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German car industry warns of job collapse unless ‘bold decisions’ made to address Chinese threat
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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A fair argument can be made that the Chinese government considers EV an imperative and interferes and subsidizes, so it's not fully free market. Thus any country with industry competing with China needs to decide if they care and if they care, how to respond to advantage conferred by China government policies. Whether that's similar incentives for their domestic industry and/or tariffs to try to level the playing field.
That's only a "fair" argument to make if one assumes that orthodox neoliberal policies such as the EU's ban on state aid are somehow the universal ethical norm. Will, they aren't.
If we made neoliberalism our dogma and the Chinese are outcompeting us maybe our dogma is fucking wrong.
There's a reason I explicitly mentioned state aid as an option. So it's a fair argument because currently they are disadvantaged. Advocating for equivalent state aid wild be on the table
I reject the framing. It is us Europeans that chose to be "disadvantaged" because we made the political choice to trust in the mumbo jumbo of neoliberal economics, because we thought we were going to be "advantaged" by the invisible hand of the market gods. We made a bad policy choice. Instead of calling it a "disadvantage", our political institutions should do their own self-criticism.
Ok, I find this very bizarre. You lament that neoliberal economics is bad but should not be considered disadvantaged?
I guess we are reading the word "disadvantage" slightly differently. You, I suspect, use it purely descriptively. I am interpreting it normatively (disadvantage viz. the proper rules). I am not pushing back on the descriptive bit. I am pushing back on what I consider to be normative baggage smuggled in by the framing. Aka maybe I'm reading too much in a word.
Volkswagen was a state funded company until the sixties ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
New factories, battery research and stuff like that are heavily subsidized for German car makers as well.
Maybe China is subsidizing more, but maybe that only speaks for sound economic decisions in China, like
A. they have the money, apparently
B. they subsidize future technologies instead of fabulating about e-fuels and whatnot.
Volkswagen gets a lot of bad rep but as I understand it, it's not a horrible company. They have a very strong worker union. To my understanding they can't close a factory in Germany without a union's approval. That in itself is a huge handicap over BYD where workers get far fewer rights.
Volkswagen used to be one of the largest exporters from the EU. If I were a liberal foreign entity then I'd love for some dirt to stick to that. They have continued to focus on keeping their German workforce employed rather than producing everything overseas though they were proud to announce that they could do a full car development and production cycle in China a few years back so things do change.
Not that I care too much for the brand but I find it very odd how Volkswagen is getting so much hate.
If we want a closer apples to apples comparison, we should at least demand that our imports have been produced under the same environmental and workplace standards as we have here or better.
😅. It was literally started by Hitler himself.
"But that was a long time ago"...yeah, well. Then give BYD some ~50ish years, by then BYD might be as righteous as Volkswagen is now...cough Dieselgate, cough.
Cfr Hitler, sure. But either we should have slashed it back then or we should accept it as it is. It was nearly disbanded but the British though it was better to keep a workers' factory (I should look it up though).
Perhaps it's ok to look at the now. They are to my understanding one of the most worker-centered companies of their scale. Certainly not something for libertarians to like. BYD can improve worker conditions. That would be great and I'm all for that. I also like that they brought the price of BEVs down. I do believe that if we want to raise standards as humanity in a global setting, that we should demand products entering the market to have followed those standards. Like we already do with safety standards. That makes it interesting for regions to raise the bar also.
For dieselgate I was also very 🤢 about that and did not care too much for the brand. Yet later many other makes were found to do the same tricks but VW somehow got singled out. I still don't know why, they were first to be discovered but perhaps there's more to it?
I'm glad the scandal got discovered. It pushed BEV forward. We should do the very best we can to stop using oil, ideally in a fair and open world.