I took a tour back when it was making the Phaeton and the Bentley Continental and it was a great tour and experience. Kind of like a flagship location rather than just another factory.

What do you mean by regime? Last time I checked Germany was still a democratic country?

To be clear, it was this 'factory': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Factory

It never really made sense after the Phaeton, which it was built for, comprehensively failed (expected production 20k/year, demand never went over 10k/year); it has been effectively closed before, and honestly it's kind of surprising it wasn't closed a decade ago.

This specific plant employed less than 500 people in its heyday and never had a 'competitive edge' because it was originally built to manufacture luxury cars mostly via manual labor (specifically the doomed VW Phaeton).

BMW seem to be fine with that. VW’s problem is too many staff, they need to slim down to become competitive again.

Add to that insane competition from Chinese EVs, and the chips debacle from earlier this year.

If we become the same shithole as the US of A, we could produce very cheap cars. But for that goal, we have start or fuel some foreign wars, making the own population poorer and dumber every day. At least we have a residue of normality these days.

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Germans are missing that cheap Russian energy.