Dear reader,
Volkswagen’s board of directors and employee representatives are currently far apart. This applies to the right way to position the group for the future. But this also applies to things as banal as the number of employees who protested against the planned austerity measures with warning strikes at the beginning of this week. According to IG Metall there were 102,600. Volkswagen, on the other hand, only reported 55,000. One thing is certain: people are very worried. It’s about their jobs.
Will an agreement be reached at Volkswagen before Christmas? Wait. In any case, some of those involved are already on edge, as one of our topics of the week shows:
Why the Porsches and Piëchs at VW are losing patience.
Why there is a threat of power struggle at Lufthansa.
Radical restructuring at Mercedes – more than 20,000 jobs at risk.
Topic of the week: Why the Porsches and Piëchs at VW are losing patience
Wolfgang Porsche (81) and the employees at Volkswagen – that is not an easy relationship. In 2016, when the car manufacturer was deep in the diesel swamp, the head of the major shareholder family complained that the works council and unions “would prefer not to change anything, to keep all the jobs and plants as if nothing had happened.” Now, in the current crisis, blood pressure is rising again. My colleague Michael Freitag reports that the Porsche and Piëch families see their hope of severe cuts and plant closures at Volkswagen dwindle: “Wolferl’s anger”
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Heads: Carsten Spohr ++ Olaf Scholz ++ Mathias Geisen ++ Britta Seeger ++ Olaf Schick ++ Oliver Thöne
General Motors has invested around $10 billion in Cruise and the dream of a robotaxi since 2016. Now it has cruised out. “A robotaxi business is not the core business of General Motors,” said CEO Mary Barra (62) in a conference call. After devastating problems with Cruise vehicles last year, Barra capitulated to its main competitor Waymo. Their new goal: the development of driver assistance systems for private vehicles.
Deep Drive: “Epileptic” cars
Anyone who continues to work on autonomous driving should probably not rely on cameras alone. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in the Israeli Negev warn that blue lights can cause them to lose their orientation paper
. The seven authors examined how five camera-based environment detection systems react to 14 different light patterns from the police, fire brigade and the like. The result: All systems reacted with at least a little irritation. Stroboscopic light is considered a risk for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Similarly, the Israelis named the phenomenon they discovered “EpileptiCar”. According to the researchers, improved AI image recognition software could be the right medicine. Working title: “Caracetamol”.
China’s quest for world power in the automotive scene is not just limited to vehicles and their batteries. Take Linglong, for example: The company wants to be one of the five largest tire manufacturers in the world within five years. This requires major international customers. Ford, Fiat and Citroën already buy Linglong tires, and now the Chinese have also convinced a German manufacturer. The new VW Tiguan rolls off the assembly line on Chinese tires. Okay, it’s just about the rather rare 19-inch format. But for the supplier it is a huge prestige success. However, Linglong threatens to become a problem for Volkswagen and Co. Henning Hinze and Sophia Stahl report: There were apparently human rights violations during the construction of the Chinese’s first tire factory in Europe
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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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