Six months ago, Jake quit what Washington politicians would call a “dream job”: a production role at a brand-new, multi-billion-dollar EV battery plant. The job checked every box on paper: it was billed as “manufacturing brought home,” paid $18 an hour to start, offered health insurance, and was positioned as the future of American industry. He lasted just 24 weeks.

“The first week, they told us mandatory overtime was non-negotiable,” Jake recalled. “12-hour shifts, six days a week, no exceptions. The health insurance had such a high deductible for a family that I couldn’t even use it. Management made it clear that within a few years, half the line would be automated. Why would I burn myself out for a job that doesn’t care about whether I live or die, and won’t exist in a few years?”

This is the story politicians and corporate executives don’t want you to hear. For a decade, Republicans and Democrats alike have parroted the same line: America needs to “bring manufacturing jobs back to America” to outcompete China, rebuild the middle class, and secure our industrial future. The U.S. IRA and CHIPS Act – and to a lesser extent, the EU’s Net Zero Industry Act – were built on the promise that if one builds the factories, the workers will come.

They’re not coming. And the lie America keeps telling itself about why is destroying America’s shot at a manufacturing renaissance before it even starts.

This analysis is focused primarily on the U.S. market, where the gap between policy promises and on-the-ground execution is widest. We’ll talk about European case studies as nuanced examples of both wins and failures, because while European workers have stronger baseline legal protections, the region is also grappling with widespread factory closures, deindustrialization, and its own labour shortages.

As an entrepreneur and investor, this is not an ideological argument for “pro-labour” policy over free enterprise, but a data-backed case that short-sighted cost-cutting and a refusal to treat frontline workers as long-term assets are the biggest barriers to manufacturing competitiveness, profitability, and sustainable growth.

The Myth of the “Skills Gap”

The default excuse for empty factory floors is always the same: “We have a skills gap.” American workers, as they are told, don’t have the training to operate advanced manufacturing equipment, program robots, or work in modern EV and chip fabs. It’s so convenient to blame workers for the crisis rather than the executives and investors who design the jobs.

It’s also mostly a lie debunked by hard data, even as one acknowledges real gaps in highly specialised roles.

If there were a genuine, widespread skills gap, the 389,000 unemployed Americans with recent manufacturing experience would be snapped up to fill these openings.

According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Quarterly Outlook Surveys, attracting and retaining a quality workforce consistently ranks as the number one business challenge for roughly 70% to 75% of manufacturing executives. Yet, labor economists point out a glaring contradiction.

As researchers from the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future have highlighted, the problem for many entry-level production jobs isn’t a lack of skills, it’s a lack of competitive compensation. While there is a genuine shortage of highly specialized engineers and advanced robotics technicians, the vast majority of unfilled roles on factory floors require only weeks of on-the-job training.

The problem isn’t that workers don’t have the skills. It’s that the jobs aren’t worth learning the skills for.

The Broken Case for Frontline Labour

Markets collapse when the implicit contract between a business and its core assets breaks down. For 70 years, that contract for U.S. manufacturing was bulletproof, and it was as much a high-ROI business model as it was a social promise: you show up, work hard, and the country will give you a ticket to the middle class. A wage premium over the private sector average, guaranteed health care, a pension, a clear career ladder to supervision, and basic dignity: your work mattered, and your employer wouldn’t treat you like a disposable line item.

That contract is dead, slowly killed over 40 years in the name of short-term quarterly cost-cutting and shareholder primacy. The numbers make the damage to business performance impossible to ignore.

In 1980, a factory job was the best path to a stable middle-class life for a worker without a college degree, and for good reason. It paid 18% more than the average private sector job, with better benefits and more job security. Today, that premium has essentially vanished for non-union workers. Many modern factory jobs pay the same, or less, than equivalent roles in retail or warehousing, but with forced overtime and grueling physical conditions. The table has turned.

It’s not just wages. We gutted every other part of the business case for worker loyalty, too:

• Pensions have been replaced with paltry 401(k) matches, if they’re even offered at all.

