Obviously! The last decades have seen increasing reluctance of national governments to allow major employers to fail. Germany is no exception:
- right now Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are in teh process of a 'shotgun marriage'. Neitehr can fail, but both have serious weaknesses. Thus they are induced to join;
-years ago NSU was failing over the disaster of the Wankel Spyder and spectacularly the Ro80. Hence VW rescued and merged into the previous merged amalgam that was called Audi;
-several weak/failing aircraft suppliers/builders ended out joining the pan-European amalgam that became Airbus;
-I'll skip more detailed discussion of myriad other industries, regional champions and State-owned enterprises in Germany that merged rather tahn being liquidated. Frankly, Germany has less appetite for messy liquidation than do many countries.
The difference between German practice and many others is that the process often ended out working exceedingly well. Pretty good examples of that within the last few decades are Airbus itself, BMW with Glas; VW with NSU.
For TSLA investors this behavior is already evident. It is not outright merger, but is intellectual property exchange. With reference to BEV probably the first gigantic clue was the creation of CharIN. Then there is the major cooperation now going on with major auto suppliers (too cumbersome to discuss here) plus VW official platform sharing and disclosed plans for DB/BMW cooperation in BEV.
All this is not agile, but it is deliberate and determined. It also is very well thought out and planned.
So I think the question of manufacturer 'bailout' is not really the most relevant one. The relevant one is, IMHO, can traditional German methodology produce success is such a rapidly evolving field as BEV's? I think the answer is definitively YES!
These companies and their resources are not nearly as stodgy as they seem to be. Smooth progress: No, Success: absolutely.
