Splendid Isolation

As with so many of their articles, this one at American Thinker does an admirable job of delving deep into the minutiae — this time of the European car manufacturing malaise — and comes up with the inevitable conclusion.  First, though the writer tees up the argument with a statement that is obvious to most of us:

Looking at the global automotive market, one conclusion is unavoidable: the end of the combustion engine is nowhere in sight.

When I say it’s obvious, I mean that anyone with a brain could see that the constraints of the combustion engine’s purported replacements — electricity especially, and ditto hydrogen power — had just too many negatives to make any replacement a lengthy (and super-costly) affair.

So why, then, did the Big Brains in the German automotive industry go so hard after electric cars, devoting billions of dollars into the creation of manufacturing facilities dedicated to the Big New Thing?  Here’s AT‘s take:

But one thing is clear: an energy policy detached from economic reality, driven by climate-apocalyptic ambitions, has harmed the industry at least as much as strategic mistakes at the management level.

We’ve looked at the climate-apocalyptics many times before on these pages, and once again, we all knew that the Watermelons had an agenda that, to be charitable, wasn’t just about Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©, but also about crippling Western capitalism to “level the playing field” with Third World nations.

We also know that when it comes to that kind of neo-socialist government mindset of the German government — and most of the other Euro governments — the idea of central control is seductive, nay imperative.  So it would be logical, in their eyes, to mandate that electric cars constitute a large majority of the auto market by x date (2030), and therefore it had to happen.

Of course, when you set yourself against market forces — especially one as entrenched as automotive power — you’re going to fail utterly absent some massive and ummm super-costly infrastructure creation, even assuming that any government had the cash and resources to actually implement such a construction project inside that timeline (and none do, not even the U.S.).

Which leads to the question:  if this scenario is so glaringly obvious, why did German car manufacturers not stand up to their government and say, “No.”?

Well, all corporations are lickspittles to their respective governments in the end, so such resistance is of course unthinkable.  But Thomas Kolbe supplies another factor:

The tragedy of Germany’s automotive industry is not that it failed to recognize technological change. On the contrary: few industries have invested more resources over recent decades into researching new drive technologies.

The deeper problem is German overconfidence: a hidden statism and an arrogance cultivated by decades of undeniable success — the belief that Germany could not only identify the technology of the future but also predict its entire development path.

A mixture of technological hubris and a belief in unlimited manageability — a character flaw that prepares the ground for failure.

To believe one can outsmart the market, to know more than millions of economic actors operating through decentralized information networks: Is this the German disease?

If so, it’s a disease that has infected Germany since Bismarck’s time — the auto manufacturing industry being just the latest manifestation (the earlier one was militarism).

I guess they should have just stuck to doing brilliant engineering — except that their political class (like most political classes) are just as wedded to the concept of social engineering as Mercedes is to automotive engineering.

There’s a broader lesson to be learned here, but I’m not at all sanguine of anyone actually learning it.