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What if German manufacturers aren't losing to Chinese technology, but to Chinese speed?
In this episode of Beyond Cost, host Jakob Etzel talks with Prof. Dr. Martin Koers about the one area where German manufacturers still lead: combustion engineering. Then they turn to the three where China has already passed them: battery electric vehicles, software-defined vehicle architecture, and autonomous driving.
Martin Koers ran the VDA, Germany's automotive industry association, for seventeen years and visited China many times, but he didn't understand the real speed of the country until he moved there to teach at Shenzhen Technology University. What he found was a 9-9-6 work culture, a cashless economy, and five-year government plans that set the goal while a brutal domestic market decides who survives. In this episode, you will learn:
- Why Germany's edge survives in exactly one of four competitive dimensions, and loses in the other three
- How centralized decision-making and a different work mentality compress Chinese development timelines
- Why the lack of software-first design is leaving Germany behind
- What young Chinese consumers now think of BMW, Mercedes, and Audi
Germany still builds the best combustion engine in the world. The question is whether that's enough, and for how long.
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