Last month, Tesla announced it would be building a “giga-factory” just outside Berlin. The factory will create as many as 8,000 jobs and crank out up to 150,000 cars every year. Two weeks after the Tesla announcement, Audi made an announcement of its own — albeit a less cheerful one. While Elon Musk and company are ramping up, Audi will be paring back, cutting 9,500 jobs in Germany between now and 2025. These two pieces of news seem to confirm a narrative that is gaining traction. It goes like this: Germany has failed to embrace the future. It has been complacent for too long, economically and politically, coasting on former glories. Now the new world is coming for it. This story is too simple to be entirely true, of course. And yet Germany’s relationship with cars does reflect many of the political, economic and societal […]