The collapse of Europe’s automobile industry is being presented as restructuring. It is not. It is a surrender.

Volkswagen, Europe’s largest automaker, has approved another 50,000 job cuts, bringing planned reductions to roughly 100,000 worldwide by 2030. Factories in Germany may stand without vehicles to build. Jaguar Land Rover is eliminating thousands of jobs. Nissan is closing plants and shedding tens of thousands of workers. Bosch, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, is preparing further cuts.

These are not isolated corporate decisions. They are symptoms of an industrial system that has lost its ability to protect the people who made it prosperous.

The old manufacturers face competitors, particularly in China, that have mastered batteries, electronics, software and manufacturing at extraordinary speed. Volkswagen admits it can carry a cost disadvantage of around 20 percent against some rivals. At the same time, European manufacturers must continue producing profitable combustion and hybrid vehicles while financing the enormously expensive transition to electric cars, software and automation.

They are attempting to inhabit two industrial eras simultaneously.

The consequences are being pushed downward. Workers lose jobs. Towns lose factories. Suppliers disappear. Skilled industrial communities that took generations to build are hollowed out in the name of efficiency.

Corporate executives call this simplification. Workers know another word for it.

Abandonment.

Volkswagen intends to slash its model range and reduce complexity dramatically. The promise is that a smaller, leaner company will be more competitive. But efficiency has become an ideology in which anything that cannot immediately produce an acceptable return is treated as expendable.

The irony is profound. The industrial giants that once embodied European economic power are now dismantling the factories, workforces and communities that created that power.

This is not simply about electric cars.

It is about the transfer of economic power from industrial workers and national economies toward capital, technology companies and global supply chains that can move production wherever costs are lowest.

The automobile was once a symbol of European industrial independence. Increasingly, it is becoming a symbol of its decline. And when the factories finally close, the executives will call it transformation.

The workers will call it what it is: the loss of a way of life.