1st ICAI 2020

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2020

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

4. Conclusion This paper focuses on data and sources of data about the automobile industry on both the national (Czech and German) levels and the international level of the European Union. Considering the importance of the automotive industry to all of those economies, both from the standpoint of its Gross Value Added and employment impacts, the data deserves to be constantly monitored and analysed. Comparable, recent data can give us a fairly quick impression of how well a particular sector of the industry is doing and how specific laws, regulations, and other government measures — such as changes in how fuel consumption is measured, the introduction of the WLTP, and the current challenge, impelled by strict emission limits for newly registered cars, of changing over to mainly electrically powered vehicles — are affecting it. Besides economic developments, another important factor influencing the automotive industry is consumer confidence, which affects car buyers’ desire to purchase new cars. Germany in particular has experience with this phenomenon. It is exactly low confidence and negative expectations that have depressed consumption by households and investment by firms and been reflected in the performance of the automotive industry. German production and export of passenger cars has continuously fallen over three years, even though registrations of new cars have increased, helped along by purchases of cheaper models from foreign countries. The Czech automobile industry is experiencing a very interesting period in its history, with record production of passenger cars and an increase in the nominal Gross Value Added by the industry in 2018. Czechia is bumping up against the limits of its production capacity, however, mainly because of a lack of workers. The growth in employment and the share of Gross Value Added by the automotive industry is therefore slowing. The industry is facing stricter emission limits and must also adapt to the revolution in electromobility. Acknowledgements This paper was created within the project of ŠKODA AUTO Vysoká škola o.p.s.: Automotive Industry in the Contemporary Economy: Positions and Trends.

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