[conflagration]

This just made my jaw literally drop. Not only is Prüm my former hometown (of roughly 5000 people), but I actually worked at Grohmann at holidays and as a part-timer during my school and student days.

This place is filled with prototypical German engineers (in the good sense) and the company was always in growth-mode. I think this might be a very good acquisition for Tesla.

[TulliusCicero]

That seems like an awfully small town for what Tesla wants to use it for. Won't they have trouble with recruiting?

[conflagration]

It depends on the kind of people you want. Even if the town is "remote" if seen by German proportions, it is still only an hours drive away from the next major cities and the countryside is very rural and beautiful. It's true that these are not the conditions that attract a lot of people straight out of college, but they are very attractive to more senior people, esp if they have family. I know Grohmann has been very good at binding talent for long times, i.e. by giving loans for houses at much better conditions than a bank would. So these people build their homes in the area, which ofc gives them a much greater tie to the place.

[tshannon]

> giving loans for houses at much better conditions than a bank would. So these people build their homes in the area...

Wow, that's a brilliant way to keep senior talent longterm.

[pluma]

They strike me more as an example of the traditional German "Mittelstand" than a fancy tech startup. The location seems perfectly reasonable, although 5000 is indeed a bit on the tiny side even for Germany.

There doesn't seem to be any public transit but in rural Germany most commuters use cars anyway. The next biggest nearby town seems to be Trier, which is one hour away by car.

There's also a US airforce base nearby and the town is relatively close to the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium.

I don't think they'll have trouble with recruiting. If the jobs are appealing enough, people will be willing to relocate -- if not to Prüm itself then probably to one of the nearby towns.

[jwdunne]

Housing seems to be less of a problem in Germany. I've heard that the majority rent because it's just much cheaper. Another story mentioned there's constant house building, along with the regulation that demands that e.g you must build on the land and not wait for the return to increase.

That plus good infrastructure and moving around isn't that big a deal.

[TulliusCicero]

I wasn't thinking about whether housing exists there (if anything, the general rule is that it's easier to find housing in cheaper places, because the cost of land is lower), but rather whether most skilled professionals would find such a small town an attractive place to live.

[jwdunne]

That's true but what I'm getting at is German housing is significantly cheaper, with good infrastructure.

Culture counts too. In the north of the UK, the idea of living in Manchester city centre is awful compared to the idea of living in quiet rural.

[masklinn]

> That seems like an awfully small town for what Tesla wants to use it for.

They're buying an existing company which is HQ'd there.

> Won't they have trouble with recruiting?

Why would they? People can easily move around.

[smhg]

> Why would they? People can easily move around.

Especially with self-driving electric cars ;)

Also, the amount of big cities in a 100-200km radius might be interesting. And those being spread out over 5 countries.

[TulliusCicero]

> They're buying an existing company which is HQ'd there.

I understand that, but it sounds like they are also planning to try and add a lot of people in the future.

> Why would they? People can easily move around.

Perhaps in Germany the attitudes are different (I recently moved here so maybe I'll find out!), but in the US you'd have an extremely hard time recruiting talented engineers to a city of just 5,000 people. Most educated people in the states want the amenities of a larger city.

[pluma]

The difference probably is that the scales are different in Germany. The largest city in the general area is Cologne with 1 million residents. There are a lot more much smaller towns in between and it's perfectly normal to drive from one town to another for shopping and services because the towns tend to be very close to each other.

You don't generally get these vast empty stretches of land between places in Germany, especially not in the West (the most densely populated region of Germany). But you also don't get American megacities like NYC, SF or LA.

[XorNot]

Also autobahns make a lot of distances seem very small in Germany.

[pluma]

Not really. An hour drive is still an hour drive. The physical distances don't really matter much though if you don't happen to own a helicopter or it's short enough that you can walk or ride a bicycle.

The autobahn is frequently overestimated by foreigners. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.

[Roritharr]

Many Large Engineering companies in Germany have their headquarters in relatively small towns. See Waldorf for SAP, Wolfsburg for VW, Zuffenhausen vor Porsche... There's many examples. Germany is pretty dense so many services are available Nationwide, and even the smallest towns usually have a few food delivery places that deliver to them. Normally the next larger city is less than an hour's drive by car away, so it's very doable to live in small towns. It also has a bit to do with salaries in Germany, which tend to be on the low side, even for highly qualified engineers if you compare it to SV levels.

[deng]

Walldorf at least is 15min from Heidelberg/Mannheim. Zuffenhausen is literally a district of Stuttgart. And Wolfsburg is a city of 120.000 people, and already VW has to pay a good "Wüstenzulage" (desert bonus) to get top talent, so they can afford taking the ICE (fast train), which takes an hour to/from Berlin.

[Roritharr]

Sure, but neither Heidelberg/Mannheim nor Stuttgart and Wolfsburg really are that meet the criteria that american people consider "big cities".

We don't have that many million people hubs in Germany so it's more common. And even with "Wüstenzulage" many Engineering salaries at VW are nowhere compared to SV salaries for engineers.

[ghaff]

How many automotive engineers in the US do you think live in a larger city? Even those in Michigan mostly don't live in Detroit proper--because it's Detroit, gentrification by the river notwithstanding. (The area around Dearborn, Troy, etc. is relatively built up of course but I'm not sure it's what a lot of people here think of as an urban lifestyle.)

[stevoski]

Prüm is in a seemingly rural yet heavily populated part of Germany. There are villages and towns every few kms, sometimes less. Many people in the region commute to major cities such as Cologne and Aachen daily. Luxembourg, Trier, Cologne, Bonn, and Koblenz are all within manageable distance.

[doczoidberg]

I come from Aachen. I don't think that people commute from here or colognen to Prüm. It's too far away for daily commute. This could change with fully autonomous cars ;)

[dx034]

Even with autonomous cars I wouldn't commute that way. It's not the kind of road where I could read or sleep while being driven there.

[conflagration]

I don't agree. From Cologne you can stay on the Autobahn/Schnellstraße pretty much until you reach the Grohmann front-door. I think that's a much better kind of commute for reading/sleeping than going through urban traffic.

[dx034]

Couldn't read our sleep while being driven on the B51 ( from experience). But not everyone will be as prone to being car sick as I am. Didn't Audi once develop suspensions that cancel the effect of curvy roads?

[adrianN]

The train connections to all nearby major cities suck though. It's nearly 3h even from Luxembourg, which seems to have the fastest connection.

[flurdy]

Initially thought that but Prüm does seem a bit isolated. Google recons it is 1h 23m to Cologne. Liege and Koblenz a little closer.

I was going to say hope it has good train links for a more relaxed commute, but then relevantly the engineers might use Teslas on autopilot to work....

[pluma]

According to Wikipedia there are no longer any passenger trains that stop in Prüm.

The good thing is most Germans living in rural areas are used to commuting by car anyway. I doubt there will be many commuters from Cologne (commuting by car from within Cologne is bad enough without having to drive for over an hour once you've managed to escape the city) but it seems like a nice region to settle down.

[ghaff]

Wait. Based on my reading here I thought it was only in the US that public transportation wasn't ubiquitous and people drove everywhere :-) And that in other countries you didn't even need to own a car.

[pluma]

It's not wrong. You don't need a car in Germany to move between most cities. But you do need a car to get around in rural Germany, especially between small towns.

This was a bit of a culture clash for me when moving from a city of one million to a much smaller city of fifteen thousand. I was used to being able to take public transport to get everywhere and I can actually take the train to move between the two cities, but in the smaller city everybody has or shares a car.