The world market leaders for automobile manufacturing emerged from the watch industry in the Black Forest. Punching, bending, shaping. These are the basic skills that are still needed today for the production of body parts or electric seat adjusters. However, nothing remained of the phono industry with formerly popular brands such as Dual or Saba. Transformation or deindustrialization, structural change or disruption – that is a question that Baden-Württemberg is not facing for the first time. Many people are wondering whether the gloomy vision of German Detroit is now becoming a reality and whether Bosch or Daimler will soon suffer the same fate as Dual or Saba once did. The road to the Black Forest community of Schonach leads via Triberg, where Black Forest watches are sold to tourists, but many retail stores are deserted. The main factory of the Burger Group is located down in the valley. The automotive industry does not just consist of Daimler, Porsche, Mahle or Audi, which have now announced mass layoffs. As former EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger recently said, the so-called automobile cluster also includes the “small and fine” suppliers in the Black Forest valleys. The company, founded 170 years ago and initially producing gears for watches, will soon be run by the sixth generation of the Burger family. Despite the crisis, the company is looking for employees with posters at the entrance to the town and on the factory building. 600 people work for the company domestically, around the same number in the plants in the Czech Republic, Canada and Switzerland – and there is a lack of young talent. However, the shortage of skilled workers caused by demographic developments only partially covers up the structural crisis in the automotive industry. Neighboring companies have already switched to short-time work or are insolvent. Now he is looking for new skilled workers: Thomas Burger, Managing Director of the Burger Group, is sitting in the company’s headquarters. Philipp von Ditfurth welcomes Thomas Burger in a small meeting room. The display cases contain grinders for professional espresso machines and gear elements for an e-bike automatic gearshift that were developed by former Porsche engineers. Also on display are so-called actuators, components for models from BMW, Mercedes and Ferrari. The small black boxes are used to electrically control the exhaust systems of combustion engines. The automotive supply division still accounts for 60 percent of sales at Burger – despite some efforts to diversify. The 64-year-old entrepreneur is not one who takes great pleasure in making the economic situation even worse than it already is with pithy sayings. “Transformation is the big issue for us. Whether it is the end of Baden-Württemberg as a car country will be seen in the next few years. In any case, it is a deep turning point, caused by the war, the tariffs and the transformation itself.”Burger believes that the industry has moved too quickly down the road of e-mobility. The EU was short-sighted when it came to the Green Deal: From its point of view, it would have been better to plan purely electric drives only for small cars and to plan larger cars, SUVs for example, with synthetic fuels. Politicians allowed themselves to be driven carelessly into this situation after the diesel scandal and out of fear of German environmental aid. He is glad that he entered into e-mobility with caution. A few years ago, Burger says, credit advisors were at his company. In a conversation with bankers, he expressed his concerns about the supposedly rapid market ramp-up of e-mobility, but no one wanted to hear it. Instead, the creditworthiness of everyone who had not fully embraced e-mobility was immediately questioned. “Unfortunately I don’t have a recording. I would like to show it to some bankers and consultants today,” says Burger. Today he is happy to have made a careful entry into e-mobility. Luckily for him, he can finance his investments with his own capital. Because only a few secondary school graduates opted for commercial training, Burger is constantly short of staff. A few months ago he hired eight trainees from Indonesia. “They are highly motivated and come through the factory gate with a smile in the morning.” The company is bank-independent and financially sound because future investments have been financed from equity capital. This means that Burger can produce highly automated and economically in Germany today and in the future. The factory halls are winding. Past design offices and old tape recorders with mechanical drives that were once manufactured in Schonach, Burger leads us into a new production hall. There, white robot arms lift small plastic parts and assemble the actuators. “The pressure on the market in Europe is growing, sales on the American market are weakening. The Chinese are offering assemblies in Europe at prices for which I can’t even buy the material,” says Burger. The workers produce 100,000 actuators per month. Previously seven days a week, currently only five due to the poor order situation. On the robot workstations, which are shielded by glass boxes, the control boxes are equipped