Audi To Cut 9,500 German Jobs In Switch To Electrification (bloomberg.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Audi plans to eliminate roughly 15% of its German workforce to lift earnings by $6.6 billion as Volkswagen AG's largest profit maker pushes ahead with a restructuring plan to help adapt to the costly transition to electric cars. The turnaround is aimed at regaining ground lost to luxury-car leaders Mercedes-Benz and BMWand counter pressure from Tesla. Volkswagen has been scrambling to revive Audi's fortunes after turmoil sparked by the aftermath of the 2015 diesel-cheating scandal. By 2025, Audi plans to cut as many as 9,500 jobs in Germany and streamline operations at its two main factories in its home country. The positions will be reduced through attrition and voluntary measures including early retirement, Audi said in a statement Tuesday after reaching an agreement with employee representatives. The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029, and Audi will create 2,000 new jobs to strengthen its engineering muscle for electric cars and digital offerings.
Re:Cutting jobs because its what companies do (Score:5, Informative)
Turd (Score:4, Informative)
The Audi Turd, sorry eTron, is one of the worst EVs on the market. It's incredibly inefficient, the charge ports are in stupid places and it lacks much in the way of EV specific features. It's clear they took a fossil car and shoved an electric drivetrain in it.
Audi really needs to improve fast. Having said that, laying of nearly 10k workers sounds like an excuse. Or maybe admitting defeat, as in they are going to use someone else's drivetrains so don't need to build their own any more.
Re: Turd (Score:3)
Electric cars are a lot simpler to build. You don't have to have all the complex mechanics like gearboxes and exhaust systems, it's pretty much 2 or 4 motors and some wires; in complexity vs current gas drivetrains it's similar to how the VW originally was made and a modern car (the 1930's beetles are very simple machines)
So this is where electric cars perhaps will finally reach price parity, simply cut out the most expensive parts in the build process and simplify.
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You don't have to have all the complex mechanics like gearboxes
Electric vehicles still need a transmission.
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that's called a transfer case, not a transmission
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You don't have to have all the complex mechanics like gearboxes
Electric vehicles still need a transmission.
If you mean "means of connecting the motor to the wheels" then obviously yes. If you mean "means of changing the gear ratio between the engine and wheels", then no they don't need it [carbuyer.co.uk], though as the link says some do.
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They may need a reduction gear, but that's not the same thing as a multi-speed transmission. And even if they do need multiple speeds, they don't need more than two of them, and you can put that functionality into a differential.
Typical EV reduction gears have literally two gears in them. Typical automatic transmissions have two or three planetary gears and a valve body. Typical manual transmissions have two gears per speed, some of which have to slide around, and a selector fork. It's obvious that a lot le
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Electric vehicles still need a transmission.
Nope. E-motors have a completely different rpm to torque curve.
Re: Turd (Score:1)
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True, but at the moment they have exactly one fully electric vehicle and it's literally a turd. Cutting nearly 10k jobs seems a bit premature.
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It's even better than that. Once you've built a motor and the robotic line to make it (look at youtube video of audi motor line) you'll barely have to touch that line for the next 40-50 years. Electric motor technology is a mature thing. Sure there are plenty of novel designs that give you some benefits, but they are largely pointless for EVs where battery/vehicle mass dominate (and ultimately you just gain weight/power at the expense of cost with all the novel designs), and all the novel designs are stupid
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"Add in all the mechanic jobs that will go "
Electric cars seem to have most of the parts "that break all the time" in regular cars. The wheels still have tires, bearings, and brakes, to service and they need alignment. It has a suspension. It still has its HVAC system with its compressor, its fans that will wear out and squeak, its subject to AC leak issues. The internal and external door handles still break. The power window motors will still fail. LED modules fail in the brake lights and headlights. The t
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Excellent points - except the brakes. I mean, yeah, they will still wear out, but far less frequently since regenerative braking means that their job is done by the motor(s) except during the most aggressive braking maneuvers. Assuming they get used 10% of the time, that'd push the recommended service time from every 50,000 miles, to every 500,000. It very possible that the original brake pads will last the life of the car.
