Volkswagen chief executive Oliver Blume was jeered by more than 10,000 workers at the group's Wolfsburg headquarters, as he defended a restructuring plan that could ultimately double the group's job losses to around 100,000 and place German plant closures back on the table, in the sharpest confrontation yet between management and labour at Europe's largest carmaker. Blume and Volkswagen brand chief Thomas Schäfer used the 25 August plant meeting, the first of a series of town

The competitive tide that has battered Germany's carmakers in China is now running strongly on their own territory, with fresh data showing domestic brands losing share of the German electric-vehicle market even as it booms, and analysts warning of further profit warnings to come. German group brands still lead their home EV market, but their combined share fell sharply to 54.2 per cent in the first half of 2026 from 63.5 per cent a year earlier, according to Professor Stefan

Gerry McGovern, the designer behind the reborn Land Rover Defender and a generation of Range Rovers, has said his career in car design is far from over, in his first public comments since his sudden and contested departure from Jaguar Land Rover, and a signal that one of the industry's most influential figures intends to return to the drawing board. Speaking exclusively to Autocar's My Week in Car podcast, published on 12 August, McGovern set out to correct the record on an e

The British government has announced almost £130 million of investment in next-generation vehicle technology, backing Bentley, Nissan and a raft of smaller firms, in a bid to arrest a steep decline in domestic car production and reindustrialise the country's manufacturing heartlands. Delivered through the £4 billion DRIVE35 programme, described by ministers as the largest state investment in the UK car industry since the post-war era, the funding will support more than 1,800

Skoda is preparing to open order books on the Peaq, a seven-seat electric SUV that becomes the most expensive model in the Czech brand's history, in a deliberate step upmarket that tests how far a marque built on value can stretch its pricing as it doubles its electric range. The Peaq is Skoda's new flagship and its largest car to date, measuring 4.87 metres in length, some 12 centimetres longer than the combustion-engined Kodiaq. Built on the Volkswagen Group's MEB platform,

Porsche has agreed to eliminate a further 5,000 jobs at its German sites by 2035, taking its cumulative restructuring toward 9,000 roles, in a stark admission that the collapse of its Chinese business and a costly retreat from electrification have upended what was once the industry's most profitable carmaker. The executive board and general works council signed off on the "Future Package" on 27 July, a deal negotiated with the IG Metall union and the Südwestmetall employers'