Damian Rezaee

By Damian Rezaee

Introduction

For most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Volkswagen (VW) embodied the strength of German engineering and industrial might. With ten brands spanning mass-market to ultra-luxury vehicles, and a global presence across every major market, VW was considered a near-invincible institution. By 2024, however, the company had issued two profit warnings in less than three months, announced plans to close German factories for the first time in its history, and initiated the largest layoff program in the group’s existence (Euronews, 2024).

The crisis did not emerge overnight. Its roots lie in a combination of structural inefficiencies that had been papered over during years of strong profits, particularly from China. When those profits evaporated, due to aggressive domestic Chinese EV competition, falling consumer demand, and a brutal price war, Volkswagen’s underlying vulnerabilities were suddenly and devastatingly exposed (Automotive Logistics, 2024).

This paper examines each major dimension of Volkswagen’s crisis: its collapse in China, the failure of its CARIAD software division, high domestic production costs, weaknesses in its EV strategy, macroeconomic conditions in Germany, and the political and institutional barriers to reform. By understanding why these problems developed and how they interconnect, we can better assess whether VW’s current restructuring efforts are adequate and what the future holds for this iconic automaker.

A further strategic problem is that Volkswagen’s crisis is not only operational, but also organizational. The group combines a vast multi-brand portfolio, strong labor representation, political influence from Lower Saxony, and high dependence on consensus-based decision-making. That structure can provide stability in normal times, but in a period defined by software speed, Chinese EV competition, and rapid cost pressure, it can also slow adaptation. Reuters described investor pressure on CEO Oliver Blume as centering especially on two issues: reversing Volkswagen’s slide in China and closing the group’s technology gap. This suggests that the crisis should be understood not simply as a cyclical downturn, but as a test of whether Volkswagen’s governance model can still support timely strategic renewal in a much faster competitive environment (Reuters, 2026a).

The Collapse of the Chinese Market

Historical Dominance and Its End

China was, until recently, the engine of Volkswagen’s global success. At its peak, VW generated as much as 40% of its revenues from the Chinese market (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024). The company had held the top-selling position in China for approximately four decades, a remarkable feat that seemed almost permanent. As recently as 2019, VW’s total China sales hit a record of 4.23 million vehicles (Fortune, 2025a).

The fall from this position has been steep and rapid. By 2024, Volkswagen was overtaken by Chinese EV giant BYD as the top-selling automaker in the country. BYD sold 4.21 million vehicles in China in 2024 compared to VW’s 2.93 million (Fortune, 2025a). In 2025, VW fell further to third place, behind both BYD and Geely (EV, 2026). This represents a seismic shift that has cost VW not just market share, but its strategic identity as “China’s favorite foreign car brand.”

The EV Price War and Structural Disadvantage

The core mechanism of VW’s China decline is the extraordinary competitive pressure from state-backed domestic EV manufacturers. Chinese automakers, led by BYD, have leveraged government subsidies, vertically integrated supply chains, and aggressive pricing to dominate their home market. According to Autoblog (2024), Chinese state-owned banks and local governments have heavily subsidized domestic EV makers, allowing companies like BYD to sell cars at discounts of up to 50% below production costs.

Volkswagen’s China market share dropped from 19% in 2020 to 14% in 2024, as Chinese brands’ collective market share reached approximately 60% (F&L Asia, 2024). The situation is compounded by the fact that VW was slow to develop plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), which have become enormously popular in China. As Autoblog (2024) reported, VW was effectively shut out of the plug-in hybrid market for years, a costly gap as Chinese demand for such vehicles accelerated.

In the first half of 2025, VW’s Chinese EV joint venture deliveries fell by 34.5% year-on-year, a stark contrast to the 47% global growth in battery EV deliveries during the same period (AInvest, 2025). The operating margin in China fell to 4.2% in H1 2025, down sharply from prior years (AInvest, 2025). China auto industry consultant Michael Dunne summarized the consumer sentiment shift bluntly: Chinese consumers now see VW as representing the past, preferring the “fresher, more compelling offerings from home-team brands” (Autoblog, 2024).