The other issue is that those things that brake all the time are also (usually, if
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Then again - some of the most heavily used Teslas on the road are pushing 500,000 miles and still going strong
The high mileage Tesla I'd read about had its battery pack replaced... twice:
The Model S has had its high voltage battery replaced twice under warranty at 194,000 and 324,000 miles. Battery degradation over the course of the first 194,000 miles was ~6% with multiple supercharges a day to 95-100%, instead of the recommended 90-95%. Between 194,000 and 324,000 miles Tesloop experienced battery degradation of ~22% (see below for details).
Plus a decent amount of other maintenance.
https://www.tesloop.com/blog/2... [tesloop.com]
I mean, it's still very impressive. But its hardly "amazing". Around here, the golf diesel (TDI) is a the big distance runner for highway commuters -- its hard to find a used VW Golf on the market here with LESS than 250,000 on it.
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Replacing the battery is indeed a gotcha, but you're still talking about replacing the battery about as frequently as you'd replace an entire ICE car as no longer being worth the repair costs (because everything is probably close to failing too).
And if the next decade can deliver the same 10x drop in battery prices as the last one did, replacing the battery won't be such a big deal. (Admittedly we'll likely be running into resource constraints as demand increases, so cheap recycling and/or chemistry based
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"Replacing the battery is indeed a gotcha, but you're still talking about replacing the battery about as frequently as you'd replace an entire ICE car as no longer being worth the repair costs (because everything is probably close to failing too)."
I just don't see the Tesla really holding up any better; this Tesla is kind of a PR stunt. It was what, a $90,000+ car, that was being maintained *under warranty*.
The maintain it vs replace it equation is really skewed here.
For starters, few high-miler cars cost e
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It's even better than that. Once you've built a motor and the robotic line to make it (look at youtube video of audi motor line) you'll barely have to touch that line for the next 40-50 years. Electric motor technology is a mature thing. Sure there are plenty of novel designs that give you some benefits, but they are largely pointless for EVs where battery/vehicle mass dominate (and ultimately you just gain weight/power at the expense of cost with all the novel designs), and all the novel designs are stupidly more expensive than the bunch of radial motors being used by most manufacturers.
Tesla is on their third electric motor design. They most recently created a new motor design for the Model 3. They've begun putting that new motor into their other vehicles, and the motor has increased Model S range by 10%.
I expect there's still quite a bit of innovation to be found in the electric motor space. The automobile application has requirements that haven't existed previously; most high-powered electric motors have been deployed in contexts where high efficiency and minimal weight weren't real
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While the ICE-specific stuff goes out the window, there's still a huge role for the mechanical engineers to play -- suspension. In fact, now that the motive power has been simplified and the cars have been super-sensorized, that creates a huge room for advances in suspension. While some very high end models do have active suspension, it's still relatively crude and you still do feel bumps in the road. Imagine a smart sensorized suspension with multiple layers and methods of attitude control that results in
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Job guarantees? (Score:4, Interesting)
The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029...
That blows my mind. That anyone could have a "job guarantee" is astounding to me. I've been with this company for 10 years, but they could just fire me tomorrow (they would be obligated to pay me severance equal to one week of pay for every year of employment). But honestly, if they don't want me here, I wouldn't begrudge them either. I want to work somewhere I'm worth employing.
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Are you actually complaining that someone got a token of appreciation from a company while you get pretty much jack shit from your current company? Also it isn't that someone has an obligation to work there, one can always leave. I would take job security over job insecurity every time and I'm talking here as a guy who had to change 4 jobs in 7 years. I'm not talking about salary here, I presume Audi pays very well, and that is beside the point here.
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I think his point is he wouldn't want to work for a company that doesn't want him or need him. It is a pride thing. I agree with him, but you wouldn't understand.
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Are you actually complaining that someone got a token of appreciation from a company while you get pretty much jack shit from your current company? Also it isn't that someone has an obligation to work there, one can always leave. I would take job security over job insecurity every time and I'm talking here as a guy who had to change 4 jobs in 7 years.
I took it as GP meaning that they were surprised if not impressed that such a thing was possible. I'm in the US, I work for a great company where the owner/CEO/President/whatever other title you want to give him flat out doesn't like firing people. The company would never make that kind of guarantee though because they can't.
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token of appreciation from a company
Token of appreciation? It's called a salary.
