No Good Diess Goes Unpunished

[Crissa]

But a source close to Diess told AFP: “There is no question of a reduction of 30,000 jobs.”

Literally correct, it was anonymously reported

No, not at all correct. It's the opposite of what he said.

He said those jobs would be lost if they didn't convert to electric fast enough, and lost market share.

-Crissa

 

[Ogre]

I think to remain competitive with Tesla, VW is going to have to massively increase productivity/ worker.

That implies there will be a reduction in employees at some point.

Every time you have huge efficiency gains, employee count goes down (or output expands massively, I’m not sure VW can pull that off from where they are though).

This is almost certainly what the Workers Coalition is worried about.

 

[Crissa]

The lesson here is: Stop listening to unsourced quotes, If someone won't stand behind their words, they probably aren't worth listening to.

-Crissa

 

[rr6013]

I think to remain competitive with Tesla, VW is going to have to massively increase productivity/ worker.

That implies there will be a reduction in employees at some point.

Every time you have huge efficiency gains, employee count goes down (or output expands massively, I’m not sure VW can pull that off from where they are though).

This is almost certainly what the Workers Coalition is worried about.

VW Wolfsburg plant mfgr ~750000/yr units on avg. with 60,000 employees.
GigaGRUENHEIDE mfgr ~500000/yr units with 12,000 employees.

Its a huge disruption Elon has planted in VW’s backyard that’s challenging 100yr automotive German labor tradition. Per WSJ interview, Elon sees statutory laws as immortal ossifying to society without any garbage collection routinely sweeping obsolete laws off the books.

 

[firsttruck]

Diess didn't call for any workers to lose jobs. Or any job reductions.

He's rather specific about that.

-Crissa

Maybe they didn't believe him.

I don't. EVs just need so many fewer components than ICE.
If VW had started 10-15 years ago they could have had a lot of the downsizing of work force happen from normal attrition (retirements, quits, etc).
VW Group (VW, Porsche, Audi, etc) may not have the new EV factories built soon enough and the batteries soon enough to prevent competitors (Tesla, Chinese) from taking significant chuck of VW Group's market share. Huge market share lose has already happened to BMW, Audi, Mercedes.

 

[firsttruck]

VW Wolfsburg plant mfgr ~750000/yr units on avg. with 60,000 employees.
GigaGRUENHEIDE mfgr ~500000/yr units with 12,000 employees.

Probably going to be much worse than that. The Tesla GigaGRUENHEIDE will probably grow to 1-1.5million units/yr.

Its a huge disruption Elon has planted in VW’s backyard that’s challenging 100yr automotive German labor tradition. Per WSJ interview, Elon sees statutory laws as immortal ossifying to society without any garbage collection routinely sweeping obsolete laws off the books.

Huge number of German workers were going lose their jobs anyway.

There was going to be a Tesla plant in Europe.
With the Tesla plant in Germany, a lot of the jobs will go to Germans.
If Tesla plant had located outside Germany a lot fewer of those jobs would be gotten by Germans.

It is buggy whip maker, horse drawn carriage maker, harness maker, blacksmith job extinction time.

 

[firsttruck]

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