At Altdeutsche Bierstube, the oldest bar in Wolfsburg, a man at the counter pondered whether Volkswagen’s home town would go the way of Michigan’s Flint — the birthplace of General Motors, once known as “Vehicle City”.
In the mid-80s, GM had announced it could no longer competitively build cars in Flint as it struggled with sliding sales and the rise of Asian low-cost rivals. It whittled down its operations in the city that, like other US locations in the rustbelt hit by the industrial decline, went from one financial crisis to the next, becoming known as one of the country’s most dangerous cities.
The man drinking his rum-laced tea glumly noted, that whether Wolfsburg, known as Germany’s “Die Autostadt”, would suffer a similar fate, depended on VW’s next move as it faces up to slowing demand, increasing competition and high costs.