The origin of this issue goes back to 2021 and the relaunch of the Build Back Better European green energy program to fight the non-existent climate change problem. We have been highlighting the consequences within the EU auto sector.
We noted in October of last year, the EU’s mandated fines against auto manufacturers who do not hit their production goals for electric vehicle sales began in 2025. EU automakers unable to meet the regulatory compliance goal began purchasing carbon credits to avoid stiff EU fines. Many of those carbon credits were purchased from Chinese EV automakers, who then turned around and started using the extra EU revenue to discount Chinese cars sold in Europe.
At the same time as Chinese autos hit record highs in Europe, EU car sales are flat or declining. Now, Volkswagen is announcing they lost half their profits in one year and will be cutting 50,000 jobs in the next four years.
(MSM – Europe) – Volkswagen just revealed its operating profit sank like a stone last year, dropping by more than half as tariffs, Chinese competition, and shifting strategies took a serious bite out of the bottom line. And that performance now has the VW Group’s execs reaching for the cost-cutting scissors, including plans to shed 50,000 jobs by the end of the decade.
The German automaker reported an operating profit of €8.9 billion ($10.3 bn at current rates) for 2025. That’s down a hefty 53 percent from the year before and well below what analysts were expecting. Revenue, meanwhile, barely moved, slipping only slightly to around €322 billion ($374 bn). (read more)
This was very predictable. In essence, EU car companies buy Chinese car company carbon credits, to avoid the EU fines. The Chinese car companies then use the carbon credit revenue to subsidize lower priced Chinese EVs to the European car market, thereby undercutting the European EV car companies.
The EU tariff applied to gasoline powered cars or hybrids from China is 10%. That tariff is not enough to stop the imports. The Chinese hybrid autos are substantially less than European car brands, and there’s no financial incentive for China to build auto plants in the EU zone especially when you consider the EU is subsidizing those cars by purchasing carbon credits.
When analyzed from a cost and consequence, the entire EU dynamic toward car companies is a little funny. However, for Germany this is a serious issue, and with the German industrial economy already stagnant – every impact to their auto industry only makes the situation worse.
When you overlay the big picture of their expensive “green energy” costs, the EU find themselves in an unescapable downward spiral. Quite literally, all commonsense seems to have been lost in their green energy chase.
By focusing on energy targets, specifically by trying to force production of European electric vehicles that are not favored by European car purchasers, the EU is shrinking their economy to the benefit of Beijing exploitation.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently travelled to China for a discussion with Chairman Xi Jinping. Chancellor Merz returned to German with a stark message about how the nation needed to quickly get productive in order to meet the far superior work ethic he saw in China.
At the same time, the EU has destroyed its energy sector by chasing windmills and solar farms instead of maintaining the much cheaper coal and gas alternatives. Overall, Europe has made a series of really bad decisions, but those consequences will surface the hardest within the largest industrial economy, Germany.
They’ve got major problems now.
looks like the euro will keep dropping towrds zero at a faster pace. get the wheel barrels ready for carrying cash.
Canada is supposed to shun their oil and timber while embracing “green” energy.
The USA is supposed to shun oil, natural gas, and ALL manufacturing in order to save the planet.
The Germans, long known for their precision engineering and automotive expertise, self-sabotage their greatest industry as they bow to their globalist overlords.
The African continent, sitting on a literal goldmine, and every other mineral mine you could name, is supposed to cede control of their greatest resource in exchange for “loans” as the Chinese expand their belt and road initiative.
All was working according to Chinese plan, when the purchased puppets Obama and Autopen were at the helm. Trump threw a wrench in the scheme.
With the Iran offensive, China is stretched for oil from multiple directions. The largest polluter on the planet, which ironically produces 70% of global EVs, and the vast majority of <cough> “green” appliances, was of course (along with Russia and India) exempt from the mandates of the farcical Paris Accord.
Trump could loosen the oil spigot for China, in exchange for its African mining rights. China’s dominance in precious minerals would be lessened, and we could form a mutually beneficial partnership with multiple African nations. A huge bonus, a lessening of the US taxpayer aid (TRILLIONS) poured into that continent over the last 60 years.
As an aside, it must pain the true German craftsmen at Volkswagen to see their designs, their engineering, be degraded in such fashion. Auto STOP/START, indeed.
“it must pain the true German craftsmen at Volkswagen to see their designs, their engineering, be degraded in such fashion.” One would think. However, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, the state which is dominated by the German automotive industry, the Green party this week won the state election.
Oh absolutely. Gonna get way worse before it gets any better.
What kind of voting machines does Germany use, I wonder? That computer software sold by Venezuela, I presume?
