Germany’s car industrial complex is slowly turning into more of a complex kind of a complex if you know what I’m sayin’ as demand for car sales has dropped to a twenty year low here, which isn’t all that very complex at all if you stop and think about it. Once considered to be about as invulnerable to economic fluctuations as the German car industry, the German car industry is now starting to look like the American one. Well no, it ain’t quite that ugly. But let’s just say der Lack ist ab (all the glamour, or paint, is gone, or at least going).

After several German car manufacturers decided to send thousands of their employees on a not so well-deserved five-week Kurzarbeit (reduced hours) Christmas break, which must have ruined a whole lot of otherwise quite stable marriages, the workers are now returning but a better market situation isn’t. Sales of BMW in evil US-Amerika, for instance, are over forty percent lower than they were a year ago. The Nightmare On Assembly Line Street continues, in other words. Freddy Krueger is a German name, by the way.

Why it’s getting so bad (how bad is it?), it’s getting so bad that German male men car executive types are now having to let themselves be lectured at like little school boys by a woman, of all people, about how to make cars, of all things, or at least how man (one) could make them. Angie wants them to be more “innovative” or something.

This is of course an impossible thing to ask however as Germans only know how to make race cars and this solar and battery stuff just isn’t sexy enough, at least not yet. And nuclear energy-powered cars would just be verboten out of hand so don’t even ask.

“Der Auftragsbestand liegt um elf Prozent unter dem Vorjahreswert und damit auf dem niedrigsten Niveau seit Ende der 80er Jahre.”