Volkswagen, the giant German car maker that was founded by Hitler and the Nazis in 1937 has long reached its peak and will be a steady decline starting in 2020. Here are just a few reasons why:
- VW has to support and maintain a lot of legacy technology system such as diesel and petrol engines, mechanic gearboxes, conventential brakes and thousands of other components required to produce a combustion engine car.
- Volkswagen currently has more than 650.000 employees the vast majority of which are not capable of being re-skilled or retrained into IT and data specialists.
- Volkswagen is an analogue company that has no digital branch while Tesla are digital technology firms. Volkswagen started using Amazon as their cognitive cloud service provider so very soon Amazon will be controlling VW causing its market value to decline even further.
- Tesla has already surpassed VW by market cap and this process is going to accelerate once Telsa starts operating their Gigafactory 4 in Germany.
- VW doesn’t develop and produce their own batteries. The battery is single most important component of any EV.
- VW don’t have their own autonomous driving technology.
The graph below shows far behind VW already is when it comes their value per car ratio.
In short, I don’t see how the Germans can compete with Tesla and other technology and data driven EV car makers.