• Career ladders have been eliminated: 70% of U.S. manufacturing supervisors are now hired from outside the company, rather than promoted from the factory floor (NAM, 2026 Manufacturing Labor Market Report).

• Mandatory overtime has become standard rather than an exception.

It’s not hard to see how this completely wrecks profitability. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) JOLTS data, manufacturing routinely experiences annual turnover rates exceeding 30%, with lower-wage facilities bleeding workers even faster. That means in low wage factories, over a third of the workers is being replaced every year.

For entrepreneurs and investors evaluating a manufacturing business, the math doesn’t lie. Executives will tell you they can’t afford to raise wages. But SHRM data shows that the average cost of turnover for a frontline manufacturing worker can go up to 200% of their annual salary. For a $17/hour worker, that’s over $70,000 per departure.

A factory with 500 entry-level workers and 44% annual turnover is spending $11.7 million a year on hiring, training, overtime for remaining workers, and lost productivity from vacant roles. If that factory raised wages from $17 to $27 an hour (a 59% increase), it would add $10.4 million in annual wage costs – but it would cut turnover by 75% (to 11%, matching the top wage quartile), reducing turnover costs by $8.8 million a year.

Net result: the factory saves $1.4 million a year, while gaining a stable, experienced workforce with higher productivity, fewer defects, and better on-time delivery. The idea that raising wages makes you less competitive is backwards logic. The most expensive thing you can do is treat your workers like they’re disposable.

The Automation Delusion

When pressed on the labour crisis, executives and policymakers will almost always pivot to the same silver bullet: automation. “We don’t need workers,” they say. “We’ll just replace them with robots and AI.”

This is the second great lie of the manufacturing renaissance. And it fails for two simple, business-critical reasons.

First, automation does not eliminate jobs. Rather, it improves and transforms positions. A fully automated EV battery plant still needs workers to operate, maintain, troubleshoot, and reprogram the robots. Those workers need more skill, not less, than the entry-level production workers they replace. If you can’t find workers to fill basic production roles today, how will you find workers to fill more skilled, higher-responsibility automation roles tomorrow?

Second, automation makes the labor crisis worse if you don’t fix the underlying business model. If you tell a new hire that their job will be automated in 3–5 years, why would they invest the time, effort, and energy to learn the advanced skills you need? They won’t. They’ll go find a job that has a future, like Jake did at the HVAC company.

The Real Threat: China’s Workforce Strategy, Not Just Subsidies

For years, one would blame China for America’s manufacturing decline. One would say China’s low wages, state subsidies, and lax regulations make it impossible to compete. This is a convenient scapegoat. It lets us avoid looking in the mirror at our own bad business decisions.

The truth is: China’s competitive advantage in manufacturing is no longer low wages. Chinese factory wages have risen 10x in the last 20 years, and are now higher than in most of Southeast Asia. China’s real, under-discussed advantage is that it treats its factory workers as long-term assets, a core business principle that too many U.S. firms have abandoned.

Chinese manufacturers routinely provide on-site housing, subsidized meals, free technical training, and clear career paths for frontline workers. They invest in upskilling their workforce, because they know a worker who stays for 10 years knows the production line better than any engineer. In turn, the average annual turnover at Chinese advanced manufacturing facilities is 15% - less than a half of the rate at low-wage U.S. factories.

This is not an endorsement of China’s labour practices, which include well-documented human rights abuses and strict state control over worker organizing. It is a recognition of a simple business reality: the firms that invest in retaining their workforce build a sustainable competitive moat that tariffs, subsidies, and even cheap labour can’t match.

European Case Studies: Nuance, Not Utopia

We don’t have to look to China to see a better business model. We can just look to Germany.

To be clear: Germany’s manufacturing sector is not a utopia, and European labour policy is not a one-size-fits-all solution for the U.S. Business insolvencies across Germany have spiked by 22% in 2023, driven by soaring post-Ukraine energy costs, global competition, and regulatory headwinds. Many German factories have closed or relocated to Eastern Europe and Asia in recent years, and the country faces its own skilled labour shortages, with 50% of manufacturing firms reporting difficulty filling roles. European workers do have stronger baseline legal rights than U.S. workers, including mandatory notice periods for layoffs, strict overtime limits, and minimum vacation requirements, rules that many U.S. entrepreneurs and investors would see as overly burdensome.

