Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Susanna Monsing and Jack Smith.

Today we'll talk about cars in the week when EU leaders meet for an informal summit in Belgium to discuss Europe's competitiveness.

And the car industry is, of all industry, probably the industry where Europe's competitiveness squeeze is at its most dramatic.

This is where output is falling.

This is where strategies are collapsing.

This is where the threat from China in particular is at its most acute.

Jack, where are we now?

Where we are now, I think, is that companies in the EU, you know, auto firms in the EU,

fundamentally they're struggling with one big strategic question, which is how they manage

the shift to electric cars.

And there are multiple components of this, right? There's the question of how

they actually do this, you know, how they actually manage the different supply chain processes,

how they manage software, battery technology, and so on and so forth. The extent to which you pour resources in this,

the extent to which you develop these things in house versus outsourcing them to other companies

and so on. You know, you have these practical questions for the car companies, but over and on top

of this, you have the question of, you know, demand in the European market, how quickly demand or slowly demand will be

shifting towards electric cars. It's definitely shifting towards electric cars, but the question is,

again, how much or how little. You have the question of how these European companies

perform in export markets while this shift is taking place. Again, export markets

where this process of transition might be going more quickly or more slowly. And then finally,

and I think most significantly, you do have this question of what to do about competition

from China, because you have a number of newer, mostly newer,

...