[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.