The German inside: what Germany builds into your car, your flight and the data centre
Your car may be Japanese or Italian, your airliner Airbus or Boeing. Inside both, and in the data centres behind them, sit German gearboxes, seals, bearings, chips, turbines, landing gear and racks.
The badge on a car tells you who designed and sold it. It tells you very little about who made it. A modern vehicle is assembled from systems bought from tiers of suppliers, and a remarkable number of the most demanding of those systems come from German companies whose names most drivers never see. The same is true, at even greater altitude, of the aircraft that carry us. This article follows the German parts through two machines: a premium car and a single-aisle airliner.
Part one: the car
The gearbox from a zeppelin company
Shift a BMW, an Alfa Romeo Giulia or a Jaguar XE into drive and, according to the Australian motoring site CarExpert, you are very probably using the same eight-speed automatic: the 8HP from ZF Friedrichshafen. It went into production at Saarbrücken in July 2009, as one of the first eight-speed automatics in volume production, and ZF claimed an 11 per cent fuel economy gain over standard six-speed units. In 2019 ZF announced an order from BMW for the next generation with a value in the double-digit billions of euros, and it now also builds the 8HP in Gray Court, South Carolina.
What most people do not know: ZF began in 1915 as a subsidiary of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, making gears for airships. It is still majority-owned by the Zeppelin Foundation, which holds 93.8 per cent and is administered by the town of Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. One of the world's largest car suppliers, with revenue of 38.8 billion euros in 2025, is in effect controlled by a small German town. See ZF 8HP.
The seal everybody calls by its brand name
Wherever a rotating shaft leaves a housing filled with oil, something must stop the oil escaping. In 1932 Freudenberg, then a leather company in Weinheim, introduced a radial shaft seal developed by Walther Simmer and his team, initially made from leather offcuts. It is called the Simmerring, and Freudenberg says the name is used in Europe as a generic term for radial shaft seals of every kind, much as "hoover" once was for vacuum cleaners. By 1953 Freudenberg had made 100 million of them. Today versions seal shafts as narrow as one millimetre, and conductive variants in electric cars carry away static charge that would otherwise damage bearings.
Freudenberg is also a lesson in ownership. The group, with revenue of 11.7 billion euros in 2025, is held by descendants of its 1849 founder Carl Johann Freudenberg, with hundreds of family shareholders and no single holder above 2 per cent.
The bearing behind every turning shaft
Every wheel, gearbox and electric motor turns on bearings. Schaeffler, from Herzogenaurach in Franconia, says its rise began in 1949, when Georg Schaeffler developed the cage-guided needle roller bearing, lighter and able to run faster than earlier designs. The INA brand stands for Industrie-Nadellager, industrial needle bearings. The company later absorbed FAG of Schweinfurt, the clutch maker LuK and, in October 2024, Vitesco Technologies, the former Continental powertrain arm. After that merger the Schaeffler family's holding owned about 79 per cent of the common shares. In 2025 the enlarged group reported revenue of 23.5 billion euros and about 110,750 employees.
The chips
A modern car can contain more semiconductors than a laptop: microcontrollers for the brakes and airbags, power chips for the electric drive, sensors everywhere. By the analyst firm TechInsights' count, Infineon was the world's largest automotive semiconductor supplier in 2025 for the sixth year running, with a 12.8 per cent share. More striking is its position in automotive microcontrollers, the small computers that run individual vehicle functions, where TechInsights put Infineon at 36 per cent. And alongside them sit Bosch MEMS sensors; in 2018 Bosch said a new car contained about five of them on average, before counting the ones in the driver's phone.
Some of the most familiar German safety technology in cars is also the least visible. Bosch's electronic stability programme, which brakes individual wheels to stop a skid, is one example; we tell that story in Bosch ESP. It sits on the same brake hydraulics as the anti-lock system described in Bosch ABS.
The roof over your head
If your car has a sunroof or a panoramic glass roof, there is a reasonable chance it came from Webasto of Stockdorf, near Munich. Roof systems made up about 79 per cent of its roughly 4 billion euros of revenue in 2025. The name itself is an acronym of its founder and its home, Wilhelm Baier and Stockdorf, adopted after the firm moved there in 1908. Founded in 1901 to make sheet-metal goods, including parts for mousetraps, Webasto developed its first folding fabric roof in the 1930s.
It is also the clearest example of how hard the industry has become. In October 2025 Webasto agreed a refinancing with its lenders: about 1.2 billion euros of credit lines extended to the end of 2028 plus 200 million euros of new loans, while the owning families transferred a significant portion of their shares to a trustee. The families remain economic owners. Carmakers agreed to pay higher prices to help.