But what sets Germany’s top-performing firms apart is not perfect regulation, it’s a consistent focus on workforce investment as a core competitive strategy. Germany’s manufacturing sector makes up 20% of its GDP (vs. 11% in the U.S.), exports high-value goods all over the world, and competes directly with China in advanced manufacturing. It does this while paying manufacturing workers 15% more than the national average, enforcing a 35-hour standard work week, banning excessive mandatory overtime, and giving workers seats on corporate boards via co-determination laws.

Consider the audited case of Klaus (pseudonym for privacy reasons), owner of a mid-sized precision parts factory in Southern Germany. Like many in his sector, his firm faced crippling turnover and margin compression, and was at risk of losing 2 major automotive contracts. Klaus did the opposite of what most U.S. CEOs would do. He leaned into the traditional German labor model. Working within the framework of German co-determination laws (Mitbestimmung) and IG Metall union standards, his factory maintained a 35-hour workweek, paid above-market wages, and guaranteed robust paid apprenticeships.

As a result, turnover dropped from over 30% to single digits. Experienced workers stayed, which drastically reduced the defect rate on the assembly line. “American executives often think cutting wages makes you more competitive,” Klaus noted. “It’s the opposite. If your workers stay for 10 years, they find ways to make the line faster, better, and cheaper. They catch defects before they leave the factory. They care about the quality of the product, because it’s their factory too. You can’t put a price on that. But if they leave every 6 months, you’re starting over every single time.”

This is the radical honesty Washington and too many U.S. executives refuse to face: America’s manufacturing crisis isn’t caused by China. It’s caused by our own refusal to value the people who make our goods. America can spend trillions of dollars building factories, but a factory is just a building full of machines. The most important asset in manufacturing is the people who run it. And we’re driving them away.

Addressing the Counterarguments

For pro-business, right-leaning readers, it’s critical to address the most common pushback head-on, with nuance:

Counterargument 1: “Raising wages will make our goods too expensive, and we can’t compete with China!”

This ignores basic manufacturing accounting. In advanced manufacturing, direct labor frequently accounts for only 10% to 15% of the total Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). A generous wage hike only increases total costs by a few percentage points. However, drastically reducing turnover saves massive amounts of capital in hiring, training, and scrapped materials. The net result is often higher margins.

This is not a call for a mandatory federal $25 minimum wage or blanket wage hikes across the board. It’s a call for entrepreneurs and executives to run the numbers on their own turnover costs, and recognize that targeted wage investments and better working conditions deliver a higher ROI than almost any other business decision you can make.

Counterargument 2: “Unions and overregulation are the real problem, not low wages!”

There is no question that union overreach can create inflexibility, and that excessive government regulation can raise costs and drive factories overseas. However, you don’t need a union to treat your workforce as a long-term asset - it’s just good business.

In fact, the firms that proactively invest in their workers often avoid unionization entirely, because their employees don’t see the need for third-party representation. For entrepreneurs, this is a critical point: investing in your workforce isn’t a concession to organized labour, it’s a way to build a loyal, productive team and maintain full control over your business.

Counterargument 3: “Germany’s model is too regulated, and it’s failing too. Why would we copy it?”

We’re not suggesting copying Germany’s entire regulatory framework. We’re suggesting copying the core business decision that drives its top-performing firms: treating frontline workers as assets, not costs. Germany has real deindustrialization challenges, but the firms that are thriving amid those headwinds are the ones that invest in their workforce. The firms that cut wages and corners are the ones that are closing their doors. That’s a lesson that translates directly to the U.S. market, regardless of regulatory differences.

Counterargument 4: “Young people just don’t want to work in factories anymore!”

The narrative that young people simply refuse to work with their hands is a statistical myth. What young people actually reject are dead-end, low-wage, high-burnout jobs. When the compensation and career paths are clear, they are eagerly entering the industrial workforce.

