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by lofi_lory 1881 days ago
As a German, I don't see VW getting it together rapidly.

Germany doesn't get life in #Neuland. VW and most of the German industry are respective leaders in some niche by being good at through mechanical engineering IP. Electrical cars are simple. Innovation is in software, DRM business models and battery tech which is all completely foreign to the German industry. People here get Teslas for the charging infrastructure alone, as the alternative is a huge mess. Don't forget, VW is still trying hard to lobby for their known turf, pushing for hybrids and hydrogen combustion mechanical marvels...

Germany doesn't get it. The pandemic has shown, the era of old white me... industrialist has forced the country between a rock and a hard place.

While Musk is shooting consumer internet into space, our leaders had long, exhausting talks, recognizing Germany's need to modernize and embrace technical progression and they fearlessly concluded: It's time to let go of fax by 2030.

1 comments

German here as well. In general, I share your pessimism.

One thing to point out about VW is that their CEO, Herbert Diess, seems to get it. To name two anecdotal pieces of evidence, Elon had asked him to become CEO of Tesla back in 2015 [1] and he had conversations with Chinese battery supplier CATL about car batteries as far back as ten years ago [2].

[1] https://electrek.co/2021/04/13/ceo-elon-musk-reportedly-hire...

[2] https://www.teslarati.com/volkswagen-herbert-diess-ev-cell-p...

I don't know... This year I lost all hope for Germany's future. This goes beyond VW. Until now, I kinda thought everything is going to be alright, Germany is a rich country and all. I wasn't aware of the extend of moral corruption in the CDU. They really eroded the whole country for personal gains. I've never been this disappointed and disillusioned by politics and society as I am for the last few month.
True, hopefully that'll motivate the CDU to clean up their act / code of conduct.

On the bright side, two of the leading companies in the mRNA vaccine space are based in Germany (BioNTech and CureVac), so there is still some ability to innovate.