Exactly this. I thought about getting a T7, but the price is just ridiculous. And it’s not even like you’re paying for quality, there are so many complaints about both minor and major issues.
I've bought a Skoda after owning VW in the past and couldn't be happier. 80% (probably 95% for the things I actually care about) of what VW offers for almost 50% less.
Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession.
German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
For a business, there's no incentive anymore to choose Germany over other EU countries. Cheap energy is gone. Germany is literally collapsing under its own weight: endless bureaucratic structures that just keep on growing.
> Germany desperately needs a wake-up call in the form of recession. German car industry has been non-competitive for multiple years now. Instead of letting it fail, the government kept on flushing money down the toilet and prolonging the inevitable.
Just let it fail? I'm reminded of this, which I read recently about rare earths:
> Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.
I'm sure that, at the time, people were saying that North American and European rare earth equipment manufacturers were "non-competitive for multiple years now."
Don't get me wrong, I agree there is such a thing as "forget the comparative advantage of trade, this is national security", and I even think steel and cement need to be in that category right after farm subsidies, but also you do have to be strategic, and you don't want private corporations "too important to fail" which turn subsidies into shareholder returns without adding real value.
And even more, if someone does buy into today's expanded definition of national security, keeping industries safe from Japanese or Chinese style zombies is a desirable thing.
Sure but we are talking about german industrial output, and one of the main reasons for problems here is the absence of the cheap energy that was available until the russian invasion of ukraine.
Energy prices? Unit labour costs? Pisa Scores? VC Investments as percentage of GDP? Number of IPOs? Taxation of Income? Punctuality of public transport?
A story from a german town:
We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore.
It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess.
The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down.
But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit.
They have finally started construction 5 years ago and the costs have doubled multiple times and are now in the hundreds of millions.
They say that hopefully in another 5 years from now they might be finished with construction. For all those years the locals have to take a long detour because the bridge can't be used.
I have recently read how in china they finished the tallest bridge of the world in a 3 year construction and the cost was less than our little bridge here. After hearing about this i realized how doomed we are. We have regulated our selfs into a total standstill. I can understand if we are maybe 10-30% slower due to better environmental protection, but if me are slower and more expensive by a factor 10, then we are just not competitive at all. This reads like satire but it is actually happening.
It seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.
The lack of can-do-attitude can be explained by regulations, imho. After you've seen the first few trivial things take ages because somebody has yet to stamp form 23b in triplicate and hand in 1k pages of environmental impact assessment, noise studies and socio-economic impact predictions, you loose the belief that you can do anything here. After you've been stonewalled by a few bureaucrats over a missing comma in their particular interpretation of subsection b12 subparagraph d footnote 11, you start going about your days looking for excuses not do to any work as well. After several people have cited "liability" and "legal risk" as arguments against babysitting their neighours cat for a day, you might start fearing that nebulous liability thing yourself.
The whole culture is poisoned by regulations imho.
Previous poster got a point though. Yes regulations are ridiculous thanks to every German and every EU government piling on more crap.
Zero argument there. 100% true.
But its also true that things CAN get through regulations. 1000 pages of environmental impact assessment takes time. But it doesn't take years. Things can be done in parallel if someone actually gave a fuck.
Sadly no one does because by the time anything starts 2-3 new governments/administrators/mayors have been in place. And people don't like to work on things someone else already took credit for.
> 1000 pages of environmental impact assessment takes time. But it doesn't take years.
Oh, but it does. For example, if there is a suspected hamster population, you need at least one year of data gathering to assess local population state. And then you need a resettlement plan for the hamsters. This alone takes at least a year because of the data gathering, and of course you need an expensive and busy hamster expert to do the gathering and writing.
Oh, and btw, that's just for permitting. After you get your permit, you have to have those hamsters professionally resettled, observed and documented.
You are right that it is theoretically still possible to get stuff done. Prime example is Elon Musks Gigafactory in Brandenburg, where there was enough political and economic pressure to get it done. But that is a rare thing to happen, and lots of those steps you have to do are out of your control and up to some bureaucrat who is of course "very busy" and "cannot at this time give an estimate as to when the permit might be completed". It is just hard to convey how bad it really is...
