indexed pensions.
There were a few pluses like bringing big stuff and going outside of the city but I rarely do those things.
Then yeah, rich boomers from rich EU countries are leaving scorched earth to everyone except their immediate family.
Battery technology and chemistry is export controlled by China [0], which has hurt European attempts at doing what you mentioned [1].
> Panasonic
They have chosen to concentrate on America instead [2]
[0] - https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2025/10/...
[1] - https://merics.org/en/comment/chinese-restrictions-threaten-...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/panasonic-localise-its-us...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-catl-breaks-groun...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061492 (“CATL's Spain plant will likely be one of Europe's largest LFP battery production hubs at ~50GWh of production capacity, employing ~4k workers with an investment of ~€4.1B.”)
China and Spain signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2021 [1] and Spain is lobbying on behalf of China against the "Made in EU" act [2].
On the other hand, Germany is backing EU quotas and origination requirements to push back against Chinese overproduction [3].
Of course, China and Germany have fallen out due to Ukraine [4] as well as China's negative perception about the EU as an institution [5].
[0] - https://cn.chinadiplomacy.org.cn/2026-06/19/content_11855853...
[1] - https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/gjhdq_665435/3265_665445/3356_6...
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/china-lob...
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/06b7fe04-25f7-445b-824a-135ae7359...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/germany-closer-us-than-c...
[5] - https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/_t2515/57/f8/c21257a743416/page.ht...
It got vetoed by Qatar (their SWF owns 17% of all voting shares in Volkswagen) because that would have meant working with Israeli companies [0] despite Germany being dependent on the Israeli Arrow system [1] to counter Russian systems.
Now that factory (Osnabrueck) is one of the factories on the chopping block.
And this is why Volkswagen is going to be a slow moving train crash - Lower Saxony, the Qatari royal family, the Pötsch/Porsche family, and IG Metall are not aligned.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-10/qatar-blo...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-d...
What a shitty management that can't find any solutions other than building weapons for war criminals.