China wants Taiwan and isn’t about to let the U.S. have mineral rights that we can use to create weapons that would counter China’s move on the Taiwnese island.
“as they bow to their globalist overlords.“
Indeed. Your comment got me thinking.
I use to say that the Chinese, Russians and Indians would never bow to the globalist parasites. It just wasn’t going to happen that these huge countries with armies and ancient cultures would not simply unite with other brutal regulations to prevent losing their kingdoms to Bill Gates and George Soros and the other globalist euroweenies. And I thought I was right about that when they formed BRICS.
But now I think I was wrong. I was seeing it backwards. Globalists were never driving the bus. The globalists were just the pawns and purchased property of China, Russia, Iran, etc. to raid and destroy the wealth and liberty. Of the west to expand their empires.
This is why we see the “globalists” destroying the German auto industry, Canada destroying their oil and lumber.
The globalists are just the bought and paid for agents of destruction. Paid for, like Antifa, like our Senate, bought and paid for and protected by foreign might.
This is why Thune won’t pass the save America Act. Restoring the power to the people through the vote will utterly destroy all of the work they have done for the last 50 to gain control of our government.
Now you’re talking, Elle. Just remember that our Republic has Constitutional remedies to deal
with our enemies, both foreign and domestic, should ‘we the people’ step up in defense of our country and the free world.
Buckle up. I expect the next two year will be a very bumpy ride.
Wasn’t Volkswagen the company that jimmied with the design software of all its cars’ computer systems so that the sensors would under-read the emissions levels?
They all do that. VW was specifically targeted to kill their great diesel cars to help EV growth. (my opinion)
ADMIN: Please delete
Yes.
And your point is?
No, but they were the company started under Hitler’s Nazi regime. Volkswagen factory in 1938 in Wolfsburg. It is said, Hitler didn’t even have a driver’s license. Though the people’s car was never delivered to the public but many invested in the automobile and never received their cars. The number was said to be over 300,000 people.
They got caught modifying the firmware for their diesel engine cars to fudge the emissions tests.
A close source claims all the manufacturers were doing it, but someone likely ratted out the Germans. Similar to when Pfizer writes up a scathing study of a competitors cheaper, more effective drug getting it pulled from the market.
You cannot have manufacturing without cheap energy.
You cannot have manufacturing without real grown up domestic energy.
Europe – apart from Norway and France – rely on windmills and fairy farts.
Do you believe the industrial revolution of the early 20th century following the invention of high pressure steam was powered by cheap energy? It was quite expensive to mine and transport the coal. They didn’t let that stop them.
Expensive as opposed to what; horse power?
FAFO! Trump 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🎉got it all along!
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes”
Can’t wait for the pendulum to swing back to rationality.
VW has a history of fraud, autocratic governments and misguided national policies. Some things never change.
Volkswagen began as a government-backed “bait and switch” scam. The Nazis used it as a way to sucker the German people into financing the buildup of industrial capacity before the war.
The original name for the Volkswagen Beetle was the KdF-wagen “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF) program. Designed by Ferdinand Porsche, it was intended as an affordable, mass-produced “people’s car” for German citizens, with a target price of 990 Reichsmarks and a promise of 7 liters of fuel per 100 km.
Because Germany was poor, very few people could afford automobiles. But to spur the country’s needed growth, Hitler and the Nazis offered the car to the people under a savings scheme known as KdF-Wagen Sparkarte (“savings booklet”). The Sparkarte contained four cards, each with space for fifty stamps. Each stamp represented 5 Reichsmarks paid into the savings scheme. Citizens were encouraged to pay this amount per week, although they could deposit more if they could afford it. Since the car had a price of 990 Reichsmarks, a person required 198 stamps to be eligible for their car. At 5 Reichsmarks per week, this would have taken about three years and nine months.
Hundreds of thousands of people opted into this scheme which commenced in August 1938. By the end of the war in 1945, many people had paid the car off completely, indirectly financing Nazi Germany’s war machine. No German civilian ever received the car they were promised. Rather than fueling the German people’s escape from induced poverty, they used it and the profits from it for something else entirely; war.
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https://www.thecollector.com/volkswagen-beetle-nazi-germany/
I have two.
the first was given to me by Dad. In Germany, 1974. I broke my arm in school playing the game of round robin. The principal of the school called my father who sent his sergeant major to my german english school in a 1961 type 1. I rode the 12 km to a medical center where I was met with my mother who was in actual terror because she worried so much about her own son. This not the “bug” made me aware for the very first time in my entire life and still does that a Mother who loves her child and a father who would send his own men under his staff, is a special scale that can only come from a dedication far beyond what they teach in school. A Father and a Mother, Christians, and obedient to GOD will move mountains to preserve and heal the life that they have developed. This truth made me a believer long before I really understood Christianity Please pay attention to my testimony., I transfer this truth because I do believe it to me very important and not chance or coincidental.