with circuit boards and assembled – sometimes without any human intervention. Christoph Schmider is a mechatronics engineer and group leader. He coordinates the work and ensures trouble-free production. Schmider believes that politicians’ back and forth on e-mobility is harmful: “E-mobility will come, although perhaps not at the same speed.” Should the change accelerate, we are prepared: the company boss gets an EMC filter from a design office. “It filters out the electromagnetic charge in the electric drive,” he says. But the crisis is worrying workers. “Many employees in the Black Forest are concerned about their financial future and fear short-time work,” says works council chairwoman Angelika Kaltenbach. The uncertainty is also great because at the moment no one can know how long the crisis will last or what cuts workers will face in the next months and years. “But we are still a long way from Stuttgart.” In the region between Heilbronn and Tübingen things are different, namely dramatic: Mahle, a traditional automotive supplier in Stuttgart, wants to cut a thousand jobs. Porsche could even leave the collective agreement and lay off workers en masse. A small subsidiary for the construction of high-end electric bicycles, which only has a few employees, is immediately put out of business. At Bosch, 22,000 jobs will be lost, the power tools plant in Leinfelden will close in 2026. The traditional household appliances plant in Bretten will also be closed. And companies that offer systems for autonomous driving are also leaving, simply because the location is too expensive. The Bosch factory in Waiblingen, where fasteners for combustion vehicles are manufactured, is also closing. The HR departments at Mercedes-Benz sent severance offers to 40,000 employees in recent months. A decline in profits of 31 percent puts the company under pressure to take action. Bosch is hit particularly hard because the foundation company was considered extremely stable and social for decades. Management even canceled the additional monthly salary for employees who have been with the company for 25 years for 2026. Company employees say that there is little left of the old “Red Bosch” culture. In the search for the culprits for the misery, politicians and managers are alternately blamed: On the one hand, it is said that the government parties are responsible for the problems in the automobile industry; On the other hand, the management is also heavily criticized: At a demonstration in front of the factory in Schwieberdingen, the Bosch managers were denounced as soulless bloodsuckers. There is also a lot of criticism from the Bosch and Daimler factories about the sluggishness of internal planning and management processes: In some areas, they took five years to observe the entry of new Chinese competitors into the market, only to realize in the end that they could not offer a product that was competitively priced. Chinese companies are putting German car manufacturers and especially their suppliers under massive pressure. The “Spätzle connection” between the major car manufacturers and their suppliers no longer exists. A battery part from Chinese production costs 220 euros, from Germany 500 euros.Serious political consequences could be imminentThe political consequences of the crisis could be serious in the state elections at the beginning of next year: There are companies in Baden-Württemberg whose bosses assume, with a shrug of the shoulders, that 80 percent of their workers will vote for the AfD. According to a study by the trade union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation, 36 percent of those who considered themselves to be from the working class voted for the AfD in the last federal election. The CDU, FDP and Greens, but also the SPD, have hardly any access to the local working class milieu. Workers are also the voters with the greatest fears for the future. “Transformation” has become a fearful term that even IG Metall no longer likes to use. The AfD achieves above-average results in transformation regions, with a focus primarily on the non-urban regions of Baden-Württemberg: the Black Forest, Hohenlohe and parts of Upper Swabia. Right-wing populist candidates could receive significant support in the works council elections at the beginning of 2026. Antonio Potenza, managing director of IG Metall Stuttgart, reports on the AfD’s attempt to build structures in the companies. “There are our officials who receive immoral offers from them and the right-wing populist union so that they can run,” says Potenza. “Unfortunately, politics has not yet received any attention at all about what is happening in companies and how action is being taken against democracy at this level.” Many people ask themselves how things could have gotten this far politically and economically. Given current market assessments, the automotive industry usually made the right decisions at the respective times. At the same time, it has made good money with SUVs on the Chinese market over the past ten years. But then the Chinese market collapsed, and at the same time Chinese suppliers put German companies like Mahle and ZF under price pressure and specifically