Strategic Overdependence and Joint Venture Risk

A deeper structural issue is VW’s extreme dependence on a single market. Generating up to 40% of group revenues from China created a brittle strategic position (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024). When that market turned hostile, there was no comparable revenue stream to absorb the blow. In 2023, profits from Chinese joint ventures were already 20% lower than in 2022, and the company projected a further 40% decline in 2024 (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024).

Volkswagen has attempted a strategic pivot with its “In China, For China” approach, involving localized EV platforms and partnerships with Chinese tech firms, including XPeng and Horizon Robotics (AInvest, 2025). A joint charging network of 20,000 stations across 420 Chinese cities has been announced, and new models on China-specific platforms are in development. However, these responses will take years to bear fruit, and there is no guarantee they will be sufficient given BYD’s 34.1% share of the Chinese EV market in 2025 (AInvest, December 2025).

Volkswagen’s China problem is also a brand and positioning problem, not only a pricing problem. Chinese EV leaders have competed not just on cost, but on product freshness, digital user experience, connectivity, and speed of model development. Reuters reported that Volkswagen lost its long-held market leadership in China in 2024 and fell to third place in 2025, with its joint ventures’ combined retail share declining further as local firms gained momentum. This matters strategically because it means Volkswagen is no longer merely losing share in a profitable legacy market. It is losing relevance in the world’s most important proving ground for the future of mass-market mobility. In that sense, the China crisis exposes a deeper weakness in Volkswagen’s strategic sensing capabilities: the group recognized electrification, but reacted too slowly to the specific way Chinese firms were redefining value in EVs through software, speed, and domestic consumer fit (Reuters, 2025a; Reuters, 2026b).

The CARIAD Software Catastrophe

The Vision and Its Failure

The automotive industry’s shift toward “computers on wheels” required established manufacturers to build software competencies they had never needed before. Volkswagen’s response was to create CARIAD in 2020, a centralized software division intended to develop a unified operating system and electrical architecture for all VW Group brands (InsideEVs, 2025). The ambition was to become what CEO Oliver Blume described as “the second SAP,” transforming VW into a software-defined vehicle company (Yahoo Finance, 2025).

The reality proved catastrophically different. Between 2022 and 2024, CARIAD accumulated over $7.5 billion in operating losses on revenue of approximately $3.5 billion (InsideEVs, 2025). In 2024 alone, the division posted an operating loss of $2.64 billion, worse than the previous year despite increasing revenues (InsideEVs, 2025). These losses drained capital that could have been invested in product development, new platforms, or competitive EV pricing.

Organizational and Cultural Failures

The CARIAD failure was not purely a technical problem. It was fundamentally a management and cultural failure. As detailed by GermanAutopreneur (2025), each VW Group brand, Audi, Porsche, Volkswagen, treated CARIAD as a service provider rather than an internal innovation partner. Brands built parallel development teams, blocked centralized decisions, and demanded customized versions of the same features, resulting in the same function being developed six separate times for different brand specifications.

CARIAD’s leadership came predominantly from the traditional automotive hardware world, where agile software development practices were unfamiliar. This meant that instead of rapid iteration, engineers were caught in bureaucratic processes, producing PowerPoint presentations rather than code (GermanAutopreneur, 2025). When a McKinsey study in 2022 identified structural problems, the response was slow and inadequate, contributing to the departure of CEO Herbert Diess that same year (GermanAutopreneur, 2025).

Cascading Consequences

The software failures had direct, measurable consequences for VW’s product lineup and market competitiveness. The Porsche Macan Electric and the Audi Q6 E-Tron were both delayed by a full year due to CARIAD’s inability to deliver its E3 2.0 software platform (InsideEVs, 2025). The Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), VW’s next-generation EV architecture, was pushed from a 2024 launch to an uncertain date after 2026 or later (Green Car Reports, 2024).

