[holoduke]

I recently saw a group of automakers together during an event. The contrast between Chinese and Germans was bizare. The group of german automakers were older men in black suits all wearing badge with titles like Senior Executive Sales blablabla. Whereas the Chinese were all young people wearing causual clothing and much more engineering minded. No wonder why european auto makers are doing so badly. They forgot to please people. The only know how to please their untergang.

[SuddsMcDuff]

This could equally illustrate the difference between long established multi national companies with an overbearing corporate culture vs young upstart companies with a dynamic startup culture.

[tormeh]

Yeah, this is just the difference between the "cash cow" and "question mark" companies on the BCG growth-share matrix. The Chinese companies will sooner or later turn into stodgy cash cows themselves.

[calgoo]

Yea is there not a saying about when the suits and bean counters take over a company the culture dies?

[chao-]

I know it as "when the Elves leave Middle Earth" from an essay of the same name:

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

[ImPostingOnHN]

I think you two are talking about the same thing. The overbearing corporate culture is the cause of valuing dress formality over performance and dynamicism.

[joe_mamba]

The question is why doesn't Germany have any young upstart auto companies when the US and China do? The question being the rhetorical kind.

[chadgpt3]

Extreme over-regulation/regulatory capture. If you do anything worth doing in Germany and one of the established players doesn't like it, they find some reason to arrest you or raid your company and shut it down. As a result, people are afraid of doing things unless there's an explicit government-approved path to doing that exact thing. You can open a restaurant because there's a process for opening restaurants, but if you want to do something off the beaten path, its a bad idea.

[tormeh]

It's not like the US has that many either. It's not the kind of winner-takes-all network effects industry that attracts venture capital outside of the Musk reality distortion field.

[joe_mamba]

>It's not like the US has that many either.

Math was never my strong point, but AFAIK the "not that many" of the US is still a greater number than the zero of Germany.

[consp]

If you look at the greater NW European area there were (are still?) several startups, non got big enough to matter and they did not have infinite money to survive like some US based PE funded ones can. And even for Germany a quick "car startup germany" search will give you a few.

[joe_mamba]

Which German/NW car start brands are start-ups?

[mschuster91]

Access to capital, mostly. The US has always been willing to grant hefty amounts of taxpayer money to startups, something culturally foreign to Germany (startups are risky, Germans don't want taxpayer money to be spent on risky adventures that might bring losses) and the US also has dozens of billions of dollars a month in 401k pension savings making their way into the asset markets.

And China, well, it's a dictatorship with effectively unlimited foreign currency reserves. They can do whatever they want.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> The US has always been willing to grant hefty amounts of taxpayer money to startups

Care to elaborate? I was under impression that absolute majority of startups in US are fully funded by a (private) venture capital. There are (were?) some exceptions like tax reductions on "green" projects, but they were not restricted to startups/small companies in any way.

[mschuster91]

> I was under impression that absolute majority of startups in US are fully funded by a (private) venture capital.

Tesla got a shitload of government funding, including a 465 million dollar loan [1]. SpaceX was effectively funded by NASA in its early days. In total, the Muskverse alone got 38 billion dollars [2]. Bezos' Blue Origin got at least 1.5 billion dollars [3].

Sure, by number most startups are fully privately funded. But that doesn't mean the US government isn't willing to help things along, at least for those well connected. And on top of that come government research grants to universities who then spin off companies and keep the profits from the spinoffs.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-off-teslas-193...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/...

[3] https://thehill.com/lobbying/5113500-bottom-line-bezos-blue-...

[joe_mamba]

>Tesla got a shitload of government funding, including a 465 million dollar loan

How much money, grants, tax-breaks, favorable loans and regulation, etc did the German, French, Italian car companies get from their local governments?

> But that doesn't mean the US government isn't willing to help things along, at least for those well connected.

As if Schroeder, Merkel, Scholz, etc didn't roll over backwards for their private industry political backers. The CEOs of VW, BMW and Daimler had those guys on speed dial.

Please, let's not pretend only the US government is helping its giants and the Europeans never.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

How does it compare to European states subsidizing ArianeGroup, in your opinion?

[joe_mamba]

>Access to capital, mostly.

German auto makers were wealthier than the US auto makers. Germany's GDP is now third in the world. There is capital.

>Germans don't want taxpayer money to be spent on risky adventures

But they wanted it to be spent on Russian gas pipelines, foreign aid, anti nuclear activism, and in the pockets of politically connected multinationals like T-systems to build another "government digitalization project" while their internet speed lacks behind developing nations?