Regulation is slowly strangling most countries. We need to find ways to stop the continuous cancerous growth of bureaucracy. Currently it is impossible to fire any government employees, meaning they keep adding more and more and the old ones just stop working. No more work gets done overall.
Given that France is also starting to suffer badly, one thing to watch is more and more people demanding a cut to EU budget contributions from these countries. Its like 40 billion EUR worth of net transfers. Could make for explosive politics.
Much to my annoyance, despite this being practically a rounding error (like, 1% or so of GDP), the EU budget contributions absolutely did have this effect in the UK.
Well, the thing is: French budget reforms that the government wants to do is 40 billion EUR, their net contribution is 10 billion. Just going to neutral gets you a 4th of the way there without touching your internal social security. If you cancel contributions that's 25 billion, that's 60% of the way there.
Not saying I agree but this sort of argument will be impossible to counter for centrists with the mounting populist backdrop.
Being the French, their tactics will rather be what it always has been: Not reduce their contribution, but vastly increase their received subsidies from the EU. That way, they can let the EU subsidize what they can no longer afford to pay for with their own money. The EU will go along with this because this is the accepted MO of France's EU contributions since forever, and increased spending towards France will increase the EU's overall budget and therefore importance. The only unhappy member states will be Germany and a few unimportant small payer states. But Germany has always gone along with those shenanigans, so no reason to think they won't happily open their wallet again...
Massive numbers for an individual are commonly rounding errors for a nation.
Specifically, if you see a budget breakdown, generally things are rounded to the nearest 1%, and the sum of numbers shown often turns out not to be 100% because of that rounding.
That governments struggle with rounding and maths isn't a justification for arguing 1% of GDP doesn't matter. It's a vast sum of money. In the UK's case getting an extra 1% of GDP for free was a no brainer. Its economy hasn't departed from the European average so what was it paying for, apparently nothing.
1% of everyone's pay is just that everyone feels the impact of 1% of their income.
> In the UK's case getting an extra 1% of GDP for free was a no brainer. Its economy hasn't departed from the European average so what was it paying for, apparently nothing.
Except for all the evidence that it has harmed the UK, which Brexit proponents blame on the simultaneous Covid pandemic.
* Failing upwards her protégé von der Leyen to the top of the EU, an incompetent, and unelected nepo-baby
* Forcing Germany and the EU to take in tens of millions (at least) of "refugees" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_schaffen_das ("we can take them", open doors, family "reunification", etc)
* Anti family hard-line feminist
TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever.
Sure, not everything she did was bad. But her legacy is now Germany's nightmare. And EU's, too. Untangling this mess will be very difficult.
Also, she did not initiate a single structural reform in her 16 years of being chancellor. The public sector has become a huge burden for our country. It is just too expensive and just like AI is currently propping up the US economy, the growing public sector is what keeps Germany's economy afloat.
"TBF, at the time, I also fell to the propaganda of Merkel being the best and smartest stateswoman ever."
to be honest, this is what enrages me. I feel like I was in a madhouse; the mass media were pushing an image of Merkel as the only adult in the room and the patron saint of liberalism.
I saw, live, how she mismanaged the Eurocrisis, turning a banking crisis into a humanitarian crisis, and how her reaction to the invasion of Crimea was meek.
but if you dared to say something about this, you were seen as a dangerous communist or worse.
I hated her flawed politics for 15 years. But now, surprisingly, I kind of miss her. not because she was good; she was terrible as i said, but the new leadership, especially in Germany, is far worse: Friedrich Merz is a zero, and von der Leyen seems utterly retarded, and i don't mean it in a mocking way, but literally: they are always choosing the worst option for Europe at every step.
dark clouds over europe... but mostly, of our own making.
A failed attempt at Catherine the Great II. I don't understand how everyone could be so blind in regards of relations of top leaders with Russia, like Merkel and Schroeder.
> But a profit warning by German carmaker BMW late on Tuesday was the latest reminder of the industry’s structural challenges as it struggles with the transition to battery cars, weak sales in China and US import duties.
My gut feeling is that the Chinese are now buying locally made EVs. Other nations are buying Chinese made EVs. Except the Americans, who can't afford anything without paying extra money to their Mad King. (This is generalized, obviously there'll be American or Chinese BMW buyers, but a lot less).
I'm a European with an Audi car, been looking at switching to EV and I can't lie and say BYD doesn't look like more value for the money than the Audi alternatives, so doesn't really surprise me.
