How do you sum up the economic forecast for Europe? This story highlights one of the craziest stories in a long time. This is so blindingly suicidal, it cannot be stupidity. This is intentional.
BACKGROUND – You might remember last year due to climate/carbon emission regulations inside Europe EU automakers had to pay fines to the EU Commission if they did not meet electric vehicle targets. In order to avoid the penalties many EU automakers began purchasing ‘carbon credit’ offsets from Chinese EV automakers.
European car makers were paying China for carbon credits, and Chinese car companies began using the payments to lower prices. Europe was, essentially, paying China to undercut their own auto market. The result was European car makers, specifically those in Germany, losing market share to lower price EVs from China. German industry began shrinking.
If that wasn’t crazy enough, what comes next is beyond laughable. As a result of lost sales and diminished volumes, Volkswagen had shut down auto plants. Now, Volkswagen is announcing that Chinese automakers, their China “partners,” will take over the underutilized facilities and start building Chinese cars in Germany.
GERMANY – Volkswagen Group is facing increased pressure from its board to further cut costs despite already announcing radical measures, such as axing around 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 and reducing production capacity by up to 3 million units per year to 9 million, which would make it very difficult to avoid plant closures or sales. Overall, Europe’s largest automaker aims to reduce costs by 20% by the end of 2028.
In an attempt to mitigate the effect of these measures, the automaker appears ready to do what not too long ago would have seemed unthinkable, namely selling China-developed cars in Europe and even sharing its underutilized plants in the region with its Chinese partners.
That’s what CEO Oliver Blume told investors and analysts on April 30 after presenting the company’s first-quarter 2026 results, which saw the automaker’s profit drop 14% to $2.92 billion amid higher U.S. tariffs and intense competition from Chinese carmakers.
In order to deal with excess capacity in Europe and rising competition from Chinese brands in Europe in the coming years, Blume said VW Group is considering selling China-built cars in Europe. It’s the first time that Volkswagen has acknowledged it is contemplating such a move. (read more)
♦ SUMMARY: Volkswagen went to China to sell cars. Volkswagen opened EV auto plants in China bringing in German industrial technology and equipment. China learned from Volkswagen and started their own EV auto companies to compete. Volkswagen EV sales in China started dropping dramatically, and the Chinese EV brands took over.
Due to internal climate regulations in Europe, Volkswagen in the EU then begins giving money to China that subsidizes their competition. China exports their EVs to Europe. Volkswagen EV auto plants start closing. China now takes control of the Volkswagen EV auto plants to build Chinese EVs in Germany.
With operations now inside the house, the Chinese government extract European wealth and pump subsidies into their EV operations in Germany, flooding the European market with cheap EVs that will undercut the German auto manufacturing sector.
You cannot make steel with windmills and solar panel energy. Germany has destroyed much of their coal and nuclear power plants. German energy prices have skyrocketed. German steel is expensive. German cars are expensive as a result. Where do you think the inexpensive steel for the ultra-cheap Chinese EVs will come from?
Now, replace [Germany] with [Canada].
And thus, China invaded the West without firing a shot.
Dear President Trump, crush China economically. They will never stop stealing the technology to destroy their competition.
Will the future hold chinese and the muslims fighting over the carcass that was once known as europe.
China too, is simply doing the bidding of the Globalists. They did not have to steal the West’s technology, we handed it to them.
The Chinese Communists are the ultimate globalists, bringing socialism with Chinese characteristics to a country near you.
Yes. Covid was a pretty good preview
At some point China’s competition will have nothing left to steal. There will be no wealth, assets, creativity, or ideas left to steal and no new ones since there will be no point in being creative.
Entropy.
“And thus, China invaded the West without firing a shot.”
Not exactly.
With the assistance of FauXi and others genocidal lunatics and murderers, China infecting the world with the WuFlu and the subsequent and catastrophic damage caused by it at large, was most certainly an invasion of ‘war’ against the West.
In life (and business), water seeks its level.
<…water seeks its level.>
Finally, someone mentions the truth…
It’s about dam time 🙂
You were rapid with that one.
“Your mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” – Heddy Lamarr.
Gotta be something in the water… don’t drink their Kool aid
Next I expect Germany will see Chinese workers in those plants, like what high end Italian handbag makers do.
Never a peep to be heard about what caused this to happen.
Never a suggestion to tariff Chinese products to protect their industry and workers.
The same mindset that doesn’t fight against immigrants raping their women.
We need to exit NATO and leave them to their own demise, which they richly deserve.
And the likes of Merz have the nerve to ridicule Trump? These people are falling off a cliff and will refuse to recognize it until that final loud thump rings through their ears.
