Technology

I remember reading about it in german media, but you can easily check the votes in the EU gparliament, as they are public. Specifically there's a nice list of how they voted on that particular issue here (english/reuters). Germany voted "against".

Like @barsoap@lemm.ee wrote, the (german) articles mentions fears of "retribution" taxes by the chinese. And when these tarifs were announced/planned, china did immediately say they'd react accordingly (so it's no an unfounded fear). Another earlier article also mentions "expert opinions" that question benefit for the german car makers due to their large export volume to china (and at least some of them having plants in china making their vehicles, too).

Now a very recent article from last week notes that the profit of VW-Group has dropped around 31% over last year, and a large part of that is coming from lower sales (and more competition) in China, as well as general restructuring costs. But I have absolutely no idea if the "reverse tariffs" are actually already in place by China, or just planned, or if they reverted their stance. It might also be that they just made independently bad decisions and this is just a consequence of that...

Edit: corrected some nonsense, oops.

I have no idea but this article includes a section. German manufacturers feared a tariff war and aren't as exposed to Chinese competition in the first place as unlike e.g. the French German companies aren't competing as much on the low-budget market.