Chinese cars are a lot more expensive outside of China than they are inside of China. And the difference is not just tariffs and shipping; they earn a lot more profit per car for exported cars than ones sold internally.
IOW, they're not dumping, they're doing the opposite. I don't know why.
> IOW, they're not dumping, they're doing the opposite. I don't know why.
If they're doing the opposite yet end up a lot cheaper with higher quality and more features, I'm really not sure what's going on. Don't see how they could be cheaper either.
1. Competition in China is fierce, there are over 100 car companies. A large fraction of them are losing money. BYD et al are lowering prices to drive their competitors in China bankrupt. They've got higher prices outside of China to enable this behaviour.
2. They're quite sensitive to the dumping charges, so bend over backwards to ensure they aren't.
1) Ever since the Cold War ended, German companies have been shifting production to cheaper places in Europe, so less and less "German" cars are actually built in Germany and show up as German industrial production.
2) Germany used to sell a lot to China, but Chinese companies are upping their game and shifting to EVs, and Germany is losing Chinese market share as a result.
3) Those same Chinese companies are increasingly selling overseas and starting to kick German butt. I went to an EV car show recently, and while Volkswagen Group had a large presence (VW, Audi, Cupra, etc) and some of their EVs looked pretty good, the prices were consistently 20-50% above the equivalent Chinese models.
A fourth reason that is overlooked is that rubber component prices (if you don't import from Asia) have almost doubled in the Eurozone since 2019. I haven't worked in a company whose products use many rubber components in their supply chain since late 2024 but a single seal, gasket or vibration absorber with a single coating of a wear or friction modifying polymer could have had quoted prices rise from 11,000€ per batch to the neighbourhood of 18,000-20,000€. Smaller price rises have also hit non-imported thermoplastics, fiberglass and plastic textiles, presumably because of structural component lead time and cash flow issues in petrochemicals as a whole.
The German industrial sector might be shy at importing most of their parts from Asian developing countries and China in order to keep friendly relations with their domestic supply chain, keep friendly relations with their domestic political system, reduce IP cloning and keep some semblance of national pride, all of which combine to impact their prices. Also, there may be legal or tax requirements about domestic or EU component origin percentages, but I wouldn't know, since my business was in medical appliances.
Export markets for European cars are cratering. The Chinese and Koreans are taking over with really decent, affordable EVs. And while the likes of VW are producing good EVs, it's at the cost of their ICE vehicles and those losses aren't offset by their EV sales.
In general the ICE car market is not just car manufacturers but many thousands of companies all over the place that make parts and components. Quite a few of those are becoming redundant and quite a few more are facing stiff competition from abroad. Anything to do with components for petrol or diesel engines is going to face year on year declines.
What's currently happening in the market is price parity before incentives, before considering benefits from lower maintenance, and before considering benefits from lower energy cost. An EV is simply becoming the cheaper vehicle to buy. And with all that included, EVs are far cheaper overall. That's not a trend that's ever going to revert. It's only going to get worse and it's going to have some obvious effects.
A lot of this applies to US car manufacturers as well BTW. The current tariffs are distorting the market dynamics. But that's unlikely to last very long. GM and Ford will need to keep up internationally if they want to stay relevant in foreign markets.
Germany is merely ripping off the band-aid right now (or having it ripped off for them). Short term disruptive but it needs to happen at some point.
German cars have always been slightly more expensive, but buyers (internal and export) thought this was a good deal because of higher (perceived) value and quality.
Nowadays quality has become an issue, where you could, back in the day, drive your Mercedes for 500.000km over a 30years lifetime, nowadays you are lucky to make it past the factory warranty. Along with quality, repairability, tuneability and parts availability and prices have worsened significantly. So German cars are no longer a safe bet on longevity and low lifetime cost, which is what drives away export customers as well as German private customers.
The only thing that has so far kept the German car industry afloat is tax subsidies towards German corporate customers: If your employer offers you a car as part of your salary, you only pay monthly taxes on a flat 1% of the sales price of the car, and for that, the employer can freely give you the car, maintenance, fuel for private and company use, all included. While the employer pays cheap company leasing rates and discounted gross fuel prices, and can offset all that whole spending against the company tax bill. So overall a good deal for employer and employee, and a huge boon to the German car industry (because practically all company vehicles have to be some German brand for prestige).