Early EV products that did ship, such as the ID.4 and ID.5, were plagued with software bugs including frozen displays and system crashes, leading to recalls of over 100,000 vehicles and severe damage to the brand’s reputation for quality (Brix Consulting, n.d.). These issues were particularly damaging because Chinese competitors were simultaneously delivering vehicles with advanced infotainment, superior autonomous driving capabilities, and seamless software updates.

By 2024, VW had invested approximately $12 billion in CARIAD, and the investment of $5.8 billion in American EV startup Rivian to access its software architecture represented an implicit acknowledgment that the internal effort had failed (EV, 2026). As CarBuzz (2024) observed, the Rivian investment effectively confirmed that “CARIAD was all for nothing, and VW had to spend $5 billion just to catch up via another automaker.”

The CARIAD failure also illustrates a classic integration dilemma. Volkswagen attempted to centralize software to create scale economies and common architecture across brands, but the group’s own portfolio complexity undermined that goal. In theory, centralization should have reduced duplication and accelerated platform development. In practice, the strong autonomy of major brands such as Audi and Porsche weakened alignment and made standardization politically difficult. The result was not only technical underperformance, but a strategic contradiction: Volkswagen tried to behave like a unified software company while still operating as a federation of semi-independent automotive brands. Reuters’ reporting on Volkswagen’s software recovery efforts and its partnership with Rivian reinforces the point that management ultimately sought outside help to accelerate capability-building, effectively acknowledging that internal transformation alone was proving too slow for the competitive environment (Reuters, 2024a; Reuters, 2025b; Reuters, 2025c).

High Production Costs and Structural Inefficiency

The German Cost Problem

Volkswagen’s German manufacturing operations are among the most expensive in the world. Labour costs at VW’s German facilities are approximately twice the European average, according to CEO Oliver Blume (WSWS, December 2024). Energy costs in Germany, significantly elevated following the post-2022 energy crisis, compound the problem. The OSW Centre for Eastern Studies (2024) identifies high production costs, particularly labour and energy, alongside low productivity, as primary causes of the brand’s difficulties.

The financial consequences are stark. VW’s automotive cash flow turned negative in the first half of 2024, reaching minus €100 million, compared with a positive €2.5 billion in the same period a year earlier (Automotive Logistics, 2024). The operating profit margin for the VW brand fell to just 2.3% in H1 2024, compared to BMW at 10.9% and Mercedes-Benz at 9.9% (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024). This is not a minor gap. It reflects a fundamental structural disadvantage that cannot be resolved through incremental efficiency improvements.

Overcapacity and Underutilization

The capacity problem is severe and well-documented. VW is producing approximately 2 million fewer cars annually than in 2019, yet has maintained nearly the same workforce size (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024). Some plants are operating at utilization rates as low as 20% to 30%, while the company as a whole operates at only two-thirds of capacity (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024).

In Europe, demand has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, leaving VW with expensive idle capacity that must nevertheless be maintained and staffed. The Zwickau EV plant, once projected to produce approximately 250,000 vehicles annually, was producing only around 200,000 by 2024, with the workforce shrinking from approximately 11,000 in 2022 toward under 9,000 by end of year (WSWS, September 2024).

The Political Dimension of Reform

Restructuring Volkswagen’s German operations is not simply a business decision. It is a deeply political one. The state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in the company and has explicit veto power over major decisions (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024). Regional politicians, including Lower Saxony’s Minister-President Stephan Weil, publicly opposed any plant closures, creating a direct tension between political imperatives and business necessity.

The company’s 1994 job security agreement, which had protected all permanent employees at German facilities from compulsory redundancy until 2029, was terminated by management in September 2024, a move that enabled restructuring but triggered massive industrial conflict (WSWS, September 2024). In December 2024, approximately 100,000 VW workers walked off the job in a warning strike, the largest labor action in the company’s history (WSWS, December 2024). The eventual “Zukunft Volkswagen” (Future Volkswagen) restructuring agreement prohibits outright plant closures and forced layoffs, instead relying on natural attrition, early retirement, and voluntary severance to reduce the German workforce by 35,000 by 2030 (EV, 2026).