developed specialized alternative products at cheap prices. This resulted in excess capacity in this country and battery production remained more expensive than originally calculated. Now companies are primarily cutting budgets for the development of e-mobility. If the market takes off, the Chinese will be quicker. Electric cars are often only available as company cars in front of the offices of architects or lawyers, but not in the terraced house garage, because they are tax-efficient but too expensive to buy. There is hardly anyone in the industry who does not believe that electric vehicles are the future of individual mobility and will at some point make up the majority of sales. However, it is generally believed that the transformation will take longer than previously thought, at least until 2035. “When suppliers have a sales problem, they immediately come under pressure; they can only cope with low sales in the short term with high production costs,” says restructuring consultant Markus Fauser. He suspects that the tip of the iceberg in bankruptcies will not be reached until 2026 at the earliest. E-mobility? “The answer is a clear yes.” Of the approximately 820,000 jobs in the German automotive industry, only just under half could remain in the end. In Baden-Württemberg alone, 40,000 to 60,000 jobs could be lost by 2030. That’s as many as the entire defense industry with suppliers in the southwest currently has. This branch and the healthcare industry, in which almost a million employees already work, are now to become the sectors of hope. The German Detroit has been imagined countless times for the Neckar region. This time too, car managers are hoping for a new upswing. “Meet the future” is written above a small, makeshift television studio in the Mercedes Museum in Untertürkheim. It belongs to the editorial team of “Auto Motor Sport”, the trade magazine for people with gasoline in their blood. Next to the studio are two current Mercedes models, one from the old world and one from the new: an E-Class with all-wheel drive next to a bright red Mercedes GLC. This electric SUV, which was introduced a few weeks ago, is expected to bring sales back to the Swabian car manufacturer in the next few months, including in China. A young multimedia editor shoots a video; A gray-haired man in a light suit marvels at the sparkling Mercedes-style LED grill: “It actually fires.” Editor-in-chief Birgit Priemer is waiting for Mercedes boss Ola Källenius in the lecture hall. Källenius actually wanted to be in China and not take part in the magazine’s congress. “Then the news came at two o’clock in the morning that you could still postpone Ola’s flight,” says Priemer happily. Källenius, the manager with the charm of a young Swedish holiday home landlord, takes a seat on the stage and the editor-in-chief immediately asks the hundred million dollar question: “The motto is zero emissions, is that now just a utopia, or is that still the right way?” Källenius gives an answer that deviates significantly from the announcements of the politicians who are now presenting themselves as fans of the old world in the crisis: “The answer is a clear yes, it means zero Emissions. The ambition is right, the destination station is right, we have to readjust the route.” You have to do a reality check. The proportion of newly registered electric vehicles in Europe is 16 percent. When the Green Deal was passed six years ago, higher sales figures were expected. Now the 2035 target needs to be made more flexible and the market better prepared, says Källenius. “At the car summit in Berlin recently, three prime ministers, one red, one green and one black, said the same thing in different words.” He rarely experienced that.More on the topicThere are quite a few automotive experts in the room who are surprised that Ola Källenius still has his job. The Mercedes boss indirectly admits on the open stage that he was wrong with his strategy, which was heavily focused on luxury vehicles – and says: “When the compact class is phased out, we will present an exciting entry-level model again in 2027. Let yourself be surprised.”This was not planned in the group’s original strategy. Nor had anyone expected the planned economic brutality with which China would pursue the goal of becoming stronger and better than the Germans when it comes to electric motors – although German manufacturers still offer superior, but sometimes significantly more expensive technology in e-mobility. In front of the conference hall is the “Concept AMG GT XX”, a vehicle that impresses motorists. A four-door coupe, flat like a racing car, painted orange. Its battery can be charged for 400 kilometers within five minutes. Employees put virtual reality glasses on conference visitors so that they can better understand the technology in a three-dimensional presentation. A virtual ride is not activated because such high speeds make many people feel sick. There is now clapping in the hall: Källenius is the first to leave and hastily runs past the three future models; he has to get to the plane to China. Where industrial standards are defined today.
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