It's proven very difficult for any legacy ICE manufacturer to successfully compete in BEVs. BYD is really the only example. Whipping around the Titanic is already extremely difficult, and you're right, German culture makes it basically impossible.
While German rigidity and risk-aversion might have made it more difficult (I used to work for a German multinational so I have some experience with this), it's true that for any big company -- even American ones -- that it is hard to disrupt yourself.
Clay Christiansen wrote a book about this called the Innovator's Dilemma.