From a strategy perspective, the German cost problem should not be interpreted only as a labor issue. It is a fit problem between Volkswagen’s inherited industrial model and the economics of the current market. High fixed costs can be sustained when volumes are strong, pricing power is stable, and product leadership is clear. They become far more dangerous when demand softens, EV adoption is uneven, and Chinese rivals compress price expectations globally. Reuters reported in late 2024 that Volkswagen’s cost-cutting push was driven by plunging profits, weak demand in China, and bloated factory capacity, with management arguing that labor-cost reductions were necessary to preserve competitiveness (Reuters, 2024b). In that sense, Volkswagen’s German footprint is not simply expensive. It has become strategically misaligned with the margin structure of contemporary volume automotive competition.

The EV Transition: Too Fast or Too Slow?

A Transition Caught Between Two Eras

Volkswagen committed aggressively to electrification, pledging €131 billion over five years into EV and digitalization development and announcing a goal of eliminating all internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2030 (CarBuzz, 2024). This commitment created a damaging dual problem: VW invested heavily in EVs that were not yet selling in sufficient volumes while simultaneously neglecting its profitable ICE lineup, which remained the primary source of near-term revenue.

As CarBuzz (2024) noted, Volkswagen largely gave up on meaningful development of its ICE models. The Jetta went without significant updates from 2018, and the Golf GTI’s eighth generation was widely considered inferior to its predecessor, a product of a company that had mentally moved on from its core business before the replacement business was ready to sustain it.

Demand Disappointment and Policy Instability

European EV demand has consistently fallen short of optimistic projections. In Germany, the government’s abrupt cancellation of EV purchase subsidies in late 2023 caused a 16.4% decline in EV sales in the first half of 2024 (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 2024). Globally, VW’s electric car sales dropped 3.4% in 2024, including a 30% plunge in the United States (Yahoo Finance, 2025). BEV adoption in Europe fell 27% after incentives were paused, cutting VW’s market share to 13.5% (JobsPikr, 2025).

The disconnect between EV policy ambition and consumer behavior left VW particularly exposed, having oriented its production and investment plans around demand forecasts that proved too optimistic. Plants that had been converted or upgraded for EV production, most prominently Zwickau, found themselves with far too little throughput to justify the investment.

Signs of Recovery

There are some indications of improvement. VW Group’s global battery EV sales rose 32% in 2025 to 983,100 units, representing approximately 11% of total group registrations (EV, 2026). Europe drove 75% of these deliveries, and record EV sales in the first half of 2025 in Europe, 248,726 units with a 17.7% market share, suggest that fleet renewal cycles and new model introductions are beginning to stabilize demand (JobsPikr, 2025). The CARIAD division, under new leadership, delivered software to 14 models in 2024, and by April 2025, nine of the ten top-selling EVs in Germany were powered by CARIAD software (Yahoo Finance, 2025).

A more precise interpretation is that Volkswagen was neither simply too fast nor too slow. Rather, it was mismatched. It moved aggressively in capital allocation and public commitment, but not quickly enough in the capabilities that mattered most, particularly software quality, China-specific product development, and cost competitiveness. This distinction matters because it shifts the diagnosis from timing alone to execution quality. Reuters reported that Volkswagen’s partnership with Rivian was designed specifically to accelerate access to modern electrical architecture and software capabilities, while later reports showed Volkswagen expanding that cooperation and linking future model programs to the joint venture’s technology roadmap (Reuters, 2024a; Reuters, 2025b; Reuters, 2025c). That evidence suggests Volkswagen itself recognizes that the problem was not electrification as a strategic direction, but the gap between ambition and execution.

Macroeconomic Context: Germany’s Broader Malaise

Volkswagen’s crisis does not exist in isolation. Germany’s economy has entered an unprecedented period of difficulty, set to complete its third consecutive year of recession in 2025, something that has not occurred in the post-war period (JobsPikr, 2025). Manufacturing production declined 4.5% in the prior year, and GDP was expected to shrink by 0.5% in 2025 (JobsPikr, 2025).