According to U.S. Department of Labor data, enrollment in registered apprenticeships has more than doubled over the last decade. Furthermore, recent industry surveys indicate that roughly 60% of Gen Z workers now intend to pursue skilled trades. They are heavily drawn to these fields because they offer high starting salaries, zero student debt, and strong protection against AI job replacement. Young people aren’t lazy. They’re rational. They won’t invest their lives in a job that sees them as disposable

Closing: The Choice We Face

We are in the middle of a global industrial competition. The winner of this competition will dominate the 21st century’s green energy transition, its advanced technology supply chains, and its geopolitical order. The U.S. has bet trillions of dollars on winning this competition, by building factories and subsidizing domestic manufacturing via the IRA and CHIPS Act.

But we’re betting on the wrong thing. A factory without a stable, skilled, loyal workforce is just a very expensive paperweight. We can build all the EV battery plants and chip fabs we want. But if one keeps treating the workers who run them like disposable cogs, they will never reach full production. They will never be competitive. The West will have wasted trillions of dollars, and will lose the industrial competition to China. Not because China is better at building factories, but because they’re better at building a workforce.

Jake isn’t lazy. He isn’t unskilled. He didn’t quit his factory job because he didn’t want to work. He quit because the job didn’t respect him, and didn’t offer a future. The millions of workers who are refusing to take these manufacturing jobs aren’t the problem. The problem is the politicians who keep lying about “bringing jobs back” without fixing the jobs themselves. The problem is the executives who keep squeezing workers for quarterly profits, while wondering why no one wants to work for them.

The great manufacturing labour lie isn’t that America can’t find enough skilled workers. It’s that we don’t want to pay for them, respect them, or give them a reason to show up. For entrepreneurs and investors, this is the single biggest opportunity in American manufacturing right now. The firms that rewrite the old, broken business model, and treat their frontline workers as long-term assets, will build the sustainable, profitable, competitive factories that win the next industrial era. The rest will keep spinning their wheels, stuck in a revolving door of turnover, low productivity, and declining margins.

The choice is ours.

by Leon Ge

03 April 2026

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This is exactly the reason why I do not want to sugar-coat the reality for Europe.

If Europe wants a true reindustrialisation, the first thing to do is not another slogan, another conference, another speech on competitiveness. The first thing is to look at where things really stand.

And where things stand is this: significant parts of its industrial system are much weaker than many Europeans still want to admit.

Not that Europe has no excellence left. But excellence is no longer enough when the industrial base is soft, the middle is hollowing out, and too much of the cost structure has turned against you:

• EU industrial production increased by an annual average of just 0.6% between 2000 and 2024.

• Yes, 2025 showed a modest average rebound of 1.5%. But by January 2026, industrial production was falling again - down 1.2% year-on-year in the euro area and down 0.6% in the EU.

That is not the profile of a continent in confident industrial ascent. It is more like the profile of a continent fighting against drift.

Across industries: A Crisis of Competitiveness

Start with energy, as it is the master variable - sitting upstream of everything else in the physical economy: steel, chemicals, glass, ceramics, refining, fertilisers, paper, aluminium, machine shops, foundries, logistics.

When energy turns volatile, the whole industrial organism starts moving either more slowly, more defensively, or more expensively. The IEA says EU electricity prices for energy-intensive industries in 2025 remained more than twice US levels and nearly 50% above China’s.

In chemicals specifically, Europe’s gas disadvantage versus the US has been brutal. The latest Middle East shock hit this further: Reuters reported that the euro zone economy is close to stalling, with oil up sharply this year, delivery delays worsening, and inflation expectations rising fast.

One of the reasons European decline is so easy to misread is that - like many other cases in history - it often arrives not as one dramatic collapse, but as thousands of executive decisions. Delay this CAPEX. Idle that line. Import this feedstock instead of making it locally. Shift the next plant there, not here. Run the European site for premium or niche output only. This trend doesn’t look temporary.

