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by throwaway_20357 104 days ago
There must be more to it. German automakers did belong to the top 10 (for some periods even top 5) R&D spenders world-wide. It seems they just did not spend it wisely. Similarly, the claim they "kept wages down" seems to require some nuance. VW workers are known to be very well paid. From the outside it seems like these companies became large behemoths who were not able to spend their R&D money wisely and their outsized pay packages forcing them to offer their products at uncompetitive prices.
2 comments
riedel 104 days ago
As a university computer scientist, I saw our graduates hardly getting job in automotive directly while mechanical engineers got all the good jobs for years. Then about 10 years ago the opposite happened: people quit their PhDs because industry was hiring as many CS /AI people they could get. Industry understood that they needed to invest (even it was already a bit late). However, they IMHO failed to turn scale that talent into sustainable innovation. Many people I know left again automotive. I think industry struggled quite a bit to translate engineering leadership to a digital age in many parts. I think it was easier for pure EV manufacturers to embrace also other digital innovations.
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raxxorraxor 103 days ago
Software need to interface almost all parts and electronics in a vehicle. Since car makers outsourced these parts, interfacing them took a lot of work. Here manufacturers like Tesla were clearly at an advantage since they controlled all components.

That is a nightmare situation for software that already started later in the development process.

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pas 103 days ago
There's not much more to it.

The internal EU market is bad (demand is low), the export markets are sensitive and competitive, and traditional Western companies are inefficient. (Which was okay as we were coasting on the post-WW2 globalization economic miracles.

But the inability and unwillingness to let the failing (uncompetitive) companies and industries go (France has a huge problem with this too) led to being stuck between a rock and an eventual hard place.

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