However, nowadays, the full tax deduction is only available for plug-in-hybrid and electric cars, ICE vehicles only get half the deduction. And the plug-in-hybrids will soon be classed down to ICE status. All the while German car makers struggle to offer proper electric cars at acceptable prices. All the while their plug-in-hybrids suffer from poor quality and life expectancy, expensive repairs and therefore expensive insurance and low resale value.
This means that German car makers will continue to lose their last reliable customer base.
Look at a brand new, not cheap Audi Q3 with it's hard plastic grey on grey interior and then compare it to something like a Zeekr X or Xpeng G6 et al. It's night and day quality and feel.
Yes. German car makers have been very dependent on the Chinese market to sell their cars too. Now that China is pushing for domestic electric vehicles, German car makers are falling behind.
Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Ukraine "was flirting with NATO". Why does that justify an invasion? Why do you think Ukraine or NATO or the US are at fault here?
Accepting that trying to get closer to NATO justifies this invasion, usually with the term "legitimate Russian security interests" denies Ukrainian sovereignty. Russia does not have the right to impose its will on its neighbours.
> Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Ukraine "was flirting with NATO". Why does that justify an invasion? Why do you think Ukraine or NATO or the US are at fault here?
Read up on Cuban missile crisis, it might provide some context.
You might want to take your own advice, because Cuba is the opposite of the example you're trying to make. The Cuban missile crisis was about nuclear weapons only. Cuba continued to host Soviet fighters, bombers, missile cruisers and many other conventional weapons until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 - far, far beyond what any NATO member has seen after the Cold War, let alone potential candidates like Ukraine or Georgia.
You are right, I should have mentioned Operation Mongoose instead. The missile crisis was the culmination of the conflict, similar to the invasion of Ukraine.
Would the Bay of Pigs invasion had happened if Cuba was not courted by the USSR ?
Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), reportedly observed that the purpose of the Alliance was to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down.
> but after multiple warnings and casus belli about Ukraine not flirting with NATO
Putin invaded in 2014 after Ukraine deposed of their dictator over his failure to commit to EU alignment, the Nato stuff is a post-hoc excuse developed by the Russian government. This isn't about Nato it's about Putin being afraid of having working democracies next door.
Ukraine a working democracy ? Before the war it was one of the most corrupt countries in the European continent.
And by applying just a tiny bit of realism, is it feasible for a country right next to a colossal power to have independence ? Do all the small countries south of the US enjoy independence ?
Moscow is ruled by idiots. The war in Ukraine was perhaps the largest own goal of the millennium, ahead of Brexit and possibly right behind—worst case—the Iraq War.
> is it feasible for a country right next to a colossal power to have independence ?
Yes. Literally how alliances have worked since the Bronze Age.
Nope. Challenge to presuppositions. The argument would be valid only if Ukraine was a threat of a "working democracy"
> Yes. Literally how alliances have worked since the Bronze Age.
Since we are now past the Bronze age could you give me a contemporary example of a small country close to the US that is practically independent and is not meddled with ?
> Moscow is ruled by idiots.
Putin might be a power hungry lunatic — like most leaders — but there is one thing that he certainly isn't, an idiot. Neither is Lavrov.
> could you give me a contemporary example of a small country close to the US that is practically independent and is not meddled with ?
You asserted that small states cannot stably border weak states. I am saying that’s obviously untrue.
You’re now adding a “practically independent and is not meddled with” condition, which is impossible to show for any state in human history since part of geopolitics is mutual meddling, you could literally describe any act of statecraft this way.
> there is one thing that he certainly isn't, an idiot. Neither is Lavrov
Putin was an idiot and surrounded by idiots when he launched the invasion. His intelligence was clearly no better than America’s, given he not only expected victory in days but didn’t bother to contingency plan. And his knowledge of his own military was clearly flawed given he attempted combined-arms strategy (like lightning warfare) without a military that practiced combined-arms maneuver outside special ops.
But Putin hasn’t been an idiot for his own interests. Putin and Lavrov’a families have extracted enough wealth that they’ll be fine. So have the oligarchs. This, of course, is lovely for American and British and Gulf financiers who get to extract and manage that wealth from Russia.