The global trade war, particularly U.S. tariffs on European vehicles, has added further pressure. VW reported a 37% decline in operating profits in the first quarter of 2025, citing U.S. tariffs, which rose from 2.5% to 25% before being partially reduced to 15%, as a key factor (WSWS, November 2025). The broader disruption to semiconductor supply chains, including Chinese export restrictions on chips following Dutch governmental intervention at Nexperia, adds another layer of vulnerability to an already stressed supply network (WSWS, November 2025).

These macroeconomic factors do not explain VW’s structural problems but have materially accelerated their visibility. A prolonged period of strong global growth and Chinese demand had masked deep inefficiencies. The simultaneous reversal of multiple favorable conditions has created what one analyst described as “an existential crisis” for the brand (Automotive Logistics, 2024).

The Restructuring Response: Adequate or Insufficient?

The Zukunft Volkswagen Agreement

The December 2024 “Zukunft Volkswagen” agreement represents the company’s most significant restructuring in its history. The deal targets €15 billion in annual savings by 2030, reduces technical production capacity by 734,000 units, freezes wages in 2025 and 2026, and commits to reducing the German workforce by 35,000 jobs through natural attrition and voluntary measures (EV, 2026). In 2025, the group reported achieving approximately €1 billion in cost savings under this program (EV, 2026).

In January 2026, CEO Oliver Blume and CFO Arno Antlitz presented a further savings plan described by insiders as “massive,” and reports indicated that plant closures have not been entirely ruled out despite the agreement’s provisions (Hagerty, 2026). The Transparent Factory in Dresden, a showpiece facility opened in 2002, was closed in 2025, becoming the first VW plant to shut in the company’s history (Hagerty, 2026).

Is It Enough?

The fundamental question is whether these measures address the structural causes of VW’s decline or merely treat its symptoms. The savings targets are significant, but the competitive gap with Chinese manufacturers, who benefit from state subsidies, lower labor costs, and vertically integrated supply chains, is unlikely to be closed through cost-cutting alone. As S&P Global Ratings (2025) noted, VW’s current BEV lineup remains unable to compete with the stream of Chinese-developed models, which offer superior infotainment, advanced driver-assistance systems, and competitive pricing.

The political constraints on restructuring, no forced layoffs, no mandatory plant closures, mean that VW cannot achieve the degree of operational transformation that its competitive position may ultimately require. The reliance on natural attrition to reduce headcount by 35,000 is a slow process, while competitors are moving at a pace that demands rapid adaptation. VW’s partnership with Rivian for software and with XPeng for China-specific vehicles are strategically sound, but they add complexity, cost, and execution risk to an already stretched organization.

Another concern is that restructuring may improve near-term economics without fully solving the strategic coherence problem. Cost savings, job reductions, and capacity cuts are necessary responses to deteriorating margins, but they do not automatically restore competitiveness in software, product desirability, or Chinese market fit. Volkswagen’s own 2024 annual reporting confirms that the group remains in a costly transformation phase, with pressure from electrification, software investment, and regional market weakness shaping performance (Volkswagen Group, 2025). If the group becomes leaner but still remains slower than Chinese EV firms in product cycles and digital innovation, then restructuring will stabilize the balance sheet without fully restoring strategic advantage. In that case, the turnaround would remain incomplete.

Conclusion

Volkswagen’s crisis is the product of multiple converging failures, none of which can be understood in isolation. The loss of China reflects a failure to anticipate and adapt to the speed of domestic EV competition. The CARIAD disaster reflects a failure to understand that software development requires fundamentally different organizational culture and management practices than hardware manufacturing. The high production costs reflect decades of deferred structural reform, enabled by strong profits and protected by powerful institutional actors. The EV transition reflects a company that committed to a new strategy before it had the capabilities to execute it, while simultaneously abandoning the profitable legacy business that could have funded the transition.

