Dear reader,
After the traffic lights go out, a new Bundestag will most likely be elected in Germany on February 23, 2025. Some are already declaring CDU top candidate Friedrich Merz (69) to be the next chancellor. We’d rather wait and see.
Despite the government crisis, the Economic Committee of the Bundestag met on Wednesday on the topic “Our automotive industry needs a future – making Germany competitive as an industrial location”. Ferdinand Dudenhöffer (73), who came as an expert, described Germany in front of the plenary session “rotten” location
. VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer (54) expressed himself more favorably was also loaded
. Among other things, he called for tax advantages for electric cars, a faster expansion of the charging infrastructure and a lower industrial electricity price.
The automotive industry in Germany is not the only one facing major challenges. Our topics of the week:
The most canceled flights of all airlines in Europe, delays and luggage chaos – Lufthansa has been presenting a worrying picture for some time. Is the crane already a VW decal? A company in which the weak parent company drags the entire structure down? Captain Carsten Spohr (57) counters this with a radical cure. My colleague Michael Machatschke has researched: 20 percent of administrative jobs could be eliminated – and medium revolutions are imminent in crew planning and brand structure
.
As the future US President, Donald Trump (78) is likely to abolish government subsidies for electric cars. It seems strange at first that Tesla boss Elon Musk (53) was Trump’s number one election worker and will be for the president in the future as a cost and bureaucracy killer should work. It’s worth taking a second look, as my colleague Anna Driftschröer shows: Due to its market power in the USA (48.9 percent e-market share!) Tesla could even benefit
, if electric cars are less subsidized. And another reading tip: My colleague Martin Noé talked to ex-Siemens boss Joe Kaeser (67) about Trump, Musk and Co. He spent the last few weeks in the USA and got the impression: “Elon Musk will probably become the first oligarch in the country.”
Deep Drive: Drive mindfully
The series “Achtsam Morden” based on the bestsellers by author Karsten Dusse (51) has been running on Netflix for two weeks. “Careful driving” is now the subject of a long-term study by the insurer DA Direct
. If you find yourself shaving or applying makeup while driving, you’re not alone. More than half of drivers in this country are regularly distracted. Residents of the 15 largest German cities are disproportionately represented (60 percent). Not surprisingly, they were also more likely to be involved in accidents than the rest in the last three years (18 to 12 percent).
We got in with politics, we get out with politics. It is currently unclear what government funding will be available for in this country in the future. Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (57) wants to delete a billion-dollar mobility item: this Germany ticket. In the future, the federal government should either pay for this alone or it could be left alone. A “holiday ticket” once a year for a month would be enough, says Söder, “for example to go to Bavaria”. This is what Söder’s “humility” sounds like, which the CSU politician had demanded of Robert Habeck (55) a few days earlier after the Green economics minister announced his candidacy for chancellor. Welcome to the election campaign.
Have a good week.
Yours, Christoph Seyerlein
Do you have any wishes, suggestions or information that we should take care of journalistically? You can reach my colleagues in the Mobility team and me at manage.mobility@manager-magazin.de
.
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