And German industry in general. They couldn’t laugh off Tesla. Now the punches are coming in hot and heavy.
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German Industrial Job Losses Top 80,000 With Daimler Cuts – Germany’s economy may have narrowly avoided a recession, but the pressure on the country’s industry shows no sign of abating.
Daimler AG said this week it will shed 10% of management positions at its Mercedes unit, lifting the tally of job cuts announced this year across Germany’s manufacturing sector to more than 80,000, according to Bloomberg calculations.
Companies from Volkswagen AG to Siemens AG are letting workers go as Germany’s powerful automotive industry struggles with a shift toward electrification and self-driving cars, and makers of machinery and robots are hit by slower exports and trade disputes. Makers of well-known German products such as Meissen porcelain and WMF kitchenware are also trimming their workforce.
Nope. Sadly, chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced that Germany will not be able to reach its goal of having at least 20 e-cars on German roads by the year 2020.
This extremely ambitious goal, mocked from the start by gas-guzzling German automobile experts everywhere (some 97 percent of the German population), has now been scrapped for a more realistic goal of a nice round non-dirty dozen.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany will likely miss the government’s target of bringing one million electric cars onto the roads by the end of the decade. The sale of electric vehicles (EVs) has remained sluggish in Germany despite discounts introduced last year and granted to buyers of green cars. In 2016, there were less than 80,000 electric cars on German roads. Experts say German consumers remain reluctant to buy EVs because of relatively high prices, limited driving range and restrictions due to the low number of charging stations.
But they haven’t figured out how to equip them with diesel emissions test cheating software yet.
The sleazy, crooked, dirtball of a company also hopes to introduce more self-driving vehicles in the near future. If those work out, self-purchasing models will be the next logical step. And after that, who knows? The Welt or something.
Volkswagen unveiled a plan for the next decade containing culture change, as it strives to compete in an industry moving towards e-cars, self-driving systems and on-demand mobility – all while it deals with Dieselgate.
How piquant or exquisite or unintentionally funny or something. An eco-study by an eco-institute (Öko-Institut) has just found out that eco-cars of the ecolectric kind are not nearly as ecological for the ecology as assumed (is there an eco in here?).
Basing its findings upon the amount of additional electricity these cars will have to use in the future, the study determined that if this energy does not come from renewable energy sources (a most unlikely likelihood at this time, it appears), then this increase in electricity production will actually prove to have a detrimental effect upon the so-called climate balance.
Exhaust or not, it must be clear by now that this subject will never be exhausted.
Als Grund nennt das Öko-Institut die Strommengen, die durch Elektroautos verbraucht werden. Die Klimabilanz wäre nur dann ausgewogen, wenn dafür zusätzliche Mengen erneuerbarer Energie in den Strommarkt eingeführt würden.
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Observing Hermann 