>that might bring losses

If they hate losses, why do they keep losing? Germany decline in past 15 years seems like its a self fulfilling prophecy. The more risk averse they are to avoid change or losses, the more they keep losing to economies who embraced change, disruption and risk.

[mschuster91]

> German auto makers were wealthier than the US auto makers. Germany's GDP is now third in the world. There is capital.

The problem is, that capital is stuck in the bank accounts of the uber rich.

> But they wanted it to be spent on Russian gas pipelines, foreign aid, anti nuclear activism, and in the pockets of politically connected multinationals like T-systems to build another "government digitalization project" while their internet speed lacks behind developing nations?

- Nordstream was privately funded, half by Gazprom, half by a consortium of privately owned large utilities

- Germany has drastically cut back on foreign aid funding, which in return killed off a lot of the goodwill Germany enjoyed in the Global South, we all know that China and Russia filled the gap. The numbers go up in theory but that's only due to funding for Ukraine.

- Anti-nuclear activism never got significant amounts of funding, instead dealing with the nuclear waste costs 1.4 billion euros a year, only 400 million euros are actually going towards the environment [1].

The only point you actually got somewhat correct is

> in the pockets of politically connected multinationals like T-systems to build another "government digitalization project" while their internet speed lacks behind developing nations?

The problem is, again, risk avoidance. Public tenders are written to prefer established players like SAP, T-Systems et al that can prove decades of experience in government projects. Partially that is due to incompetence, partially it is to shrink the bidder pool and avoid the risk of getting entire projects held up for years by lawsuits of bidders who lost.

The lack of internet speed doesn't come from a lack of public investment. Telekom has been privatized for decades. The problem here is regulatory incompetence.

> Germany decline in past 15 years seems like its a self fulfilling prophecy. The more risk averse they are to avoid change or losses, the more they keep losing to economies who embraced change, disruption and risk.

Agreed. The b00mer brainrot runs heavy here.

[1] https://taz.de/Budget-des-Umweltministeriums/!6102402/

[joe_mamba]

>- Germany has drastically cut back on foreign aid funding, which in return killed off a lot of the goodwill Germany enjoyed in the Global South, we all know that China and Russia filled the gap.

Germany now surpassed the US as the biggest foreign aid spender in the world, in absolute terms, not per capita

[Roark66]

>Nordstream was privately funded, half by Gazprom, half by a consortium of privately owned large utilities

And do you also believe what Merkel said that "it's purely a commercial venture"?

Who chairs those "privately owned large utilities"?

What are the links between those people and "the establishment" that includes people like Merkel (earlier Shroeder - his work for Gazprom was also purely commercial venture of a private citizen, right?).

That establishment deciding its a great opportunity for Germany to be the Russian gas station of rest of Europe forced to use that gas as the only "green transition" hydrocarbon.

And not only was it a great commercial venture (that had in its profitability calculation getting rid of nuclear - including blocking countries like Poland from building it, squeezing out other countries that own pipelines again such as Poland/Ukraine/Hungary and so on and forced "transition" to gas for the EU - let's not kid ourselves, renewables will never be more than 50% of base load unless battery tech gets cheaper, so that "transition fuel" would last for 50+ years.

It also contained a humanitarian element of giving Putin huge amount of money therefore making sure the dictator will absolutely not use it to build armies to invade his neighbours (despite doing that already at the time in Georgia for example), but he will get used to that money so much he will spend it all and will not want to stop it coming therefore granting eternal peace in Europe.

Anyone who thought the public will swallow this must have been high... But the Germans did.

"nothing to see here" - right?

I for one am glad hopefully the German public realises what kind of state Russia is now, and what "doing business" with them leads to (it corrupts your own country) , but how long that knowledge remains, and why it took a full scale war in Europe to acquire it I don't know.

[arjie]

Are the Chinese particularly open API-wise here? Another user says BYD applied the DMCA to his repo that reverse-engineered their app (necessary because there's no other way). I think European auto-makers are probably doing poorly because a regime shift occurred in battery tech and EVs became much more useful and EVs are a manufacturing problem that advantages the guys who've been manufacturing electric motors and disadvantages the guys who manufacture cutting-edge gasoline engines.

I'm reminded of the fact that when I got a Roomba ten years ago the box said that the device was open and hackable. Searching online, the text looked like:

> This robot contains an electronic and software interface that allows you to control or modify, and remotely monitor its sensors. For software programmers interested in giving your iRobot new functionality we encourage you to do so.

My Dreame X40 Ultra does work flawlessly with Home Assistant but it carries no such text. In the end, I prefer the working to the text (so perhaps the Chinese companies are better), but things have changed over the intervening years.