Merz knows exactly what he is doing. He is doing as he was told to do by his handlers. The same as Macron, Starmer and the Spanish puppets.
Wrecking the existing Nations, and their native peoples and cultures, to implement their Globalist-Chinese hellscape, populated by more compliant 3rd world humanity.
And don’t forget to include Mark Carney
Our next door neighbor
Exactly.
All that wrecking may be called Globalist, but it is actually Leninist. Look at what the Bolsheviks did starting with the October Revolution. It wasn’t just to take over the government and impose their own control. Their mission was to break apart the old culture and society; to take control of families away from parents and give it to the Party; to eliminate religion, or at least all of it that might pose a threat to the control of the Party and make the remainder wholely subservient; and all the other things they did to eradicate the old. Their aim was to tear everything down and then start all over building everything back as they and they alone envisioned it should be. The Globalist agenda is Neo-Bolshevik.
Correction, Jumping off the cliff.
It is not the fall that will kill them, it’s the hard landing of real economics that will destroy them. If Kamala and Tim had won this would be our future… one election cycle away from disaster. I can only shake my head and curse Nixon and Kissinger.
it expands the ability to incubate and distribute Covid2.
Change that from “doesn’t fight against immigrants raping their women” to
“doesn’t fight against immigratns raping their sisters.”
The members of parliament that are most supportive of immigrant rapists are actually the females.
Not a demise as much as a communist transformation, very dangerous to us.
Much better if we don’t leave Germany to their “demise” but rather demise the leftist parties responsible for the theft of their national soul.
As with Venezuela, reclaim Western nations like Germany from the communists of China. The West belongs to us. We value our history and traditions.
Factory conversion work will begin next week said CCP Transition Team spokesman – Rik Shaw.
The German auto industry is dead, not because of their workers but due to their politicians. Sad but true. We’re not that far away either.
Yep. Death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts…
If the ‘brands’ of German automakers still have value, they should just become American automakers. 😏
This guy even looks like the idiot he is!
He isn’t an idiot, he’s evil. He and his cronies steal for a living.
Boy howdee is the stupid deep. They are paying China to take their jobs and wealth.
Don’t expect a single bureaucrat to step up and say “we screwed up”.
Such a lovely phrase, our Chinese partners!! Like the 5 families in the mafia are partner’s !!! Sleeping with the fish is how this will end for the Germans.
GMs “Chinese Partners” own and opperate Nexteer formally Steering Gear
Of course it is intentional.
The big signal will be whether the globalist nation wreckers exempt or otherwise relieve their Chinese co-conspirators from the destructive laws, rules and regulations that killed the native manufacturers.
And that will be the final tell to all but the most obtuse as to what the end game is.
And the signal that Germans must take back their nation very quickly, before they are extinguished.
or subsidise them to buy expensive german steel at Chinese prices
take notes. “liberal” policies are more destructive to a nation than war and should be seen as subversive weapons of war. essentially a virus that kills a nation from within.
The globalists weapon of choice.
If you poke some people on the head with a stick for a long period of time, when you quit, they’ll miss it.
Germany is surrendering to the Chinese state capitalists and to the muslim immigrant invasion. Britain is doubling down on Net Zero with disastrous consequences for its economy.
Spain and Ireland are also surrendering to an immigrant invasion. France is likely to go full marxist-communist. Phony Meloni in Italy hasn’t stopped her nation’s long-term slide into the socialist abyss.
Europe is a lost cause. We should pull out of NATO and leave the Europeans to their self-inflicted fate, not spending good money after bad in a useless attempt to save them from themselves.
Never forget climate change has nothing to do with the climate. In 2015 Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
Russia is starting to look very good.
build back bankrupt!
How do chinese plants in germany deal with energy costs?
Use more plastic and cardboard parts.
They will be assembly plants using intermediate parts made in China by Chinese workers from Chinese raw materials.
This is an important point; the actual fabrication will be in China. Makes me wonder about these factories in the US, and whether or not they also are just assembly plants…
Maybe they can just purchase ‘carbon credit’ offsets from themselves? It isn’t any more crazy than all the rest of this.
I think one thing is for sure: They will sell a lot of their EVs in Europe. Before much longer, they will be about the only cars most Europeans will be able to afford to buy.
EU is reducing their ‘power’ supplies, so, where are all of the EVs going to find their electricity?
Very good point. Of course the elites who are reducing the power supplies don’t want the common people to have their own automobiles anyway. They want everyone but themselves on foot or bicycle or using increasingly unsafe public transportation. Only the elites will not have to reduce their standard of living, at least not until the whole economy finally comes crashing down around them.
