German here. My Problem with the German Car Industry is that they still see the car as a product, not as a platform. A car is a major investment and one that sticks to me for a while. I must rely on the car manufactures to continuously push updates and improve the lane-keeping assistant etc. (Maybe even the style of the UI?). I don't see this happening, at all. The lane keeping assistants get shipped and then forgotten, everybody is working on a new integration that is maybe coming out in years (crazy to think about if your only used to software-cycles). I don't want to be in the situation that i can't pair my smartphone with my car next year because mercedes doesn't bother updating it's software. Tesla does OTA updates and sees it's car as a platform, at least in my perspective. Software is all i know and they don't understand software yet. Softwares lives, unsupported software is dead.
I don't think that they are completely missing the electric car trend. They are being cautious, but everybody is at least getting it's feet wet. I hope they can then "just" scale their production. I don't think this is enough, but i hope they can turn around quickly enough when this gets serious.
But overall the future doesn't look too good.
Besides, i don't have the money right now to buy a car (also i don't want to).
I don't think that they are completely missing the electric car trend. They are being cautious, but everybody is at least getting it's feet wet. I hope they can then "just" scale their production. I don't think this is enough, but i hope they can turn around quickly enough when this gets serious.
But overall the future doesn't look too good.
Besides, i don't have the money right now to buy a car (also i don't want to).