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 @[email protected] 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.

There were accusations and reports for their factory in Brazil (source: BBC, as well as many others at the same time). I personally didn’t look much further into it and haven’t tried following the story since, but I would research if I was looking to buy a car.

Edit: Note I’m also not the op of the comment.

All of the German car makers were actually opposed to the import taxes on Chinese EVs, as was Germany as a whole. But it got passed on the EU level anyway.