German carmakers invest in surfing a digital wave
[...] he packed up and took his team to new digs in Berlin, where increasingly urgent attempts to tap into a growing tech scene are part of German carmakers’ efforts to ride a digital wave sweeping the industry — before it rolls straight over them.
The market value of Alphabet, which is building a driverless car, is more than double that of BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen combined.
Industry executives in Germany often cite how Apple’s iPhone quickly erased Nokia’s once-dominant position in the mobile handset market, and they are determined not to let something similar happen to them.
The big question is always, ‘Do we car manufacturers learn to become tech companies more quickly than a tech company learns to be an automotive player?’
To combat the likes of Tesla, the Palo Alto electric automaker, BMW is planning to expand its i Series line of battery-powered and hybrid vehicles.
Since 2014, it has sold 100,000 of the i3 model, which runs on batteries and has a lightweight carbon fiber body.
While not a household name, the Berlin company provides about 80 percent of the built-in navigation systems for cars in North America and Europe, and is the only large-scale competitor to Google Maps.
“The future of Germany as an industrial nation depends on how companies succeed in bringing the manufacturing and digital worlds together,” said Frank Ridder, research leader for Germany, Austria and Switzerland for Gartner, a technology research firm.
[...] factory jobs as a percentage of total employment have been declining for years, prompting the government to dole out hundreds of millions of euros in research and development funds to meld traditional manufacturing with the latest technology.
The company, which is still dealing with its emissions cheating scandal, is the world’s biggest automaker, but was the slowest of the three to embrace the digital age, and is now trying to catch up.
In smaller cities, Harms said, Moia could offer an inexpensive form of public transportation, even though rivals like Uber and Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing service, are already well established in many of these locations.