Illustration for this trend found in the chemical industry. Europe’s chemical industry still has €635 billion in turnover, about 1.2 million jobs, deep know-how, and a central position in modern manufacturing. But the centre of gravity has shifted. Cefic says Europe’s share of the global chemical market has fallen to 13%, while China has risen to 46%. BASF, Europe’s flagship chemical company, is at the same time expanding heavily in China while warning investors about weak demand and higher costs at home.

Steel tells a similarly hard truth.

EUROFER reports European steel production hit a historic low in 2025, while imports gained a record share of the EU market. Even if demand rebounds modestly, European steel consumption in 2026 is still expected to remain around 11 million tonnes below pre-pandemic levels. Britain’s response this month: cut tariff-free steel quotas by 60%, raise out-of-quota tariffs to 50%, and explicitly try to rebuild domestic share from 30% to 50%. We can understand the instinct. But tariffs can buy time; they do not, by themselves, create competitiveness.

Automotives follow the same trend.

Though Europe still has brand power, engineering prestige, supplier depth, and some of the best industrial storytelling in the world, nothing has been guaranteed. ACEA says EU new car registrations rose 1.8% in 2025, yet volumes remain well below pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, it is reported that Chinese automakers doubled their share of the European market to 6% in 2025.

The battery layer is even more sobering: according to Reuters, the cost gap between EU-made and Chinese batteries is still around 90%, even if scale and better execution could narrow that gap sharply over time. I wrote previously about Germany vs China in the EV race and how it reveals the industrial infrastructures beneath.

Too much European debate still treats China as a geopolitical problem, a subsidy problem, a dumping problem, or a values problem. Sometimes it is all of those things. But that is not the whole story, and serious industrial people know it. China is also a capability problem for Europe, because it has become the toughest real-time industrial proving ground in the world across more and more sectors: EVs, batteries, solar, robotics, manufacturing speed, digital supply chains, and increasingly the fusion of software and hardware.

That is why recent remarks from Mercedes leadership in Beijing matter. At the China Development Forum, Ola Källenius described China as a “dynamic innovation landscape” and stressed Mercedes’ long-term commitment. In Chinese media coverage of the same forum, he was quoted even more bluntly: if you want to play football, you play in the Champions League, and China is the Champions League of the automotive industry. Whether one prefers the diplomatic version or the sharper one, the underlying point is the same: the hardest game is being played there. Serious firms know it.

Resilience vs. Fragmented Policies to treat symptoms

Now, to be fair, Europe is not simply declining across the whole board.

Europe still has aerospace, premium machinery, pharmaceuticals, precision engineering, serious materials science, defence-industrial momentum, and a regulatory machine strong enough to shape markets far beyond its borders. Renewable electricity reached 46.9% of EU net generation in 2024. Battery storage deployment in the EU rose to 27.1 GWh in 2025. Germany’s March flash manufacturing PMI even climbed to 51.7, its highest in 45 months, even as the broader private-sector picture softened.

France is a good illustration of both the resilience and the problem.

Because France, thanks largely to nuclear power, has been more shielded than some gas-heavy peers. Reuters reported that French electricity prices are down 29% this year, while gas-dependent systems such as Italy have been hit much harder. But cheaper power alone has not magically restored industrial momentum. France’s private sector contracted in March at its fastest pace since October, with the flash composite PMI at 48.3 and input-cost pressure rising sharply. So yes, energy architecture matters enormously.

This is the resilience part of the story. But energy relief by itself does not single-handedly rebuild a system that has potentially lost speed, density, and confidence.

Among the problems, the low-end goods parcel flood could be a great illustration.

In 2025, 5.8 billion low-value e-commerce parcels entered the EU, up 26% year-on-year, according to the European Commission figures. To shield local French retailers from this competition, the French government imposed a new fee starting March 1, 2026: a €2 flat charge for every individual item under €150 in packages entering France directly from outside the EU.

The policy had a critical flaw: it only applied to packages arriving directly in France. The EU’s core "free movement of goods" rule allows products legally shipped into any EU country to move freely to all other EU member states with no extra fees. Chinese platforms immediately exploited this loophole: they rerouted all their China-origin cargo flights from France to neighboring EU countries (Belgium and the Netherlands). Packages landed there first, then were trucked into France, completely avoiding the €2 fee.