That’s why I didn’t say Putin or Lavrov are idiots, I said “Moscow is ruled by idiots.” The Moscow elite are corrupt to the point of self destruction. They’ve allowed themselves to be played by Washington and Beijing into selling out their country’s status as a global power in exchange for minor battlefield headlines. They continue a war that keeps getting them played, the latest phase which will involve their energy export competitors bankrolling the razing of Russia’s energy export infrastructure.
Whenever you hear a German entrepreneur talk about the biggest obstacles they have and are facing, it's never crumbling infrastructure or slow internet. The number one complaint is always excessive bureaucracy and crippling regulations.
> Slow internet access and slow build out of fiber network
We don't have dial-up anymore. High-speed access is not a problem for commercial and industrial sites, and rarely a problem for remote work in residential areas. Despite what some commentators like to imply, you don't need 1 Gbit/s for productive work. 100 Mbit/s is usually fast enough, and if your browsing experience is still slow, it's most likely caused by round-trip delay, not bandwidth.
> low wages in European comparison
That would actually help commercial output and competitive position, not lower it.
IDK man... the rental market in German cities is "beggars can't be choosers" market and you are very likely ending up with 16Mbit DSL on 2 years contract.
At my former company we paid 900€/month for 1Gbit/s, which we required. That's definitely a problem when the same performance is available for ~50€/month a few kilometers over the border (in the Netherlands).
In rural regions workshops output is limited by their internet speed as the can only download that many CAD files from customer per day.
What makes German cars uncompetitive in the world market are actually high production costs. Which is due to high energy, labour cost and social tax. Combined with a lack of innovation. This is impossible to fix with a state subsidy.
I don't think production cost is the big issue. German cars always were premium-priced compared to what you could get from a Japanese, French or US car maker.
The big problem imho is that due to greed and technical incompetence (especially regarding electronics and software), quality and value have gone down. The high prices are no longer justified, and customers are drawing the logical conclusion.
Those are consumer subsidies, they make buying a cheaply produced car cheaper, they don't make producing a car cheaper. Of course you can industrial policy for that as well, if you have the right conditions, cheap industrial inputs, and can eat domestic politics shit, i.e. automate the workforce. But DE probably don't have the domestic politics to automate the workforce nor future access to cheap gas.
So their industrial problem can't be fixed with subsidies, as in subsidies not capable of improving long term DE competitiveness without subsidies. Even if they automate workfroce and remove social benefits, lack of access to cheap industrial feedstock is precluding, i.e can't offset structurally disadvantage of being more expensive producer on input level.
Like many traditional car makers they are struggling with the EV question. Presumably they want to switch to EVs, but in a company built on building ICE vehicles that comes with a lot of resistance from inside the company.
All things considered they aren't doing too bad, both Volkswagen and BMW are in the global top 7 EV brands by sales. But BYD is far ahead of everyone else, selling nearly an order of magnitude more EVs than any German brand. Which hurts Germany especially since they used to sell a lot of cars in China, BYD's home turf
Keep in mind that the ICE market is still huge. Even in China 50% of new cars are still ICEs, 30% are Plugin Hybrids and only 20% are BEVs. On the EV market, especially in China, there is a brutal price war going on, with falling profits even for giants like BYD, so trying to milk the ICE market for a little more could give German car makers some air while trying to catch up (which they do if you look at the new Mercedes and BMW models).
Porsche (having the same CEO as Volkswagen) went all-in with EVs too early with offering their bread-and-butter model "Macan" as an EV exclusively, and they had to find out that it's not what their customers what at the moment, so they are currently trying to backpaddle.
Other countries like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia "diversified" by pushing into German automotive supply chain and are sinking along Germany. German automotive was so self confident still 15 years ago that you can see this confidence in drivers of their cars until today on roads worldwide.
Cheap RU gas isn't just power, it's cheap industrial feedstock/inputs. Renewable/nuclear does not replace this. So all the wank about their energy policy is distraction. TLDR:
Competitive Germany industry needs cheap RU gas.
Healthy German economy with 40% trade GDP needs US + PRC, then RoW markets.
PRC market going away.
Germany "chose" (maybe pressured) into expensive US gas to keep US market, because doesn't matter manufacturing cost if you lose biggest future market, and can't manufacture without reliable source of gas. The lockin is DE gets US gas and US market access.
