And here I am driving a 20 year old Honda that should run for another 10 years with few issues.

Now that is the resilient Cuban way!

It’s been funny to see how quickly liberal democracies retreat from their professed love of the free market as soon as it threatens to challenge their market share.

It's worker protection, something I thought most people here on Lemmy agreed with. No western nation can compete with China on price without completely gutting 7 decades of worker, social, economic, and environmental protection laws.

It’s been funny to see how quickly liberal democracies retreat from their professed love of the free market as soon as it threatens to challenge their market share.

As opposed to illiberal democracies like China who do it by not allowing anyone free access to their market in the first place?

Exactly. They insisted China become capitalist then complain when they do capitalism.

A fair argument can be made that the Chinese government considers EV an imperative and interferes and subsidizes, so it's not fully free market. Thus any country with industry competing with China needs to decide if they care and if they care, how to respond to advantage conferred by China government policies. Whether that's similar incentives for their domestic industry and/or tariffs to try to level the playing field.

Not really. China is trying to wage economical war with the world.

Chinese EVs are made by workers who live in cages and work 12+ hour days making $500/mo in a country that's only 80% cheaper than the US. IE $500 is like living off $650/mo in the US if your living expenses were paid (and your home was a cage coffin). You're basically an indentured servant because you can leave, but you'll be homeless because you can't save enough to live in the city.

Second, the CCP subsidize the shit out of EVs. Then sells them across the world.

These two things are designed to destroy the auto industry across the world. The sad thing is most people are to idiotic to realize it. They just go "I wAnT cHeAp EvS duurrr". Plus, at least domestic Chinese EVs are scary AF, they have an insanely higher rate of thermal runaway. You can have you cheap EV at the cost of helping destroy your domestic economy, just don't park that shit within 590 feet of my house.

We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas

They trie dto make enormous EV car and nobody buy them. They didn't try to make affordable cars. Because this would impact the economy of leech we have in Europe.

I drive a 1999 Skoda Octavia, VAG, with the 1.9 TDI, with the mechanical pump. The thing, with proper maintenance, is ultra reliable. Doesn't leak or burn oil. It hasn't had a major repair in 27 years/400.000 km, just consumables, like a clutch, belts, a starter motor, stuff like that.

Two people I know that have bought VAG cars the last 5 years are constantly bitching about their cars.

Engineering is not the problem here, it's management making engineering decisions.

The Chinese make generational planning. Western make quarterly decisions to appeal to speculators, not investors.

Western car makers, and Japanese/Koreans, definitely have the know how to make good value EVs, and some do (see Renault and Hyundai). If western and free market oriented Asian makers made long term investment and decisions they would compete just fine.

It doesn't even mean anything to drive an Audi or BMW anymore. A Hyundai or Chinese brand can give you the same functionality at an equal or cheaper cost. Their cars don't even stand out anymore due to their SUV focus. It's hard for a luxury brand to recover its image once it loses its lustre.

No one left to buy them. Since they're expensive locally, they used to export them to the Chinese. But China has its own industry now.

Best I can do is put cameras all over it and track everything that happens inside and out of the car "for your safety".

That would break them. Building cars that last means less demand for the next new car. Planned obsolescence is the only way to make sure the next round of vehicles has a market, regardless of whether its a significant enough improvement to justify the cost.

Germany must explore other industries besides car manufacturing.

This! Our industry is far too dependent on the car market. Car ownership is going down and people don't need to buy new cars all the time. The market is saturated. When I look around, everybody is driving a relatively new car that won't have to be replaced for years. It's just not a growth industry - and by the love of god, it shouldn't be one.

Tariffs won’t help because while they’re losing across the board, the most important market for VW, and also the one with the most drastic losses, is not Germany but China. They bet a lot on expansion into China and once reached ~20% market share there, but that has since dropped to half. For BEV specifically it’s abysmal, so the outlook is also bad: BEV has rapidly risen to nearly 60% of the Chinese retail market but VW’s share is in the low single digits.