Figures compiled by European trade body Clepa and shared with the FT show that parts suppliers announced 50,000 job losses in 2025, following 54,000 in 2024, in a sign of continued distress for the struggling sector.
Bosch, the world’s largest auto supplier, announced in September it would cut 13,000 jobs by 2030 after saying it faced an annual cost gap of €2.5bn, leading to protests from employees last month.
After parts makers Valeo, Forvia and Schaeffler announced plans in 2024 to cut thousands of jobs, last year saw the announcement of further job cuts at Continental’s automotive parts division, since spun off under the brand Aumovio.
They could have had a slice of the electric car cake, but decided instead to double down on petrol cars.
Did they? European car makers together have a significantly larger market share in the global EV market than Tesla. The VW Group alone is only marginally behind Tesla, and likely to overtake them soon. The European EV market is completely dominated by European carmakers.
That’s not the reason, total sales are way down, and if you want to blame anyone, blame the poor quality and poor reliability of european cars and brilliant ideas like subscriptions to hardware, and the complete focus on high profit margin cars no one is buying.
Blame management:)
But let’s be honest, the Chinese government subsidizes production
The job loss in luxury horse carriages was for sure bad too.
They built luxury cars instead. A lot of the skillset is pretty similar. The difference here is that engines and batteries and electric motors mostly require very different skills.
