I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them.
What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their paychecks politics. An average salary of ~80k/y, as reported in the linked piece, explains a lot.
You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).
I don't know where you have those numbers from, but they are very inaccurate. The average household income in Berlin in 2012 was 1650€ net per month [1], so that would be about 20k per year. According to what you wrote, Berlin streets should be essentially free from cars, but I can assure you that this is not the case.
Let me give you some real numbers. I am married and have a small child. I earn 55k gross, which is ~38k after taxes. My wife earns significantly less, providing another 7k per year. I don't know right now how much she earns before taxes, but our gross income combined is well below 80k. So we have about 45k per year and we easily get by. We have a nice flat, eat out several times a week, take ~3 vacations a year, are paying into a private pension plan, and are still saving money. Granted, we don't own a car, but we could if we wanted.
I have no idea if the reported 80k are accurate, but I would be very surprised, as it would be far above the average income for software developers in Berlin (and I think most of their employees are devs).
german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true.
Is that the actual paycheck, or the company expenses on salaries? I'm not an expert on German finances, but I would expect the actual paycheck to be only about 50% of total employer expenses.
And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.
I'm absolutely certain those cars don't belong to the employees. Also do take in consideration the average would include salaries from execs and teams in SF and NYC.
Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)
Of course not, I'm not talking about 200 Teslas parked outside. My reasoning was more or less this: devs, general low level employees, IT technician - they're not paid that much. They would probably be the low end of the pool of salaries. To rise the average so much it would take some good amount of overpayment for upper management and executives. All for a company that doesn't make money. Hence the observation about the cars.
AFAIK the two Teslas frequently seen around the Factory belong to the same guy (one of the founders of the Factory). There's not that many execs at the Soundcloud office as well, from what I reckon.
Also: there's multiple companies in the building complex (including a bunch of seats on the coworking space reserved for offsites from executives from Lufthansa and some other giants)
That would explain the high concentration of super cars, then, but It was at least 4 teslas, 2 blue ones, one in red, one in white.
Source: I lived in the area for 7 months last year