I was told my my German principlem, who is driving my fathers’ v-dug, transferred to him by his “top” . An E7. A black man I never met, but who served with my Dad. A good man whom I would learn more about over the next 40 years of my life *another story, another time*
The top sergeant told the principle HOW TO DRIVE AND HOW TO INSTRUCT ME TO KEEP THE ARM BRACED AGAINST THE PASSENGER ARM REST. It was a perfect fit. The compound fracture was supported perfectly. As we races on 30 Horse powers against time to make it to the hospital as my arm slopped around in motion that made me vomit several times and the principal at least twice that I remember.
When I got to the hospital in Ulm. My mother, 8 months pregnant with my sister, was wailing in the circle drive. This made my cry out in more pain than even by broken arm., That day more than any other in my life, I realized the love and the pain of a mother who has children. Mothers know best.
Long story short. The v dub, later referred to as “blue boy” became my property. I restored her and many years later sold her at a red light to a young Marine at MCBH Kaneohe for a mere 8 k USD$. He said his wife was due soon and he needed a reliable car. He and I are still friends and I became good friends to his child, a girl, who would be one year older than my own.
Sometimes, a story about a car, also tells a story about a life, several lives,.
GOD BLESS AMERICA
and may God bless Germany and fix it because those 10 MM bolts need new threads.
I must have gone to school with you, also in Ulm, 1961. Ford Barracks.
It’s worse over at Porsche… https://x.com/_investinq/status/2031385022746271794?s=46
As well as Audi… my 2020 A6 Allroad suffers from Electrical issues that the Factory can’t resolve due to their 48Vdc partial EV system that sometimes drains the 12V battery making the vehicle dead. They’ve sacrificed their stellar reputation when they dedicated all their resources to the EV side of the business. And with every software update, things just seem to get worse.
I won’t buy another Audi again. I own 5 Audi’s but nothing newer than 2020, because that’s when Audi lost it’s soul.
I remember when Audi had a faulty ventilation system that put radiator fluid vapors into the cabin.
I would never own an EV. I have two older BMWs and an older Lexus SUV. And the last new car (Honda Passport) that I purchased off the showroom floor was in the fall of 1997. Got 300,000 miles out of it.
Volkswagen has owned Audi since 1964. They also own Porsche, Lamborghini, and Bugatti.
All these great cars, at the mercy of lefty bureaucrats….
My neighbor’s brand-new Mercedes also kept stalling. He was told it was due to the ignition draining the battery, however the problem continued..
He finally traded it in for a completely different model at Toyota. He is still waiting for his new car to arrive, two months and counting..
Society Suicide.
And that’s what happens when you let the loonies run the asylum.
A bunch of pencilpushers following an agenda (that we didn’t vote for) no matter the consequences.
This will not end well.
If in fact “we didn’t vote for” them, but our elections were nonetheless *stolen* against the will of the people, this has dire implications for our Constitutional Republic that must be addressed immediately.
The problem is identifying who, exactly, is Constitutionally authorized to address the issue of stolen elections, that is not also the beneficiary of stolen elections? Surely we cannot expect the treasonous usurpers installed against the will of voters to *voluntarily* remove themselves from power?
You have to wonder what the end goal is here, as ‘green energy’ is anything but green and is unsustainable. The blindness of ideology??
You will own nothing and live in a 15 minute city in a very small apartment.
Don’t forget ze bugs. You will EAT ze bugs and LIKE it, because your brain will be hardwired to that of a transhuman slave who gnashes his teeth and wishes for death, but death will not find him.
Yeah well.. I much prefer persecution as a human being in full control of my own faculties. The odds of eternal salvation will be far greater.
The beginning of the German Rust Belt
it was and continues to be a means to transfer wealth and power and political influence. the three bangers. Create a crisis the existential death by heat crisis, created of course by anthropologic abuse of the environment/atmostphere, then develop a gimmick to solve the problem and save the world. What’s not to like about saving the world….always remembers the children no doubt. Then force laws that punish companies that do not agree or participate and raise the stock of those companies that do.
never mind that even 100 times the current fleet of EV vehicles will never ever drop co2 gas ratios even by 2 percent. Never mind that 100 times the current solar and wind power will never ever drop co2 gas ratios even by 4 percent.
don’t pay attention to the distortion and the lies. it’s for the children…you know.
but its really about transfering wealth through fraud, by people who don’t even actually believe of behave that any of the claims are true. They just want to checks to clear. Exhibit: show me one single politico corruptor who has adopted a fully “green” sustainable house and vehicle. Name one. I can name thousands and thousands who have not only not done these things, but who are heavily invested in classic oil gas energy and have not made any changes to life style or ownership. That should tell you something. Obama bought shore line property in Florida and in Hawaii, at or near sea level foundations. Oh my, but it’s the ice at the poles that will raise the sea levels to 20, 40, 100 feet in 50 years….and that was 20 years ago these claims. None of that has happened. Can it happen, sure. But it’s not even made a few centimeters.
it’s fraud. It’s intentional lying to grift and transfer wealth using the force of law and executive order, committee of media narrative that tells you to confirm to the realities of death by heat or you are an immortal person, selfish.
