China took over exports and manufactoring capacity 5 fold of what germany was doing in core industries: manufacturing, machine building and chemicals.
Its not just innovation, we missed and our stubbornes of just keep doing what we good at, its also china catching up and steam rolling us.
When I bought an EV, people around me told me the same thing and still do: they like the sound of engines, these EVs are not suitable for daily use, EVs will burn down, we hate renewable, we hate cables, we hate...
To match china, we would not only need to work a lot more, we would also need to work on saturdays, break a lot of labor laws we build up, reduce salary despite working more, reduce energy costs massivly and automate as much as possible.
A nitting machine from germany costs 60k. In china, with the same quality (because they catched up) is 20k. 20k!
And were i'm from (bavaria) most young man want to become Mechanical engineers because of BMW and co. No one wants to do IT (lets ignore the AI elephant in the room).