Dear reader,
Unsurprisingly, the current reporting season leaves Germany’s automobile manufacturers looking quite dispirited. Porsche? Operating profit around 99 percent collapsed. Mercedes? Minus 70 percent in profits from ongoing business. This Thursday, some nervous glances will be directed towards Wolfsburg: Volkswagen presents its figures; Porsche, the long-time guarantor of returns, is no longer available. Is there a risk of the first group loss since the corona-infected second quarter of 2020?
The year-end spurt gives the industry little hope of improvement. Everyone is freaking out about Nexperia. The chip supplier is known to be one Dispute between the Netherlands and China flared up. The auto industry lacks semiconductors. Our topics of the week are about how hard things could get:
Why things are crashing again at ZF Friedrichshafen.
Why Aumovio sends warning letters to employees.
Which is why Mercedes is reopening the Smart billion dollar grave.
How Norbert Reithofer became the father of today’s BMW success.
Topic of the week: Why things are crashing again at ZF Friedrichshafen
The board of directors and the works council at the ailing auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen had been at war for months. The dispute over the restructuring of the company culminated in the chaotic expulsion of CEO Holger Klein (55) during the IAA in Munich at the beginning of September. Since then, people have been striving for harmony on Lake Constance. Human resources manager Lea Corzilius (36), for example, applauded the savings plan for the transmission division (“Division E”) that was decided at the end of September. However, the peace between management and employees does not yet seem to be particularly stable. There’s a crash behind the scenes again. In the center this time: Corzilius of all people
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With Herbert Diess we already had a car extractor in our range today. Another, Carlos Tavares (67), has used the newfound time since leaving Stellantis at the end of 2024 to write a book. His work is called “Un pilote dans la tempête” – “A Pilot in the Storm”. On 110 pages, the Portuguese works on Europe, Tesla and VW, among other things. Tavares apparently wants to push his work to become a bestseller with his usual pithy interviews. He regrets his reputation as an overly tough cost-killer in the French weekly newspaper “Le Point
“For example, not: “These are the idiotic prejudices of European society, which denies that cost cutting is essential for a company’s survival.”
Deepdrive: Who can you rely on when charging?
Once a year, people flock to the trade magazine “Connect
” Test drivers out to take a closer look at the offerings of various charging point operators, so-called CPOs. There is nothing new in Germany: For the third time in a row, Aral Pulse impressed the test power guzzlers the most – for example because the Aral columns are usually found at the usual company gas stations and not somewhere in the prairie. The most room for improvement in this country, especially when it comes to the “quality of stay”, is at Pfalzwerke charging points.
Ghost driver of the week
How do you convince people nostalgic for combustion engines to switch to an electric car? Kia, together with importer Astara, is using a very special accessory in Finland. The electric Kia EV4 is available there with one Fragrant tree
in the look of a petrol can. It doesn’t stop with the petrol look alone: a scent of gasoline and motor oil should help to alleviate “urgent withdrawal symptoms” after saying goodbye to the combustion engine.
I wish you a wonderful holiday program if you enjoy it.
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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