Jaguar F-Type long-awaited return to sports car form
PLANNING FOR PROSPERITY Europe’s carmakers look for routes to profitability as premium marques and value brands thrive while volume products decline. Tony Lewin reports.
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ore powerful than either horsepower or corporate power, the forces now sweeping through the European – and global – automotive industry are reshaping the landscape like never before. The longpromised new era of electric cars has finally become reality, with big names such as BMW and Wall Street darling start-up Tesla fielding advanced products and gaining very positive press along the way. Despite high early-adopter prices, Europeans bought over 30,000 battery-powered models in 2013, and with both the Volkswagen Golf and Ford Focus now available as electrics, the figure could double once again in 2014. Though these may come to be seen as significant milestones in the history of the automobile, when considered in the broader context of the 12 million customers who buy petrol and diesel-powered cars in Europe each year,
C4 Cactus – a welcome return to originality for Citroen
8 Industry Europe
electric models are still no more than an intriguing sideshow. For the same prevailing winds of continent-wide austerity that have blunted the take-up of minority-appeal electric cars are also rocking the foundations of the volume car business – to the extent that one automaker group has had to reform its structure in order to ensure its survival. A quick roll-call of winners and losers shows how things are changing. Business is booming – provided your product is in a trendy segment such as that for compact SUVs. Typified by the Nissan Juke, Renault Captur and Peugeot 2008, these have successfully captured the zeitgeist of urban escapism and, being built on the basis of mass-production hatchbacks, are also good news for profit margins. Prestigious small-to-medium cars are good news, too, with the new Mercedes A-Class and a refreshed Audi A3 helping boost the segment
by a quarter – impressive in an overall market that struggled to reach its already disappointing 2012 sales total. Yet for those producers not fortunate enough to have strong products in these few growth segments, the picture is one of a continuing struggle. Large, exotic and ostentatious cars of whatever stripe appear to be falling out of favour with consumers, though individual launches of long awaited new models such as the Mercedes S-Class and Jaguar F-Type sports car have provided a misleadingly positive influence on otherwise troubled sectors. Another remarkable performance is that turned in by the Range Rover Evoque, the super-stylish sporty SUV that has the Land Rover factory working round the clock to meet worldwide demand. At the opposite end of the prestige scale comes an equally successful story – that of Dacia, the Romanian-based budget brand controlled by Renault. Its sensible, familyoriented hatchbacks and light off-roaders have caught the mood of the moment and have seen their sales rocket by a quarter: in a still-declining climate this represents a powerful trend. Big-number losers include larger nonpremium saloons such as the Ford Mondeo, Peugeot 508 and Toyota Avensis, all down by a third, and the Renault Mégane, down by a quarter; other stalwarts such the Nissan Qashqai and Mercedes C-Class paused for breath as their factories geared up for newgeneration models.
