That was the car year
And the Loser 2023 is…
By Helmut Becker
December 27, 2023, 3:53 p.m
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The automotive year 2023 has ups and downs, winners and losers. Which markets are resilient and which are weak? Which car manufacturer is coping best with the difficult market conditions – and who is attracting negative attention and therefore falling behind?
Since the invention of the Olympic Games around 2,800 years ago in honor of the gods, competition and the desire to win have been in human genes. Of course, this also applies to “Homo Economicus” today. Instead of “Faster, higher, further”, however, for him everything revolves around more growth in sales, profits, market share and being at the top of the rankings of the large and powerful competitors on the market.
So broken down to the automotive industry: Who is the winner of the 2023 car year, who lost? This question will be examined here.
A look at the industry
The IAA Mobility in September 2023 in Munich will already show impressively: the winner of the year is the Chinese automotive industry, while the loser is the German automotive industry. The bare numbers that underpin China’s supremacy: The Middle Kingdom is by far the largest producer of motor vehicles. In 2022, 23.8 million cars were manufactured, and in 2023 there are expected to be around 26 million, around 6 million of them with electric drives, which in turn corresponds to an electric car global market share of around 60 percent.
The driving force for China’s auto industry is the domestic market: a total of around 25 million new registrations are expected in 2023, which will then correspond to almost one in three new vehicles worldwide. In October alone, more than 2.46 million new cars were sold in China – more than in the US and EU combined. Or to put it another way: As many new cars were sold in China in one month as in Germany in almost a whole year.
The fact that Germany is lagging behind China’s car sales market in terms of numbers is nothing new. The fact that the German auto industry will have lost its technologically innovative global supremacy to China in 2023 is new. China as the electric car world champion has overtaken the old combustion engine world champion Germany. When it comes to electromobility, China is superior to German car manufacturers in all respects: in electric and battery technology, the availability of raw materials, production costs and in mass motorization in the form of smaller electric cars. The German auto industry doesn’t have any of this, apart from some exotic, high-priced premium electric cars.
And the threatening thing for the domestic auto industry: In Germany, the production of electric cars is being cut down, shifts are being cut, and production lines are coming to a standstill. In China, however, the production of electric cars is running at full speed. The exhibitions and shows are overflowing with brands, models and visitors. Established manufacturers and startups are constantly bringing new vehicles and variants onto the market with which they are also pushing into Europe.
A look at the manufacturers
If you look at the individual car manufacturers, the big winner internationally is BYD. The Chinese high-flyer with the well-known marketing slogan “Build Your Dreams” will have displaced industry pioneer Tesla from the top electric position in 2023 with an estimated 1.9 million pure electric cars, so-called BEVs. Since BYD also builds combustion engines, the company, including plug-in hybrids, has already overtaken the German premium giants BMW and Mercedes-Benz with 2.4 million vehicles. In November, BYD exported more than 30,000 electric cars abroad for the first time. Record. For the year as a whole there are likely to be more than 200,000 export units, which in turn represents a fourfold increase compared to 2022. Growth outside of China – and with vehemence! BYD has long had its sights set on the European market and, like Tesla, wants to build its own vehicles here. Whether in Saarland or Hungary has not yet been finally clarified.
But there is also a winner on the German side, chosen by the industry newspaper “Automobilwoche”: BMW. For the second time after 2021, the Munich-based group is the “Winner of the Year” in the “Car Manufacturer of the Year 2023” category. BMW boss Oliver Zipse said: “At BMW, the future and the present come from a single source.”
There is nothing to add. Oh, yes: the losers in 2023 were Tesla and Volkswagen. The German industry leader, the benchmark in the Middle Kingdom for decades, continued to lose ground in China.