The result was the exact opposite of France’s intent:

• No drop in Chinese e-commerce packages to French shoppers - only a change in their delivery route

• Severe harm to France’s domestic aviation and logistics sectors: Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport saw a 60% plunge in China cargo flights (losing ~50 weekly flights), a 92% drop in e-commerce customs filings, freight industry layoffs, and closure risks for small regional airports

• Neighboring EU countries gained all the rerouted cargo and logistics business, becoming accidental winners. This outcome was entirely foreseeable: Italy had implemented an identical policy earlier in 2026, with the same rerouting result.

After all, a customs fee on small parcels is not an industrial strategy. It may reduce distortion, but it does not rebuild tooling, supplier depth, or mid-market manufacturing confidence.

If you gaze long enough into the abyss

This is why I think the honest conclusion is neither declinist nor comforting.

Europe’s problem is not that it has no excellence left.

Europe’s problem is that excellence is becoming too isolated.

Too much of the industrial middle has become fragile. Too much of the energy-intensive base has become uncompetitive. Too many policymakers still confuse prestige with capability.

If Europe wants a true reindustrialisation, it needs more than speeches about sovereignty and more than defensive tariffs at the border. It needs cheaper and more stable industrial energy. Faster permitting. Faster capital formation. Serious local demand support in strategic sectors.

That is the abyss Europe needs to look into.

Not because Europe should give up.

Precisely because it should not.

By Leon Ge

March 24 2026

This essay is the first in a series on Europe’s industrial condition and the harder question of reindustrialisation. I am approaching it as a Chinese operator with deep exposure to the West (10 years in France, 10 years in Singapore) and a strong interest in where industrial capability is truly compounding, where it is fragmenting, and why. The goal is to look squarely at reality and from that, make decisions.
In the next pieces, I’ll go further into where policy, capital, and execution in Europe need to change if reindustrialisation is to mean anything more than a slogan.

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That is the frame I would offer.

After two decades living and working between China, Singapore, France and wider Europe, and after spending the last few years visiting Chinese industrial hubs, industrial parks, suppliers, founders, manufacturers, and local officials across the country, I have come to think that the car story is widely described but still badly understood.

Too many people still tell it as a simple EV story.

It is not.

It is an operating system story.

And Germany, for all its prestige, is now being forced to compete against a newer and harsher one.

Germany’s old formula was real

For a very long time, Germany’s automotive strength rested on a formula that was powerful enough to feel almost natural: engineering prestige, supplier depth, export discipline, industrial consensus, relatively cheap energy, and a highly profitable relationship with China. Reuters put it more bluntly in 2024: Germany’s long-time formula relied on cheap energy from Russia, lucrative trade ties with China, and consensual industrial relations. That formula is now under strain on all three fronts. (Reuters)

This is why the current pressure on German carmakers should not be read as a normal cyclical wobble.

It is not one bad quarter.

It is not merely that EV adoption is difficult.

It is that the environment that once made German automotive excellence scalable has become less forgiving, while the environment that now favours speed, software, battery economics, and brutal iteration increasingly points elsewhere. (Reuters)

The scoreboard is ugly enough already

The recent numbers are not subtle.

Mercedes-Benz Cars sold 1.80 million vehicles in 2025, down 9% year on year, with China down 19% to 551,900 units. BMW Group’s sales in China fell 12.5% to 625,527 vehicles. Audi delivered 617,514 vehicles in China, down 5%. Porsche’s China deliveries fell 26% to 41,938 cars, while group operating profit collapsed from €5.64 billion to €413 million and its operating return on sales fell to 1.1%. Volkswagen Group’s total deliveries were broadly stable at 8.98 million vehicles in 2025, but China deliveries fell 8%, and its battery-electric deliveries in China fell 44.3% to 115,500 units. (Mercedes-Benz Group)

None of this means German carmaking is dead. That would be lazy.