What happens when Europeans cannot afford to buy anything because they lost all their manufacturing and jobs?
Ever watched the rowing scene in Ben Hur?
Germany and canada are dissimililar in that one has a 4000 mile land border with the US and is key to arctic security, and one doesn’t.
I wonder if a good analogy of what the end looks like is the shrinking below replacement level of 2.1 of fertilization rates around the world. The circling the drain gets faster and faster until it crosses the event horizon.
It is purposely being done. The masquerade is simply not a bunch of true climate hoax believers catering to the environmental special interests donors. This is fully intended to destroy the western world and culture to institute authoritarian regimes. Interesting just how many western persons that have achieved so much from western culture and ingenuity that are willing to destroy it for their own personal gains.
Well, as noted in Seattle Washington some years ago presciently, the quote: “last one leaving shut off the lights”. That is occurring now in Seattle, and might as well pass the position on to Germany – It seems the lemmings now create cliffs to charge over – cannot destroy themselves fast enough.
Unfortunately, lemmings are too smart to all run off a cliff, it takes humanity to be that foolish…
But a question, how will China run the plants if all the reliable energy in Germany has been decommissioned? China is building coal plants constantly. Hasn’t Germany stopped alot of their reliable energy?
After finishing law school in 1985, Merz worked as a judge and ‘corporate lawyer‘ before entering full-time politics in 1989……
Just like here in the U.S……Lawyers, corrupt Politician Lawyers(almost 50% of Congress are Lawyers) and Judges are destroying everything they touch…..
There are three levels of lawyers. 1. The most intelligent students in law school get great jobs because they do the work. 2. The socially well connected get paid well because they know who has the big money and needs council. 3. The slowest students pass the bar and write wills for a marginal living. These clowns matriculate into the political party nerds looking for work. Some become politicians to our dismay as it is their first instinct to take the cash. Our suffering continues.
My 12 yr. old Ford Escape has 209k miles on it, with a new transmission and a few pricey repairs plus maintenance, oil, batteries etc…
Those repairs and scheduled costs, have still not cost me what it did to repair and replace parts on a little 3 series BMW with far fewer miles on it. I was never happier than to get rid of that little monster, even though it was solid and got 45 mpg….was glad to see it go.
Years ago, I had a Jetta that got broken into…the thieves pried out the Grundig radio. happened in the Loyola hospital parking lot….I am filling out the police report while the ER techs were picking glass out of the perp’s hands…
They did not want the Jetta, just the radio
.
Buy American.
Too bad they weren’t picking bullet fragments out of the perp’s face.
My 2012 Ohio built Honda Accord has 131K miles on it and I drive less than 5K miles a year. Much as I would like a newer car, I can’t justify buying one, especially knowing that, at 72, I may have just a few more years of driving in me.
At least you won’t have to worry about the authorities turning of your car using your onboard computer garbage. How about those cocks?
Open borders, fossil fuel elimination and now Chinese sponsorship. And this is what the Democrats vow to emulate. Insane
Good luck Europe, when your EV doesn’t start in cold weather.
All EV’s suck.
Who in their right mind would buy a EV, expensive or cheap?
While people are making fun of the cheap products of China, China is slowly driving the costs of other nation’s products up. The population of China tends to keep workers easily managed cost wise. Who needs nuclear weapons? Just take over the countries without a shot and let the world keep China’s communists well fed and active.
Can’t quite capture Mandarin with a German accent.
” This is so blindingly suicidal, it cannot be stupidity. This is intentional”
all per Protocol and the Agenda. The Head of the Snake is finally chewing its way through Europe and the Commonwealth. We all know where it goes next.
Trump and his loyal patriots are quite literally Freedom’s last stand.
The Communist/globalist plan is to remove Germanys wealth and erase its national identity. Make all of Germany dependent on gas pipes from Russia (our friend). There is no wind or sun in Germany but sell the people on renewables. Let them spend all their money building windmills. Eliminate the German culture by allowing millions of nasty hateful immigrants in, and feeding them. Then insult the Americans, your defenders, your biggest market and your business partners. This is all a plan, not a mistake. Its is everywhere so you are not alone. Is it too late to stop? Maybe the AfD can make Germany Great again, but certainly not the Socialists, Communists and Globalists.
Weren’t several top people in the AfD party recently assassinated ?
Wow Germany and Europe are done. If this is not one of the 7 signs, don’t know what is.
Suicide by bloodless invasion. Meanwhile in Texas.
Thanks to an AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Leftist) judge…
Wonder what the incentive is………..purposeful national destruction for $$$$??