There is also a broader strategic lesson in Volkswagen’s experience. Legacy scale can become a liability when it creates coordination burdens that exceed its economic benefits. Volkswagen’s portfolio breadth, political embeddedness, and historically successful China strategy all once appeared to be major strengths. Under new competitive conditions, however, those same features have become sources of rigidity. Reuters framed 2026 as a decisive year for Oliver Blume because investors increasingly view the turnaround as dependent on whether Volkswagen can simultaneously arrest its China decline and close its technology gap (Reuters, 2026a). That framing is useful because it shows the crisis is not merely about temporary underperformance. It is about whether Volkswagen can redesign its organizational logic for an era in which software integration, regional agility, and faster execution matter as much as manufacturing scale.

Together, these failures reveal an institution that grew too large, too complex, and too politically constrained to respond with the speed and decisiveness that modern competitive dynamics demand. The restructuring underway, the “Zukunft Volkswagen” program, the Rivian partnership, and the China-specific platform strategy represent serious and necessary action. But it may not be sufficient to fully restore VW’s competitiveness against agile, state-backed Chinese rivals and nimble EV-native competitors.

For that reason, Volkswagen should be understood not simply as a company under pressure, but as a legacy institution undergoing forced strategic reconfiguration. Its future will likely depend less on whether it can make incremental improvements and more on whether it can materially simplify decision-making, accelerate software execution, and restore product relevance in China. The road ahead, therefore, is not just a turnaround challenge. It is a question of institutional reinvention.

What is certain is that Volkswagen’s experience constitutes a defining case study for legacy automakers globally. The transition from mechanical engineering to software-defined, electrified vehicles is not merely a technical challenge. It is a test of organizational culture, strategic agility, and institutional adaptability. For VW, the outcome of that test remains unresolved.

References

AInvest. (2025, September 9). Assessing Volkswagen’s China market resilience amid EV transition. AInvest. https://www.ainvest.com/news/assessing-volkswagen-china-market-resilience-ev-transition-2509/

AInvest. (2025, December 15). Volkswagen’s strategic turnaround in China: Assessing the viability of localized R&D and EV innovation. AInvest. https://www.ainvest.com/news/volkswagen-strategic-turnaround-china-assessing-viability-localized-ev-innovation-2512/

Automotive Logistics. (2024, October 31). Volkswagen to close plants, lay off staff and cut wages in Germany. Automotive Logistics. https://www.automotivelogistics.media/policy-and-regulation/volkswagen-to-close-plants-lay-off-staff-and-cut-wages-in-germany/46306.article

Autoblog. (2024, November 7). Volkswagen’s China crisis: Can the German giant survive the EV price war? Autoblog. https://www.autoblog.com/news/volkswagen-china-crisis-ev-price-war-survival

Brix Consulting. (n.d.). EP 25 – Volkswagen’s €20 billion software disaster. Brix Consulting. https://brix.consulting/blog/ep25_volkswagensoftwaredisaster/

CarBuzz. (2024, November 12). Volkswagen’s current situation is a dire warning to all other automakers. CarBuzz. https://carbuzz.com/volkswagens-financial-troubles-warning/

EV. (2026, January 12). VW Group EV sales fall 44% in China in 2025, rise 32% globally. Electric Vehicles. https://eletric-vehicles.com/vw-group/vw-group-ev-sales-fall-44-in-china-in-2025-rise-32-globally/

EV. (2026, March 10). Volkswagen Group to slash 50,000 jobs by 2030 as profit nearly halves. Electric Vehicles. https://eletric-vehicles.com/vw-group/volkswagen-group-to-slash-50000-jobs-by-2030-as-profit-nearly-halves/

Euronews. (2024, October 28). Volkswagen set to close three German plants and cut thousands of jobs. Euronews Business. https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/10/28/volkswagen-set-to-close-three-german-plants-and-cut-thousands-of-jobs

F&L Asia. (2024, December 1). Foreign automakers adapt to China’s EV market shift. Fuels and Lubes Asia. https://www.fuelsandlubes.com/fli-article/foreign-automakers-adapt-to-chinas-ev-market-shift/

Fortune. (2024, April 6). China’s EV competition is so fierce that Volkswagen “cannot keep up.” Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/04/06/volkswagen-china-ev-competition-byd-automotive-competition/

