Volkswagen Group is doing well with electric vehicle sales in its home region, but costly tariffs and eroding market share in China and North America have been hurting it badly. Europe's largest automaker, which also owns brands including Audi, Porsche, Skoda, and Lamborghini, has seen its profit margins evaporate, and yesterday the company's supervisory board was presented with a plan to ameliorate that. An expected call for factory closures and redundancies wasn't included—at least not in VW Group's public statement—but according to Reuters, the measure failed anyway in a 12-7 vote.

Unlike most automakers, worker unions are extremely powerful at the VW Group. Half of the 20 seats on the supervisory board are appointed by worker councils. Another two seats are spoken for thanks in part to the company's partial ownership by the German state of Lower Saxony—currently held by that state's minister of education and minister-president. So while profit has been important, it's not the only thing that matters to the decision-makers.

Over the years, there have been lengthy fights over any suggestion of redundancies. Lately, VW Group and its unions spent months in negotiations in 2024 before finally agreeing to a plan to cut 35,000 jobs by 2030.

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Anyone who has followed the aftermarket automotive performance industry for long enough can tell you just how dramatically it has changed over the past few decades. What once required mechanical tinkering and a lot of know-how can now be done in mere minutes via an electric control unit (ECU), which can extract significant boosts in horsepower and torque from naturally aspirated, turbocharged, or supercharged engines.

In some ways, though, the process has become much more difficult.

Just ask Alabama-based Audi Performance & Racing, more prominently known as APR. As modern vehicles become increasingly software-driven and OEMs continue to tighten security, the company has had to work harder each year to offer ECU tuning that delivers more power while staying within factory parameters for overall reliability. It's a far more arduous process now than it was in the early aughts, when my own B5-generation Audi S4 was still fresh on the market.

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