But Germany with expensive US gas = will eventually lose competitiveness in most other markets, so sectors will crater. Double whammy of other (PRC) being more competitive and DE making it self even less competitive.
The counterpoint to that is JP has to sacrifice (shadow subsidize exports) by managing exchange rate, i.e. JP went from 5-6T nominal GDP to 4T just through FX depreciation in last 20 years. They import expensive inputs but fx/account/spreadsheet their way into selling (up until PRC auto) competitive cars, which really domestic JP households pay for by essentially subsidizing exports (i.e. household -> industry transfer) which worked for a while with low / negative interest rates, but that era coming to end last few years ("easy" era with yen carry trade) and now there is CoL crisis especially for imports. Meanwhile PRC auto is eating at their shares.
Germany being stuck with Eurozone/eurobux has much less ability to pull this lever - they can't unilaterally devalue euro. So JP currency manipulation game, which itself is short/medium term trick that broke down with PRC's structurally cheap autos isn't option. If DE could play the FX game same will happen, they can prop up some sales (though long term can't compete with PRC producer prices), in exchange for domestic purchase power tanking.
TLDR if German could do a JP, which they can't, it will result net smaller German economy by essentially having germans subsidize exports and eat buckets of shit via imports, BUT MUCH WORSE THAN JP. JP still "only" 20% export:gdp, DE is 40%. Imagine Germany go from 4.5T GDP to to 2.5T. It would be anniliation.
E: Forgot this is all WHILE JP is still importing cheap RU LNG from Sakhalin2, despite US pressure, and only got US to back off buy also buying some LNG from alaska. Meanwhile US told Germany to jump off a cliff and they did.
While it may not be intuitive, exports are about 20% of GDP in China and about 42% in Germany so roughly twice as high in Germany. That makes Germany more exposed to global trade disruptions and geopolitical shifts.
> But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
Do you have more details? From what I gather as an American from 5 minutes of Googling is that Ford sells a van in Europe that's a re-badged VW T7, but it's not like VW is selling Ford stuff.
Sorry, the T7 is actually the multi van now, which is VW based
The old transporter and panels vans were called T6 and this is where confusion lies. None the less, the Transporter etc are Fords.
As far as I understand, the VW Amarok is based on the Ford Ranger, the VW T7 Transporter (their Commercial vehicle) is based on the Ford Transit Custom. The T7 Multivan and California are still built on their own VW platform.
> as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is set to meet the bosses of the country’s carmakers on Thursday in Berlin to discuss the woes of the struggling sector.
Consumers will definitely profit from that, there's no way they will tax Chinese imports even more, no way i tell's ya!
Germany (and the EU generally) import 98% of their oil-derived products..
Before sanctions the leading import source was Russia.
EVs could have helped a lot more as China has demonstrated but people like the brum-brum noise and all the right-wing parties with mysterious ties to Russia and other fossil fuel producers didn't think they'd work for some reason.
Beyond the points you made about petrol cars, the price is also a big factor.
In the EU, car companies only sell large (and very expensive) SUVs.
If you want to have a fully electric car on top of that, the bill will be far too high for most people.
This is also why the EU is seeing a switch where people can't buy their cars anymore and have to lease them or hope their employer will do it for them as part of a company car package.
> In the EU, car companies only sell large (and very expensive) SUVs.
News to me. Did you mean in the US? Or did you mean the most famous German brands like BMW and Audi?
For the EU as a whole, there's e.g. Dacia which is Romanian and therefore EU: https://shop.dacia.de/offer/257/235286/0/0 this is clearly neither an SUV, nor particularly expensive — even 18 years ago I was seeing things for about this price new, and there's been a lot of inflation since then.
The number you are looking for is 10. ARD is made out of 9 different stations, which each has its own oversight based on the state they are from. While there are valid areas of criticism, they are overall quite good.
(And then two more, Deutschlandradio and Deutsche Welle)
> Cutting cheap Russian gas was a suicidal move for European manufacturing (and households)
Brussels checkmated itself trying to maintain industrial power while appeasing its anti-nuke reactionaries.
Europe cedes sovereignty with gas. (Whether it buys from America or Russia isn’t structurally relevant. Militarily the distant and rich master is obviously preferable.) The answers are solar, wind and nuclear. Germany is singularly responsible for fucking up the last, and with its Russian gas appeasement, undermining the former.
