This specific plant employed less than 500 people in its heyday and never had a 'competitive edge' because it was originally built to manufacture luxury cars mostly via manual labor (specifically the doomed VW Phaeton).

BMW seem to be fine with that. VW’s problem is too many staff, they need to slim down to become competitive again.

I assure you, there is no more layoffs to do at any auto manufacturer that will effect the bottom line. IF that is the problem, the brands dead anyways.

I assure you that the biggest cost to VW, Ford, JLR, Renault etc is: 1. Building/investing in Chinese domestic market (IE, building plants in china to sell to their market) 2. lobbying governments to dissalow chinese branded/manufactured OEMs in western markets 3. Litigation on IP against those same chinese manufacturers they are both working with in chinese market, and preventing entry into their western market.

These problems "can be gotten around", by simply accepting this is reality. VW is doing such unfortunatley, while a company like BMW REALLY pretends "it's fine", as they have way too much cash doing nothing.

VW has 680,000 employees to make 9 million vehicles a year. Toyota does the same with just 375,000. VW is bloated and needs to slim down.

Add to that insane competition from Chinese EVs, and the chips debacle from earlier this year.

"Sudden" . Go on, sing your praise. I hope you'll get paid at least a few cents for your work.

Funny, but I am not a Russian troll. I am in fact native to West Europe and have to face the consequences of this bullshit (including rising energy prices) every single day.

Not all Russian trolls live in Russia and not all of them are Russian.

Easiest way to tell the local time of someone on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46225407

You are totally wrong.

It's 20:21 CET+1 back here in West Europe and I am one of many living through the consequences and actually in the middle of this total shit storm.

Do you think we, the native people of Europe, think the collapse of our countries is somehow funny or to be applauded? DO YOU?!?

If we become the same shithole as the US of A, we could produce very cheap cars. But for that goal, we have start or fuel some foreign wars, making the own population poorer and dumber every day. At least we have a residue of normality these days.

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're trying for something else here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Germans are missing that cheap Russian energy.

To be clear, it was this 'factory': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Factory

It never really made sense after the Phaeton, which it was built for, comprehensively failed (expected production 20k/year, demand never went over 10k/year); it has been effectively closed before, and honestly it's kind of surprising it wasn't closed a decade ago.