German auto sector: electrification costs 300 thousand jobs. One third of the total workforce.

An examination of employment trends in the automotive sector since the peak in 2019 found that around 75,000 jobs were lost in the four years to 2023 , but at the same time almost 29,000 new jobs were created. The net job loss was 46,000 .

Extrapolating these effects, Prognos and VDA estimate that employment in the German automotive industry will decline by around 190,000 net people by 2035, or a fifth of the number of employees in the sector in 2019.

The loss of 300 thousand workers, that of a third of the total workers in the auto sector amounting to approximately 900 thousand.

Job losses are certain, creation is not

A further problem is that job loss is certain, while earnings are totally insecure . According to the VDA, the creation of new jobs related to electric cars is hampered by the lack of qualified workers in key professions and increasingly unfavorable location conditions for investments in Germany.

Despite this huge employment disaster, the automotive industry will continue on the path towards climate neutrality, commented VDA President Hildegard Müller . Economic fluctuations and consumer uncertainty caused by the discussion of new financing measures have caused further problems for the sector.

Overall, the market reorientation towards electric cars is not living up to expectations. The electric car market is growing internationally, but the change will not happen within a few years and will vary in different regions of the world, so there would be room for internal combustion cars for many years to come.

Despite this, and despite the resulting disasters, German politics and the business class will continue on this path: “Electromobility will lead to job losses, even politicians should admit this and not blame the actions of individual companies . The reduction in employment is not in itself part of a crisis, but of a transformation." “But something must be done if the additional added value and employment that could be created in Germany are not created here.”

Policy must address the causes and not just the symptoms of problems, Müller said. Even for medium-sized companies, which are particularly affected by structural changes, it is important to fill financial gaps. It would be useful to relax the rules for banks, which are very cautious, simplify financing programs and review financing criteria. The EU will make the transformation more difficult with the battery regulation now presented, which wants to allow the production of batteries only with green energy in the same location. From the point of view of the VDA president, it is also incomprehensible that the Confederation wants to stop funding basic research into battery technology from 2025.

Less metalworking, more electronics and mechatronics

The study by VDA and Prognos examined the evolution of employment in a total of 700 groups of professions or workers. Between 2019 and 2023, employment in metalworking decreased from 8,900 to 45,900 people, in technical quality assurance from 5,600 to 36,200 people, and in mechanical engineering from 5,400 to 58,200 people. The importance and availability of workers in the IT, mechatronics, energy and electricity sectors will increase.

It does not seem predictable, for example, that more technicians in the field of plastic and rubber will be needed to build electric cars, even though these sectors are also relevant in EV cars, and this is because a good part of the This suggests that this work, which tends to be energy-intensive, it is not found in Germany but outside the country. So even if EV and fully electric cars are successful, there is still a risk that this will not impact German industry.

An economic disaster strongly desired by politics

The forced and accelerated transition towards electric mobility was a precise decision taken in 2020 , not thousands of years ago, in the wake of Greta Thunberg's demonstrations, without any real assessment of the economic and employment impact. Would the CDU politicians in the European Parliament, enthusiastic about this directive at the time, still vote for it today, knowing that it will dramatically accelerate the decline of the German and European auto sector?

The serious problem is that decisions with enormous impact are made without a true evaluation of their social, economic and political effects. The European institutions are prey to the fashion imposed by the mass media, always externally guided, and not to rationality. At a national level, governments seem incapable, weak, frozen in their own passivity.

A final note: Tobias Piller, the author of the original FAZ article, was one of the major supporters of the European decisions against Italy. I wonder if he still thinks the same way now.