But it is necessary to do anyway? Just accept the losses and move on. Eventually solar will take over everywhere regardless of what anyone does, or doesn't. A few years of perturbations don't matter.
basically, you are right. as the other commented said, "Europe cedes sovereignty with gas" be it Russian or American. The continent should be laser focused with renewables and other forms of energy generation (also nuclear, if necessary, even if i am not too happy about it)
With LNG, it's not as bad. It is about as bad as oil imports. No dependence is created because all LNG is the same and you can just buy it from anyone on the market - unlike a pipeline that creates a mutual dependence.
We can see though that it turned out to be worse for Russia than for Europe: they haven't found another export market when Europe declined imports, only other candidate is China but knowing they are the only ones, they demanded, and got, deep discounts. Pricing of "Power of Siberia" supplies is not public and it's been claimed that given transportation costs, it actually sells gas cheaper than Russian internal prices.
a lot of LNG is actually Russian tho, using shadow fleets, and this is ridiculous and stupid. But it's what Europe need... imho, while all the investment should be on solar, wind and water - it would be better to cut the hypocrisy and to buy cheap gas from russia.
Well, the fraction of Russian LNG can't be higher than the overall fraction of Russian LNG on the world market right? Because prices for it are the same everywhere - a tanker operator can send it wherever prices are the best. It means a really small fraction. And most importantly, Russians can't threaten to cut it, because it simply means removing some of the supply from a large, uniform pool - if they do it they won't harm anyone in particular, just make LNG everywhere uniformly more expensive - and deprive themselves of money. With pipelines, they could actually imperil supply in a particular place.
Also, Russian LNG will be let go of rather soon, this is in the upcoming sanctions package.
It's not about green policies, it's about Germany getting rid of its nuclear reactors after Fukushima and getting addicted to cheap Russian gas. Now that the latter is verboten their entire industry is in shambles. This is all Merkel giving in to populists instead of listening to scientists and trying to play nice with Putin.
> Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende. Thus, Germany should have adopted an energy policy based on keeping and expanding nuclear power.
Green is likely sponsored by Putin as a way of keeping Europe away from Nuclear and any other viable alternatives to Russian gas. (proof: Former German chancellor on board with Russian energy companies.) Not investing enough in Nuclear and solar is Germany’s biggest mistake.
There was de facto no investment into nuclear energy across all countries since the early 80s and it's beyond tiring to see online commenters adamantly trying to blame that on a scheming cabal of Green politicians, when Green parties never got beyond 10% of the vote in the elections. Yes, Germany prohibited the ban of new reactors in the earyl 2000s, but the truth is no one wanted to build them anyway and hadn't for a long time. Under the Schröder government, only two or three reactors were shut down and they were the oldest, had a meager output and weren't even profitable anymore. And the only way Russia influenced that was by mishandling Chernobyl. It's laughable to claim a country whose only high-technology export is nuclear technology is pushing others to abandon it.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I'm tired of hearing this age-old propaganda tune over and over again.
Germany had plans (before the Schroeder government laid the foundation for the whole nuclear shutdown) to build new and more nuclear reactors. After the initial buildup phase from 1970 to the late 1980s (latest in operation was Neckarwestheim 2 in 1989 not counting test reactors, only 9 years before Schroeder, not really a "long time"), most good sites had a reactor or maybe 2 or 3. The plan then was to plan for replacing the oldest ones and add a few more to existing sites, starting in the late 1990s when the first reactors start to approach an age of 30, to be replaced by their finished replacement reactor on the same site at 40 before 2010. Those plans included pebble bed reactors (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_THTR-300 unsuccessful due to technical problems), fast breeder reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300 unsucessful due to green opposition) and improved PWRs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) co-developed with France, nowadays a few have come online).
The reason why nobody wanted to build them was green opposition. This started before Chernobyl, for example in opposing the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wackersdorf_reprocessing_plant and blocking the refueling operations of existing plants. The green party never got past 10%, but mostly because the parties in government accepted their demands out of fear of strengthening them, because they needed them for a coalition, or because after Chernobyl saying anything positive about nuclear became political suicide. Misinformation was rampant, any German PWR was equated to a Chernobyl in waiting. Experts disagreed and were ignored by media and politicians, shouted down by the greens as industry minions wanting to poison us all.