I cannot even begin to fully express my absolute hatred for these kinds of people who have literally terrified young people over the last 20 years.
If I ever come across Al Gore, I will televise knocking out every single tooth he has. And curb stomping that piece of feces. He and that other scofflaw, married to the ketchup heiress, a phoney Vietnam pathological liar and degenerate, john kerry, the poster boy of everything that is wrong with a radical corrupt jackwagon.
God Bless America
Slow motion train wreck. European elitists move to replace apes as the caricature for who now sits upon a petrol dump with a lit match. Truly remarkable.
F__k Europe
Think of the iconic brands that will ultimately be degraded. Car guys worldwide will shed a tear :/
I remember our neighbors all gathered under the hoods of their cars to fix the engines. Car repairs created many bonding moments for that generation.
Now, all newer cars have computers that no one can possibly service except for the repair shops and dealerships. My daughter had her rear headlamp and a corner fender replaced from an accident, and the bill was thousands due to the “sensors.”
We also had elections once upon a time, using in-person paper ballots that were counted the same day and matched to signed voter ledgers. We immediately learned who won our elections within 24 hours on Election Day.
Now we have -take a wild guess- computers again, this time using backdoor software programs which result in elections that last for weeks until the (rigged) totals can finally agree with the “harvested” mail-in ballots.
Unfortunately, this will likely hit workers at the VW plant in nearby Chattanooga. The poor, globalist, top-down decisions by corporate executives in Germany will have negative consequences for workers here in America. Ford made similar decisions which led to our state offering all kinds of financial goodies to building their electric truck plant in West Tennessee before realizing nobody wanted to buy electric F-150s. If only these executives paid more attention to what their customers actually wanted rather than fantasies about what the executives think their customers need, their companies would be in much better shape today.
And GM in Middle Tennessee with a huge electric vehicle plant and a monster battery plant next door. Both are being repurposed and the State will lose hundreds of millions.
VW is helping build a huge EV plant in South Carolina for Scout Motors.
Should be done by the end of this year, with SUVs coming off the line sometime in 2027.
Would not surprise me to see the plant closed by 2028.
I’ll show you who’s STUPID!
EU = mutually assured destruction
almost like the insanity of wokeness and climate cultism are weapons of war to inflict on your enemies.
This is just mind-boggling.
Anything that ultimately hurts the people is evil at work.
Has anyone ever done a deep dive into the computer systems on Chinese EVs, looking for hidden circuitry and/or programs that could, on command,
render the vehicles inoperative by frying the circuitry?
Look at what Israel managed to do to take out thousands of Hezbollah’s top leadership all at once, by making their cell phones explode.
The Chinese, if anything, are master copycats and could easily steal Israel’s idea. Same for all those cellphones, tablets, printers, computers and every other electronic device made in China.
Formula 1 now laughable because thay are also pushing the Green Scam on the public. Forced 50-50 power distribution between an internal combustion engine and electric drive. Cars are now slowing on track, particularly on long straights, as they run out of electrical energy and are forced to maintain 50/50 distribution. On track speed differential will eventually kill someone.
Been an F1 fan my whole life. I’m out.
Germans don’t need jobs when they can get free money from the old people. Wait until they run out of old people. Sorry Greta. You will have a very miserable old age yourself.
Surely the greenie weenies cannot be this stupid. I’m sure they fully expected AMERICAN TAXPAYERS to fund their untenable business plan, just as we have *always* funded every socialist program from “free” national security to “free” healthcare in Europe and Canada.
What do you suppose the TPP would’ve been used for? Outsourcing our economic policies to a foreign globalist cabal over the next few decades would surely have had dire consequences for our Constitutional Republic, would you not agree?
Thanks to President Trump’s strength through economics policy, everybody can plainly see how close we came to disaster.
CONgress must be champing at the bit to get these next two years behind them so they can all get back to screwing the USA as always. These grifters care not one whit about a prosperous USA as long as their backroom deals keep fattening their own wallets.
Buh bye Germany.. Who will be next in line to die by their green new steal?
Obviously you’ve mistaken me for somebody who cares. Their problem, not mine.