Fortune. (2025a, July 15). China’s car market has lost all reason: The country’s largest western carmaker refuses to compete in Tesla and BYD’s EV price war. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/07/15/china-car-market-tesla-byd-price-war-volkswagen-audi-jetta/

GermanAutopreneur. (2025, June 4). CARIAD: The real story behind VW’s software disaster. GermanAutopreneur. https://germanautopreneur.com/p/cariad-volkswagen-software-failure-lessons

Green Car Reports. (2024, July 30). Next-gen VW EVs reportedly delayed by software issues. Green Car Reports. https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1143961_next-gen-vw-evs-reportedly-delayed-by-software-issues

Hagerty. (2026, February). Volkswagen wants to slash costs by 20% across its entire portfolio. Hagerty Media. https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/volkswagen-cost-cutting-plant-closures/

InsideEVs. (2025, March 17). VW Group’s CARIAD software division had a bad year. Again. InsideEVs. https://insideevs.com/news/753673/vw-group-cariad-billions-losses-2024/

JobsPikr. (2025, November 14). Germany layoffs deepen: VW slashes 35,000 jobs. JobsPikr. https://www.jobspikr.com/blog/germany-layoffs-2025-automotive-crisis/

OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. (2024, September 12). The crisis at Volkswagen presents a significant political challenge for the German government. OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2024-09-12/crisis-volkswagen-presents-a-significant-political-challenge-german

Reuters. (2024, June 25). Volkswagen to invest up to $5 billion in Rivian, set up joint venture. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volkswagen-invest-up-5-billion-rivian-part-tech-joint-venture-2024-06-25

Reuters. (2024, October 30). VW demands 10% wage cuts to save jobs as profits plunge. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volkswagen-reports-third-quarter-profit-slump-major-overhaul-looms-2024-10-30

Reuters. (2025a, July 3). How China’s new auto giants left GM, VW and Tesla in the dust. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/how-chinas-new-auto-giants-left-gm-vw-tesla-dust-2025-07-03

Reuters. (2025b, January 17). Volkswagen looking to deepen partnership with U.S. EV maker Rivian, Spiegel reports. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volkswagen-looking-deepen-partnership-with-us-ev-maker-rivian-spiegel-reports-2025-01-17

Reuters. (2025c, November 12). Volkswagen says Rivian JV tech could extend to combustion cars in future. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volkswagen-says-rivian-jv-tech-could-extend-combustion-cars-future-2025-11-12

Reuters. (2026a, January 28). Volkswagen CEO Blume, free of Porsche role, under pressure to deliver on turnaround. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/volkswagen-ceo-blume-free-porsche-role-under-pressure-deliver-turnaround-2026-01-28

Reuters. (2026b, January 12). Volkswagen drops to third in China sales as fast-growing Geely Auto overtakes. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volkswagen-drops-third-china-sales-fast-growing-geely-auto-overtakes-2026-01-12

S&P Global Ratings. (2025, September 1). Volkswagen AG. Volkswagen Group. https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/publications/more/s-p-ratings-direct-volkswagen-ag-release-01-09-2025-3084/download

Volkswagen Group. (2025). Annual report 2024. Volkswagen Group. https://annualreport2024.volkswagen-group.com

World Socialist Web Site. (2024, September 4). VW workers must prepare for industrial action to oppose factory closures and layoffs. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/04/fiqi-s04.html

World Socialist Web Site. (2024, December 14). Volkswagen: “New era” in social policy means thousands of auto jobs cut. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/14/owde-d14.html

World Socialist Web Site. (2025, November 3). Germany: Mass layoffs, trade war and war, what is to be done? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/03/oluc-n03.html

Yahoo Finance. (2025, January 14). Volkswagen sales slump in 2024 amid struggles in key Chinese market. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/volkswagen-sales-slump-2024-amid-150517314.html

Yahoo Finance. (2025, June 4). VW’s troubled CARIAD software unit has turned the corner, CEO Peter Bosch says. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vw-troubled-cariad-software-unit-221000979.html