At Volkswagen’s headquarter in Wolfsburg, it is easy to see why the car industry has such a relevance for Europe’s largest economy: one can get lost in a production site that is almost as big as Gibraltar, consumes 0.35 per cent of Germany’s power demand and employs more than 85,000.

But now this key sector of the German economy is beginning to falter, as profits are squeezed by a plunge in demand, high oil prices and fallouts of the financial crisis.