Just as the world continues to run on oil, so does it on $$$.
satanic ideology has replaced centuries of history which proves this, and by which German was once the mighty industrial powerhouse of Europe. No matter the results of crippling denial which keep the Germany (and other EU nations) in a massive and deepening hole. Their rulers cannot/will not admit their insidious folly goes against the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God… and stop digging.
They’d rather collapse into an ignominious heap than renounce their hubris.
Slow moving train with no brakes, picking up speed on the downhill which can end in only one way.
Same thing happened in the camera business, particularly in optics. Germany and Japan farmed out production to China.
Now China is flooding the market with inexpensive lenses; some even specifically designed to fit Leica cameras. They’re not great, but they’re a fraction of the cost and getting better every year. Most people don’t appreciate the difference in quality. It’s all about bargain basement prices.
How many times does this scenario have to repeat itself before companies learn the hard lesson?
In a world where fine handcrafted leather shoes were once the norm we’ve become a rubber flip-flop society.
No empathy at all for les Bosches: rather than pass judgement about the American body politique, they ought do a little more soul searching about what their fathers and grandfathers did under the Nazis.
All the more reason to ditch Europe
All your automakers are belong to us.
Once a Democrat is elected again, he’ll open our market up the same way and there will be Democrats buying BYD just for the virtue signal much like they did the Ukraine bumper stickers.
Did you hear the one about the German chancellor who thought he was a comedian?…………..
“It vas no laughing matter”.
I’m still stuck on $2.92 billion in QUARTERLY profit not being enough.
Might be more meaningful to know what the margins are in relation to that $2.92 billion in (presumably) net profits.
If they were spending say 40+billion a quarter and netting 2.92 billion that would be better than spending double for the same net.
Bold move Conner. I hope it works out for you….
With the number of factories burning down in China because the workers aren’t being paid a precedent has been set.
This will not work out well.
Europe has just gone stupid. They deserve whatever fate has in store for them. Jettison them: No more troops no more bases, no more NATO. Just trade agreements as appropriate.
Physicist Mark Mills provides the numbers. It requires 500,000 lbs of earth to be mined for one Tesla Battery. It requires thousands of gallons of caustic acids to chemically melt the dirt to extract the necessary metals. That Tesla will produce 30+ tons of CO2 prior to even making it to the Dealership lot. The equivalent ICE automobile produces 30-50 tons of CO2 in its entire cradle to grave lifespan. Even if you are CO2 is poison believer then EV vs ICE per CO2 are equivalent. In fact one can make the argument that a solids based energy storage technology vs storing gasoline in a sheet metal gas tank is far worse for the environment. Electrified economy is no friend to the environmental vs hydrocarbon.
They “only” made $3 billion dollars last year. How much more will profits drop in future years as the Chinese care take over?
“…sharing its underutilized plants in the region with its Chinese partners.”
Partners.
That’s hilarious.
The insanity on the left is infectious. Then Europe welcomes colonists who come to conquer not assimilate. So sad watching Europe self-destruct. This is exactly what the democrats want to accomplish here. Woe is us, woe is us.
The exact same thing would have happened here, if Harris had taken the reins from Autopen, who was supposed to take the reins from Hillary, who would have taken the reins from Obama.
The CAFE standards, the crappy built-to-fail energy star appliances, the whole green energy scam. All to benefit China, the largest polluter on the planet. They just needed to grease enough palms along the way. For instance, the “secret” buyers of Hunter’s “art”, at $500k a pop.
I remember seeing a video of Chinese built skyscrapers. Gleaming monoliths, but with hidden flaws. The cheapest bolts and fasteners possible, and the resultant early, and snowballing, effects on the structural integrity. Reminiscent of their iconic drywall.
Ford CEO Jim Farley famously praises the Chinese EV he was test-driving, “I didn’t want to give it up”. But just imagine, once China obliterates its compliant, complicit “competitors”, and uses the cheap Canadian steel that Sundance mentions, how great” these cars will be.
As a bonus to the broken Western masses driving EV’s (and eating bugs, and living in mass housing), the bonus energy supply freed up for Chinese use, at reduced prices due to a global softening of demand.
Panda plays the long game. But thanks to weaklings like Merz, they actually won’t need to play it much longer.
If Volkswagen closes ALL their manufacturing facilities, then they can REALLY save some money.
Germany has lost any competitive edge by shutting down efficient nuclear power plants in favor of inefficient, expensive “green” energy. Last I heard, they were considering trying to restart some of the nuclear plants, but that’s a hard row to hoe. It basically committed industrial suicide.
“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
Everything the Chinese have is because we have bought their cheap crap for decades. Everything they have is either a cheap copy of someone else’s work or stolen.