By DCB Editorial, April 9, 2025
The Volkswagen Group, once a towering symbol of post-war European industrial might, now finds itself caught between the tectonic shifts of economic nationalism, technological upheaval, and a global marketplace increasingly shaped by political fragmentation and ecological urgency.
Its recent sales figures tell a story that is as much about machines as it is about the unraveling of old certainties. In Europe, a continent grappling with its historical identity while staring down the barrel of a climate reckoning, sales of Volkswagen’s battery-electric vehicles more than doubled in the first quarter. This surge comes not from some sudden moral awakening, but from bureaucratic mandates—EU emissions targets, imposed like commandments from a faltering technocracy desperate to remain relevant.
China, by contrast, tells a different tale. There, EV sales for Volkswagen collapsed by more than a third. The company, once a titan in the Middle Kingdom, finds itself outpaced by nimbler, domestic rivals—products of a system that has embraced the electric age not as a vision, but as an instrument of dominance. Foreign brands, with their legacy baggage and Western illusions, are increasingly irrelevant in a marketplace engineered for disruption.
China Decline
Yet the internal combustion engine clings on in China, and Volkswagen still commands a significant 22% share of that dying kingdom—a final redoubt for an old order running on borrowed time.
Volkswagen, like its European peers Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, reported overall declining sales in China. But the company’s optimism remains mechanized and obligatory: it promises new ID.3 and ID.4X models, a shiny new Audi EV to be unveiled in Shanghai, and glimpses of future vehicles set for release in 2026. The showroom dreams persist, even as the geopolitical ground shifts beneath the factory floor.
In the United States, sales ticked up modestly—6.2%—likely an anticipatory flinch ahead of looming 25% tariffs, a product of escalating trade tensions and the disintegration of the globalist consensus. Volkswagen’s American offerings, largely assembled in Mexico or imported from Europe, are now exposed to the unpredictable calculus of economic nationalism, where policy is driven not by vision but by vengeance.
This is not simply a story of market trends or automotive forecasts. It is the slow death rattle of a global economic model built on limitless expansion, cheap labor, and fossil-fueled fantasies. Volkswagen is adapting, yes—but like so many institutions of the 20th century, it does so not with imagination, but with inertia, caught in the rearview mirror of history as the road ahead disappears into a storm.
