Job losses and reskilling in the European car industry

CLEPA, the European association of automotive suppliers, counts announced job losses and new jobs every six months, based on Eurofound data and its own analysis. Suppliers announced 54,000 job losses in 2024 and another 50,000 in 2025, against 7,000 announced new jobs in 2025. In the first half of 2026 a further 18,900 job losses were announced. That is 35 per cent fewer than in the previous half-year, but more than in 2022 and 2023. Two thirds of the new jobs in that period were linked to electric vehicles. CLEPA does not rule out a new wave of restructuring in the second half of 2026.

In Germany, EY measures the same thing using raw figures from the federal statistics office, Destatis. At the end of March 2026, 32,000 fewer people worked in the German car industry than a year earlier, a fall of 4 per cent, and about 125,800 fewer than in 2019: one job in seven. Jan Brorhilker of EY expects further job losses in industry as a whole, because companies are now also discussing closing entire plants. According to Brorhilker, concerns about a future shortage of skilled workers are fading into the background.

ACEA, the association of European carmakers, commissioned Adecco to examine how ready 39 European automotive regions are for the transition; the analysis came out in January 2026. Up to 2035, work in car production will shift towards engineers, IT specialists and managers, while demand for metalworkers, administrative staff and skilled tradespeople falls. At the same time there are already shortages in precisely those occupations, because of replacement demand and an ageing workforce. IT specialists still make up only a small share of employment, which suggests that much of the digitalisation is outsourced. The report places the bottlenecks mainly within the organisation: workforce planning starts late, HR is involved late, and support for those who lose their jobs only comes afterwards. It also mentions the cultural change required and the trade-off between training time and production, and proposes using production downtime for training.

KPMG surveyed 775 executives at carmakers, suppliers, dealers and mobility companies in June 2026. Almost a third name a shortage of critical skills and talent as one of the three biggest internal barriers to their strategy. KPMG recommends replacing fixed annual plans with continuous reallocation of capital, talent and management attention.

How solid is this? The job losses are a CLEPA series covering several half-years and are confirmed in Germany by official figures, but the pace slowed in the first half of 2026. The claim that reskilling is lagging rests on a single analysis commissioned by the carmakers’ association, supplemented by a survey of executives. Dutch figures are missing. So the picture is not yet settled.