Volkswagen's controlling families gathered this week to announce they've noticed Chinese car companies also sell cars. Took them a while.
The top investor demanded "immediate action" to fend off competition. Here's a wild thought: build better cars. Faster. Cheaper. You know, that thing companies did before begging governments for help became the primary business model.
The families want a faster overhaul. They've been overhauling for years. Dieselgate was 2015. That's eleven years of overhauling. At some point you're not overhauling anymore. You're just bad at making cars people want to buy.
Chinese brands figured out how to make electric vehicles that don't look like suppositories and cost less than a mortgage. Volkswagen's strategy appears to be making the same sedans from 2003 but with a touchscreen that crashes more often than the Windows Vista launch.
The controlling families are worried. They should be. BYD sold more EVs last quarter than Volkswagen sold excuses. When your competitive advantage is "we're not American" and even that stops working, you're cooked.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started googling "how to short a German dynasty." They'll buy VW calls anyway. They always do. Some guy named Derek is currently convinced this means Volkswagen is about to buy Tesla and will put his rent money on it.
The families called for faster action on Friday. Markets are closed Saturday and Sunday. By Monday they'll have formed three committees to explore the possibility of eventually discussing a timeline for considering whether to think about competing. That's how you fend off rivals who ship 40,000 cars a week.
Turns out when you spend a decade lying about emissions instead of building the future, the future builds itself without you.
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