The reactors shut down under Schroeder were quite profitable, but getting old enough that they would have been switched off soon anyways. Nuclear reactors become more and more profitable over time, because most of the cost is in the initial construction and the financing. After the building is paid off, running cost is quite low, fuel cost is negligible compared to personnel for example. But at some point, repairs, downtime and necessary improvements make it too costly after all. That's when the originally intended replacement should have started, but this was stopped by the Schroeder goverment and the Greens.
And while I don't know whether the Russian influence on and financing of green movements is true or not, it is logical. Russia never had any chance to export its nuclear technology to western countries. Western nuclear power plants were, at least since the 80s, safer and better. The only thing the west could have bought (and actually does still buy) from Russia is uranium. But that is by far a smaller export for Russia than oil and gas. And there are uranium reserves in many western countries, Canada, Australia, the US, Germany and the Czech republic do have large deposits that are only partially exploited, and many other (third-world) countries do have uranium mines and do export (which is why the west is buying there, it's just cheaper). So uranium isn't really a reliable or big business for Russia. Oil and Gas, however, are. And since oil and gas are high-volume goods, imports are far less flexible than uranium imports. Basically, if you want it cheap, you need a pipeline, which is the perfect leash for the Russians to hold. And lo and behold, Schroeder, while making plans to shut down all German nuclear power plants over time, planned to increase gas imports from Russia, which was upheld during the later Merkel years. Schroeder was, after his term, rewarded for this with a position at Russia's state gas producer Gazprom. So it would be in Russia's interest to reduce nuclear power use in Europe and get Europe dependent on their gas.
Btw. the meaning of "green" has changed. Back in the Schroeder days and before, green was largely pro-environment and anti-nuke. But CO₂ emissions and global warming weren't a huge topic. Open-pit coal mining and coal plants were opposed on grounds of landscape destruction, resettlement and pollution. But CO₂ was never the big topic that it is nowadays. Therefore, back in those days, even for the Greens, "clean" gas power plants were a viable replacement.
I guess they're talking about neoliberal, which is completely different from liberal (but overlaps - both liberals and conservatives are neoliberal; actual leftists aren't)
The problem are leftist policies that have completely destroyed any economic dynamism and that have created such high tax burdens that working full-time and trying to advance in your career is basically not worth it for many professionals. I know a lot of people who have either left the country or who have switched to part-time, because doing four days a week gives you 50% more weekend, but only costs you a little bit of money if you are reasonably well paid.
If anything, we need more economically liberal policies, because those actually do stimulate innovation and growth. Instead, leftists are completely focused on how they can extract even more money from the productive part of the population to give to the unproductive.
To my knowledge, leftists aren't in power anywhere, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. And if they are in power somewhere, they're certainly not bailing out massive automotive companies.
It is quite the opposite of a liberal agenda. German policy is very illiberal in that it is heavy on bureaucracy, strict on regulations, and nowadays firmly stuck in a green-at-any-cost course. All that leads to high energy prices, sky-high barriers for industrial development and entrepreneurship and therefore high prices of german-produced goods.
Did you look at the state of rail and water ways, did you see subsidies for agricultural diesel, do you know they’re still buying gas from Russia, gasoline is still heavily subsidised, etc…
They’re greener than the US, yes. But far from green at any cost. They built these huge mountain of papers that make everything difficult, not just building a wind turbine (~7 years, literally trucks of paper…).
Liberal would mean it's on the car producers to get out of this situation again, but instead the government tries to comfort that industry and financially support them. What about that is liberal? Or maybe you mean something else than what most of the world interprets this word as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
It's the American duopoly in these peoples head man. If you're a Republican everything bad is "Liberal" and if you're a Democrat everything bad is "Conservative". Always quite entertaining when it is used as a measuring stick for policies developed in a multi-party democracy which does not fall along the party lines as cleanly as it does in the US. The fact that Merkel voted against gay marriage always seems to break brains.
I didn't know it was in the liberal agenda to give automanufacturers protectionist mechanisms against competitors making products more aligned with customer demand to artificially prop up a major industry sector.
What kind of liberal are you talking about though? The American version or the European one? They mean very different things.