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I would take job security over job insecurity every time
Many people have never experienced job security so probably don't appreciate how nice it is. Of course at one time people could spend their entire career at the same company, but that seems pretty rare now. Before I retired from my (unionized) job, a job security clause was part of our contract, and while it always could have been removed during new contract bargaining, it was an important benefit that membership consistently wanted the union to prioritize in negotiations.
Re:Job guarantees? (Score:5, Interesting)
The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029...
That blows my mind. That anyone could have a "job guarantee" is astounding to me. I've been with this company for 10 years, but they could just fire me tomorrow (they would be obligated to pay me severance equal to one week of pay for every year of employment). But honestly, if they don't want me here, I wouldn't begrudge them either. I want to work somewhere I'm worth employing.
I suspect that the situation is not a case that each person individually has their employment guaranteed, but rather than they will continue to employ 50,000 of that class of employee, and that they have a plan for getting useful production out of them through at least 2029.
Germany does have closer partnerships between labour and management with both parties being less adversarial than is typical in North America. I think labour representatives typically have places on company boards for example.
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The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029...
That blows my mind. That anyone could have a "job guarantee" is astounding to me. I've been with this company for 10 years, but they could just fire me tomorrow (they would be obligated to pay me severance equal to one week of pay for every year of employment). But honestly, if they don't want me here, I wouldn't begrudge them either. I want to work somewhere I'm worth employing.
I suspect that the situation is not a case that each person individually has their employment guaranteed, but rather than they will continue to employ 50,000 of that class of employee, and that they have a plan for getting useful production out of them through at least 2029.
Germany does have closer partnerships between labour and management with both parties being less adversarial than is typical in North America. I think labour representatives typically have places on company boards for example.
I can see why that would be extremely difficult for Americans to understand since many businesses and employees in the US seem to have a relationship that ranges from a 'lord of the manor vs serf' relationship to a COIN campaign trying to beat down an insurgency. Somewhere in there too are 'Christian' companies sticking their noses into the reproductive activities of their employees.
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Nobody's going to read your wall of text. Please learn to use the blockquote HTML tag or at the very least make paragraphs with the "quoted" texts and your replies.
Bernie Sanders & Liz Warren both (Score:2)
Re: Bernie Sanders & Liz Warren both (Score:3)
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Re: Bernie Sanders & Liz Warren both (Score:2)
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This is a few years old, but GDP growth is not the only measure of a healthy economy.
https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-re... [hbr.org]
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On the other hand we had a balanced budget since 2014.
Re: Job guarantees? (Score:2)
Re:Job guarantees? (Score:5, Informative)
Germany does have closer partnerships between labour and management with both parties being less adversarial than is typical in North America. I think labour representatives typically have places on company boards for example.
Economists call this the German Model [wikipedia.org], and it is wisely praised for the economic success of post-war Germany and beyond.
It is often highly lauded in "The Economist".
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The union probably negotiated that. In exchange for giving some ground somewhere else they got a guarantee that Audi would keep employing at least 50k employees in Germany until at least 2029.
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The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029...
That blows my mind. That anyone could have a "job guarantee" is astounding to me.
OTOH, it blows my mind that American managers would think that any employee, faced with the prospect of very likely losing his job in the next few years, would continue to diligently do the job.
When you want to transition your company from doing X to doing Y, the only way that you can reasonably expect the employees currently doing X to continue to do X diligently for the next few years (while the company transition to do Y), is to guarantee their employment for a certain number of years with a completion b
Re: Job guarantees? (Score:2)
Re: Job guarantees? (Score:1)
will have job guarantees
Yeah, and the check's in the mail.
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Get a job, do it well, get to keep the job.
Anything changes and that "job" has to look after the worker.
Why the USA became and stayed great. The ability to change quickly.
Why Germany has to look after it workers and stays average. Having to stay the same to look after workers and never risk anything new.
No worries! (Score:2)
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No problem, I'm sure every one of them will be getting $2 an hour driving people around or delivering food soon.
From TF summary: The positions will be reduced through attrition and voluntary measures including early retirement, Audi said in a statement Tuesday after reaching an agreement with employee representatives. The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029, and Audi will create 2,000 new jobs to strengthen its engineering muscle for electric cars and digital offerings.
