By Paul Homewood
From Bloomberg:
Germany is the birthplace of Karl Benz, the inventor of the automobile, and gave rise to the “People’s Car,” Volkswagen, which has grown into the world’s biggest auto manufacturer. It’s home to four brands—BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Porsche—that account for 80 percent of global sales of luxury vehicles. And with 835,000 workers, the auto industry is Germany’s biggest employer, responsible for a fifth of the country’s exports.
But automotive employment will start to decline this year, the powerful IG Metall union predicts. Germany may have reached peak car, posing a threat to the most important pillar of the economy. “We’re preparing for a time when fewer people will work in the industry in our region,” says Rüdiger Schneidewind, mayor of Homburg, a western city of 42,000 with four big factories that account for 30,000 jobs. “More than half of this region’s prosperity is due to auto manufacturing.
It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the automobile permeates German culture. The country’s no-speed-limit autobahns are the stuff of legend, and the cars that run on them are technological marvels supporting a vast ecosystem of suppliers and developers. But as people shift to ride-hailing, car-sharing, and driverless electric vehicles, many of Germany’s advantages will evaporate. “The three core features of mobility in the 20th century are dissolving: cars that need a driver, are privately owned, and are powered by a combustion engine,” says Stephan Rammler, an auto industry consultant and professor of transportation design at Braunschweig University of Art. “Germany risks falling behind new giants being created in China and the U.S.”
The concern for the Germans is that profits will flow increasingly to arrivistes such as Waymo, Apple, or Uber Technologies. Battery-powered cars don’t need as much precision engineering as traditional models, and making them will require fewer workers. More than a third of Germany’s 210,000 jobs in engine and transmission production will disappear by 2030, IG Metall says. “Carmakers can only survive as mobility-service providers, not as auto manufacturers,” says Horst Lischka, IG Metall’s Munich head and a member of BMW AG’s supervisory board.
Full story here.
It is astonishing to see just how much automaking contributes to the German economy.
You cannot stop progress, but Europe may rue the day it became so obsessed with climate change, that it put at risk one of its most successful industrial sectors.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 5, 2019 at 01:00PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 