Right, but why don't the Germans respond? I understand that they have some structural cost disadvantages but they seem to have been caught by surprise and just gave up.
I think what happened is Merc and VW wanted to sell into China. Part of the deal was they had to build factories in China and allow Chinese imports the other direction. It was very profitable for a while but is now causing issues.
That impacts market share but it doesn't explain why the Germans keep building shitty cars. Why are they so lazy and incompetent? Blocking Chinese imports wouldn't fix that fundamental problem.
Their problems are created by the government mostly, so they can't do anything about them.
• Expensive energy (German government believes there is a climate crisis)
• Expensive labour (German government believes in prioritizing workers over companies)
• Expensive regulations (you get the picture)
They can't solve any of these problems because they are left wing imperatives, and the left would rather the German car industry die than give up on any of them. So all they can do is wait for the end, and/or hope the AfD somehow obtain a majority.
Just for your information, the AfD doesn't want to have cheap energy either. Nobody in Germany does, and that's the problem.
While the AfD wants to keep German lignite (half as cheap as any imported gas), it also wants gas. The point of coal is eliminating gas. Otherwise you're just polluting for no gain.
The point of coal is to make electricity and making sure it's cheap means using every resource you have. So I don't quite see how supporting the reopening of coal plants is not the AfD supporting cheap energy.
As I said, coal makes electricity cheaper if it can eliminate gas, like in China and India. Poland uses a lot of coal, but it doesn't help because it also uses a lot of gas nowadays.
Of course, there are geopolitical considerations. Germany thought that it could cut military spending by buying Russian gas, and Poland believes that it needs to buy American gas for protection. But none of them can compete with China.
Energy is expensive in Germany not because of gas itself but because of the Energiewende combined with reliance on Russian gas. This comes largely from Europe's refusal to use fracking and insistence on lots of wind and solar, which are expensive and unreliable. The UK has gas deposits it could frack, for instance, but refuses to do so because they believe (wrongly in my view) that this would end the world.
Of course they can compete with China. China is rather resource poor for such a big country and has to import lots of its fuel. Energy is cheap(ish) in China because it is willing to use all available energy sources without net zero ideology.
