3rd ICAI 2024

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2024

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

Although European brands have managed to maintain market share in Europe over the last 30 years, they have faced a number of threats in recent years. These range from the need to meet CO 2 emission standards, to lagging behind US or Chinese government support for the transition to electric cars, the lack of battery production and sourcing of raw materials for them, or to the growing competition from Chinese, mostly electric, vehicles (Alochet, 2023). The following two charts show the development of new passenger car registrations in absolute numbers and the market shares of each automotive group in the Western European market. Over the last three decades, Volkswagen (24% market share in 2021), luxury car producers BMW (8%) and Daimler (6%), as well as France’s PSA (16% in 2018 before the merger into Stellantis) have been successful in increasing their sales and market share of the passenger car market in EU15+EFTA. Korea’s Hyundai Kia (8% in 2021) and Japan’s Toyota (6%) also built up their market positions. By contrast, France’s Renault (9%) lost its position slightly, and bigger declines were recorded by Fiat/FCA (7% in 2018 before the merger into Stellantis), Ford (5%) and GM, which practically exited the European market after the sale of Opel in 2016.

Figure 14: Development of new passenger car registrations in EU15+EFTA by automotive group

Source: ACEA (2022); by brand ownership in a given year; Volkswagen without Porsche; data for Stellantis from 2019, although the merger of FCA and PSA officially took place in 2021; PSA from 2016 with Opel, which was owned by GM until then.

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