This piece is from November 4, 2019. The implicit warning is, if anything, more relevant now than it was just four months ago.
From Der Spiegel:
Threatened by entrepreneurs in California and by Chinese upstarts,
German automakers are urgently trying to find their place in a new world
of robots and electric cars. BMW, Daimler, Audi and VW set the
standards for a century but have now fallen behind.
History will be written on Nov. 4 at the VW plant in Zwickau, Germany.
Anyone lucky enough to recently visit the factory, which is sealed
behind blue rolling doors, entered into a secret world, a hidden
industrial laboratory to which only a few Volkswagen employees have
access. In its "ghost run," or test operation, orange-colored robots run
by highly complex programs and aided by humans and machines assembled
eight electric model-ID.3 cars per day for testing purposes. Serial
production is now set to begin on Nov. 4. Depending on how you see it,
this marks either the beginning or the end of an era.
In the future, 1,500 electric Volkswagen cars are to roll off the
assembly line at the plant in the eastern state of Saxony every day, a
total of 330,000 vehicles every year, in what the company describes as
the "largest and most efficient electric car factory in Europe." The
designers of the new compact, C-class ID.3 want to make it a 21st
century icon, just as the VW Beetle and VW Golf were in their heydays.
That's advertising language, of course, but even from a neutral
perspective, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of what is
happening: In Zwickau, Volkswagen is ringing the death knell for the
combustion engine. By 2040, VW plans to cease manufacturing all cars
that run on gasoline or diesel fuel. It's the end of an era.
And what a momentous era it was. It lasted over 100 years, and was
shaped in decisive ways by German inventors and engineers -- courageous
entrepreneurs, visionary designers and highly competent, skilled
workers. During this era, German automobiles became the epitome of the
highest quality workmanship around the world. A time when Volkswagen,
Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche and Audi, and the objects of global prestige
they produced, became ambassadors for Germany. Their finely tuned
engines were models for industrial excellence. German cars were
considered "
das Auto" par excellence and Audi's advertising
slogan "Vorsprung durch Technik" (Progress through technology) became
one of the few German terms actually known in English.
Men like Eberhard von Kuenheim, who laid the foundations for BMW's
success, Ferdinand Piëch, who first made Audi and then VW household
names around the world, or Wendelin Wiedeking, who saved Porsche and
catapulted it into unimagined dimensions, were to the German economy
what Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are today to American
industry: heroes.
Of course, there have also always been headaches
over the years: oil crises, gasoline-price shocks, trouble with air
pollution in the cities, the nuisance of traffic jams and debates about
appropriate speed limits. In the 1980s, people began thinking more about
the links between the economy and the environment. In the 1990s, the
whole world laughed when the environmentalist Green Party in Germany
argued for a massive hike in the price of gasoline for the sake of the
environment.
Since the start of the new millennium, worries about climate change
have increased sharply, and people have started coming around to the
idea that it's madness to get around using large, heavy boxes that burn
fossil fuels.
Late To The Game
But it was only very recently that the German automobile industry
finally came to the realization that it is going to need to radically
adapt. The industry, led by Volkswagen, believed it could solve its
problem in two ways: first by creating better, less-polluting and more
efficient (diesel) cars and secondly, when the first approach failed, by
cheating or denying reality....
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MUCH MORE