Part two: the airliner
One third of the engines, assembled in Munich
One of the two engine options for the Airbus A320neo family is Pratt & Whitney's geared turbofan, the PW1100G-JM. It is an American engine with a German heart. In 2011 MTU Aero Engines took an 18 per cent share in the programme. MTU supplies the entire low-pressure turbine, the high-speed turbine that runs at a far higher speed than in conventional engines because the gearbox decouples it from the fan, the first four stages of the high-pressure compressor and the brush seals.
What most people do not know: MTU is the sole worldwide supplier of the engine's low-pressure turbine, and around one third of all PW1100G-JM engines receive final assembly at MTU in Munich, not in the United States. In September 2025 MTU's Polish plant near Rzeszów shipped its 5,000th low-pressure turbine module for the engine. MTU reported record adjusted revenue of 8.7 billion euros for 2025.
The landing gear from the Allgäu
When an Airbus A350 lowers its nose wheel, it is relying on a part designed, made and certified in Lindenberg, a small town in the Bavarian Allgäu. Liebherr-Aerospace Lindenberg supplies the A350's nose landing gear, its slat actuation system and key flap actuation components, and also builds the folding wingtip system for Boeing's 777X. In April 2026 Liebherr said the first A350 nose landing gear from one operator had entered overhaul in Lindenberg. Liebherr's holding company is Swiss, but this engineering is done in Germany.
The light in the cabin
Look up at the soft blue glow of an airliner ceiling at night. Diehl, the family-owned group from Nuremberg, says its aviation arm has been the global market leader in cabin lighting for decades. Airbus has relied on Diehl for emergency lighting and power supply for decades, and Diehl says Boeing switched to it for those functions on the 787. Diehl Aviation also makes galleys, lavatories, cabin linings and air distribution, with Airbus as its main customer, and about three quarters of its business comes from new aircraft.
Part three: the cabinet behind the cloud
Both machines now depend on a third: the data centre. A connected car downloads software updates, and an airline's maintenance planning runs on servers. Inside those halls, the steel racks, enclosures and cooling units that hold the servers often come from Rittal of Herborn in Hesse. Founded in 1961 and today the largest company in the family-owned Friedhelm Loh Group, Rittal describes itself as the world's leading system supplier for enclosures. Its industrial cabinets house the controls of factory lines, including many of the car plants above, and its IT racks and cooling systems are built into modular data centres. At the 2025 Open Compute Project summit Rittal presented a rack for NVIDIA's MGX server architecture, built for AI computing. The Friedhelm Loh Group, which also owns the engineering software firm Eplan, reported revenue of 3.1 billion euros in 2024.
What most people do not know: Rittal says its system solutions are used in more than 90 per cent of industrial sectors worldwide, yet the company is not listed and has a single owner, Friedhelm Loh. Much of the infrastructure of the digital economy is still formed from sheet steel in small towns in central Germany.
The common thread
What unites a zeppelin gearbox company, a former tannery, a bearing maker and a town in the Allgäu is a business model: make the hardest component in the system, make it for everyone, and make it for decades. Most of these firms are family- or foundation-owned, which gives them time horizons that listed rivals struggle to match. It also leaves them exposed. The car transition to electric drive is shrinking the market for gearboxes and seals around combustion engines, and Webasto shows what happens when volumes fall faster than costs. The aerospace firms, by contrast, sit on order books stretching into the 2030s. The badge still belongs to someone else. The engineering, very often, does not.
Sources
- Wikipedia: ZF Friedrichshafen (ownership, revenue, 8HP)
- CarExpert: Inside the suppliers, ZF
- ZF via PR Newswire: ZF wins major business for new 8-speed automatic (2019)
- Just Auto: ZF's Saarbrücken plant gearing up for the future
- Freudenberg Sealing Technologies: 85 years of the Simmerring
- Wikipedia: Freudenberg Group
- Schaeffler: 70 years of Schaeffler
- Schaeffler via EQS: Schaeffler reports solid results for 2025
- EE Journal: Infineon further extends its global leadership in automotive semiconductors
- Webasto: 125 years anniversary
- Webasto: Financing secured until end of 2028
- MTU Aero Engines: MTU takes 18 percent share in PW1100G-JM
- SP's Airbuz: MTU celebrates 5,000th low-pressure turbine for PW1100G-JM
- Liebherr: First flight, Liebherr-Aerospace on board the A350 XWB
- Rittal: Data, facts and figures
- Friedhelm Loh Group: Rittal
- Diehl Aviation: Cabin lighting systems and interior functions