This is not a US company with a US based operation. If it was, all 50.000 US workers would be
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This is not a US company with a US based operation. If it was, all 50.000 US workers would be out on their ear and their replacements already being trained up in Mexico or China.
That's sure not just a US thing, but a Canada thing, and a German thing, and so-on. Companies have been doing this since the 1990's all over the world.
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It certainly happens everywhere else but only in the USA is it a national sport.
You're fundamentally ignorant of just how often it happens everywhere. I'm old enough to remember the medium and heavy industry collapse in the 90's here in Canada from NAFTA. Where much like the US businesses packed up and simply went to Mexico.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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That sounds great and all, but can you say you've ever really lived with out the constant threat of just being let go?
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The company does not risk any strikes. So no unplanned downtime for them.
Without the unions, there would be no strikes.
The people will have a better deal and are less unsure of what the future will hold. That means they can prepare for it, no matter how hard it can be.
Preparing for a loss isn't a bonus for companies. Without unions, there would be no loss.
The companies in Europe are aware that these talks must be done. I know of experience that the company will reserve a budget for that. They are not stupid and will know what it will cost. It basically is then finding the best way for all to deal with it.
Without unions, these talks don't have to be done. And the company doesn't have to reserve a budget for it.
Unions are NOT beneficial to ALL. The entire point of them is to extract more money & benefits, at the expense of the company, and distribute those to the employees. It's a membership club, designed to benefit it's members, not the company.
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BEV econoboxes will be land yachts. (Score:4, Informative)
ICEV wastes its kinetic energy in braking. Heavier vehicles waste more. Thus fuel economy meant tinny, tiny, small light weight vehicles. BEV has regen braking. The kinetic energy charges the battery to slow the car down. Downhill driving charges the battery.
ICE with high power ratings have low fuel economy. So fuel economy means trading away peak power. Electric motors are super efficient at all power levels. A 280 HP motor is as efficient as 140 HP motor.
Thus ICEV econoboxes were tinny, tiny, light, wheezing, asthmatic little run abouts.
Once the power and weight penalty is removed, car makers will discover they can make econoboxes that rival the land yachts of 1970s, and effective running cost is also 60 cents a gallon of gas.
At this point the ICEV sales will completely collapse. No one would buy them. Market will kill them.
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I can't wait for EV caravans/campervans.
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So far BEV econoboxes are just like regular econoboxes. See Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe, etc. The problem for the foreseeable future is that even for an econobox, you need like half a ton of batteries that cost a lot of money to get decent range. E.g. 60kwH at $120 is like $7200 which is like 60% of what a small city car costs. So you really have to save the money elsewhere to get to a reasonable price.
It's not so obvious on a more expensive car, even if you bump up the battery to 70 or 80kwh, it leaves you wi
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Plastic production line.
Tiny electric power system.
Gets people from home to work, to do shopping.
Germany has made an East German electric Trabant at West German luxury vehicle prices.
Without the skilled workers keeping their jobs
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Slowly this realization is sinking in. They typically take 4 years from drawing board to production. It wil
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Eliminate? (Score:2)
Maybe it's a German thing, but it seems a bit harsh to me.
Couldn't they simply lay them off instead?
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Maybe it's a German thing, but it seems a bit harsh to me. Couldn't they simply lay them off instead?
You mean lay them off, make them train their Chinese replacements, cheat them out of their severance and then watch as they slowly succumb to desperation, depression and then commit suicide? Somehow eliminating them seems more humane.
The Scapegoat (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm getting pretty tired of VAG and journalists attributing a downturn in fortunes on the diesel emission scandal. Porsche, Audi and VW are moving as fast as they can to electrification of their fleet because they are already losing market share worldwide to the Tesla Model 3 and the expense of complying with continuously stricter EU emissions legislation for automobiles. It's all about the present and the future and MONEY and has nothing to do with past mistakes.
Does anybody believe that a corporation beholden to its shareholders has had some kind of attack of moral enlightenment and is changing their ways as a result? Or that people stopped buying diesels because of the scandal? Where I live VW had to buy back their cars but they were allowed to fix them. They slapped new filters on them and re-sold ALL OF THEM at fair market value.
If a company like Tesla didn't exist VAG wouldn't be spending a dime on EVs and we'd all be driving ICE vehicles until shit started to look like Mad Max.