Volkswagen just confirmed the price of its electric-vehicle crusade. The board approved slashing another 50,000 jobs and ending production at four German plants. Combined with earlier cuts, the company is tearing out a sixth of its workforce. This is not a cyclical dip. It is the bill coming due for years of betting the company on a technology customers never fully wanted. 

After Dieselgate, Volkswagen did not just clean up its engines. It remade itself as a climate champion. Billions poured into dedicated EV platforms, software units, and factories such as Zwickau and Emden that were supposed to lead the electric future. Executives talked as if combustion engines were already history and European regulators would simply force the rest of the world to follow. Demand never arrived at the scale they assumed. Buyers still prefer affordable, long-range cars they can refuel in minutes. Range anxiety, charging deserts, high prices, and battery costs did not vanish because the company issued press releases about sustainability. Chinese manufacturers, unburdened by the same ideological overhead, delivered cheaper, more practical EVs and ate Volkswagen’s lunch first in China and then in Europe. 

Meanwhile Volkswagen’s own EV plants sat underused while the company still carried the high German labor and energy costs of its old model. Porsche quietly delayed its own electric timeline when the market refused to cooperate. In the United States, Volkswagen even halted ID.4 production in Tennessee to switch back to gasoline SUVs. The “transition” was never a market verdict. It was a political and cultural fashion that management treated as destiny. 

The result is textbook go-woke-go-broke. Virtue signaling about net-zero timelines and ESG scores does not pay the electricity bill or keep assembly lines running. Customers vote with their wallets, not with activists’ slogans. Volkswagen chased the narrative instead of the demand curve and is now paying for it in tens of thousands of livelihoods. Other manufacturers that stayed closer to what people actually buy look a lot smarter today. Ideology makes a poor product planner.