Volkswagen has just reclaimed the top-selling position in China in the first two months of 2026 with a 13.9% market share, narrowly ahead of Geely at 13.8%, while BYD fell to 7.1% after subsidy changes and fading tax incentives hit the market. Audi has regained the leading premium position in China. BMW remains globally large and profitable. Mercedes still dominates the over-1-million-RMB segment in China. Porsche’s 911 continues to be an icon. (Reuters)

But that is precisely the point.

This is not an obituary.

It is a stress test.

The deeper problem is not “EVs”. It is tempo.

If you reduce the story to “German carmakers were slow on EVs”, you miss the real shift.

The real shift is tempo.

Chinese automakers and suppliers do not merely produce electric cars. They compress time. They compress model cycles, software updates, supplier response times, localisation speed, charging infrastructure deployment, and the willingness to ship before every last uncertainty has been philosophically resolved.

Volkswagen’s own response tells the story. It’s the first mass-produced EV developed with Xpeng, the ID. UNYX 08 reached production in 24 months. Reuters reports Volkswagen says its new China-based architecture allows vehicles to be developed 30% faster. The group plans more than 20 new models in China in 2026 and 50 new-energy vehicles there by 2030. That is not the behaviour of a company making cosmetic adjustments. That is the behaviour of a company being forced to adopt a new clock. (Reuters)

That is why I do not think the best frame is “China has overtaken Germany”.

The better frame is this:

• Germany still carries much of the brand equity of the old automotive order.

• China increasingly carries more of the operating logic of the new one.

And the wider German system is under pressure too

Cars do not exist outside industrial conditions.

German industry is not being tested only by BYD, Geely or Xiaomi. It is being tested by energy, labour costs, slower growth, tariff pressure, and a broader erosion of the old business environment. Reuters reported last week that euro zone industrial output is now 3% below its 2021 level, and Germany has been one of the hardest-hit countries, with output 9% below 2021 levels. The same report points to high energy costs, competition from China, U.S. tariffs, poor productivity growth, and weak global demand for European cars as the reasons. (Reuters)

The energy side matters more than many people want to admit. Reuters noted in February that Germany had for decades relied on relatively cheap Russian gas, which had been a key industrial advantage. The IEA also reported that German wholesale electricity prices rose 37% in the first half of 2025, with average prices just below USD 100/MWh. In other words, Germany is trying to run a manufacturing-heavy model after losing one of the inputs that helped make that model work. (Reuters)

The labour side is becoming visible too. Reuters reported in August that German industry had shed around 245,500 jobs since 2019, and that the sharpest annual decline was in car manufacturing, where around 51,500 jobs were lost in a year. Volkswagen alone is planning major cuts through 2030. (Reuters)

China’s automotive machine is bigger than most people still realise

China is not only making more EVs. It is becoming the centre of gravity for the industrial learning curve itself.

According to the IEA, China produced 12.4 million electric cars in 2024, more than 70% of global EV production. China also sold over 11 million electric cars in 2024, with electric vehicles accounting for almost half of all car sales in the country. That is not just scale. That is training data for an industrial system. (IEA)

And the speed frontier keeps moving. Reuters reported last week that BYD’s Denza Z9GT will launch in Europe with charging from 10% to 70% in five minutes, with up to 800 km of range, while BYD’s own sales grew from 420,000 cars in 2020 to 4.6 million in 2025. Even if specific models or subsidy conditions fluctuate, the direction of travel is unmistakable. (Reuters)

But here is the nuance most lazy articles miss

China’s automotive rise is not clean.

It is not smooth.

And it is not built on pure profitability or Western-style market hygiene.

Reuters reported in September that foreign brands’ share of China’s car market fell from 62% in 2020 to 31% in the first seven months of 2025. But the same Reuters investigation also found an oversupplied market, deep discounting, local-government inducements, pressure to keep factories running, and a system in which capacity has outrun rational demand. AlixPartners estimates only 15 of China’s 129 EV and hybrid brands may be financially viable by 2030. (Reuters)

This matters because it sharpens the argument.

China is not winning because everything is tidy.

China is winning, in many layers of the value chain, because the system is willing to be harsher, more compressed, more subsidised, more localised, and more brutally competitive than most incumbents in Europe or Japan would comfortably tolerate.

That has obvious risks.

It also creates speed.

This is why “premium” no longer means what it used to mean

For years, German premium brands benefited from a simple asymmetry.

China made many things.

Germany made the aspirational car.

That asymmetry is weaker now.

The new Chinese rivals are not just cheaper. They are increasingly software-rich, fast-moving, and in some segments more aligned with what younger buyers want: digital interfaces, rapid refresh cycles, ambitious charging, strong in-cabin experience, and a less nostalgic view of what a car should be. Reuters put it plainly last week: Volkswagen has lost ground in China to local rivals that have been quicker to roll out software-rich, lower-cost electric cars. (Reuters)

And the competitive pressure is no longer contained within China. Reuters reported in February that Chinese automakers doubled their share of European car sales to 6% in 2025, even though penetration differs sharply by country. That number is still small enough to dismiss if you want comfort. It is already large enough to demand attention if you care about direction. (Reuters)

So what is actually being revived?

Not Germany’s exact institutions.

Not its exact labour model.

Not its exact premium aesthetic.

What China is reviving is something deeper.

A belief that industrial power matters.

A willingness to align supply chains, policy, infrastructure, technology, and manufacturing around strategic sectors.

A seriousness about export scale.

An acceptance that speed is itself a weapon.

And a refusal to assume that old incumbency deserves permanent reward.

In that sense, China is not simply defeating Germany.

It is reviving, under different political and economic conditions, some of the old industrial virtues that Europe once embodied more confidently than it does today.

That is what makes this moment uncomfortable.

And interesting.

Germany is not finished. But the burden of proof has flipped.

I am not arguing that Germany is over.

That is lazy and ahistorical.

German carmakers still have world-class brands, engineering depth, supplier relationships, global footprints, and serious talent. Volkswagen is adapting. BMW remains formidable. Mercedes still owns parts of the premium narrative. Audi is retooling. Porsche will not disappear because one bad year made the market emotional. (Reuters)

But the burden of proof has changed.

It is no longer enough for Germany to say: we are premium, we are precise, we are engineering-led.

The world is now asking harder questions:

• Can you move fast enough?

• Can you localise fast enough?

• Can you ship software that feels current?

• Can you manage energy economics that are no longer friendly?

• Can you build EVs that do not merely comply, but excite?

• Can you compete when the home market of your rival is also the largest industrial training ground on earth?

Those are not rhetorical questions anymore.

They are operating questions.

What serious operators should watch next?

The first thing to watch is not headline sales.

It is development time.

If China-based design, software, sourcing and vehicle development loops keep compressing while Europe keeps debating, that matters more than one quarter of deliveries.

The second is energy and industrial cost asymmetry.

If Germany remains structurally more expensive to manufacture in, the premium cushion will only stretch so far.

The third is whether Western carmakers become more Chinese in China, and more selective everywhere else. Volkswagen’s Xpeng partnership and “in China, for China” push suggest that the answer is already yes. (Reuters)

The fourth is whether Europe can rebuild industrial confidence without simply copying China.

That is the bigger civilisational question underneath the car story.

Not whether Europe can ban, tariff, or complain its way back into safety.

But whether it can relearn speed, seriousness, and industrial coordination without losing its own strengths in the process.

That is the real contest.

And cars are simply where it is easiest to see.

Why this matters beyond cars

If you work in sourcing, industrial strategy, advanced materials, supplier discovery, manufacturing partnerships, or China-Europe industrial flows, this is not a niche automotive story.

It is a leading indicator.

It tells you where the new industrial clock is being set.

And if you are still reading it as a conventional “German decline versus Chinese rise” story, you are missing the more interesting part.

The more interesting part is that one side is defending an inheritance.

The other is rebuilding a machine.

And machines, when they are well-tuned, are very hard to beat.

- Leon Ge, on behalf of the Tocco team

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