New Direction For Global Car Sales
A recent inventory on who the top passenger car manufacturers were worldwide showed that Volkswagen, Toyota, Hyundai and GM are the three leading passenger car manufacturers in the world. Where are most of our new cars made? The highly competitive nature of the global vehicle production industry reveals that most of the companies are based in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the US. Interestingly, the world’s largest producers of automobiles are China, the US, and Japan.
With this in mind, the four biggest passenger car manufacturers in the world in 2017 were: Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai and General Motors. Both Toyota and VW produced close to 10.5 million vehicles in 2017, with Toyota only just nudging out VW from the top spot. Hyundai produced a little over 7 million while GM produced just fewer than 7 million vehicles.
Since I’ve got you interested, have a guess as to who you think would be next. Well, another US manufacturer, Ford, takes fifth place with 6.4 million cars produced. Nissan is next on 5.8 million, closely followed by Honda on 5.2 million.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V., known as FCA, is an Italian-American multinational corporation and is the world’s eighth largest auto maker with 4.6 million units produced.
Two French car manufacturing groups finish out the top ten. So in at ninth and tenth respectively are Renault with 4.2 million and Groupe PSA with 3.6 million. Groupe PSA is a French multinational manufacturer of vehicles sold under the Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Opel and Vauxhall brands.
After some really big growth in 2017, there are a few signs that the car manufacturing industry is struggling a little. Some of the recent news has been that Ford plans to close its Bridgend plant next year. In February, Honda said it would close its Swindon plant by 2021. It comes as car-makers around the globe struggle with a range of challenges, and it appears that consumers are buying fewer cars.
A few possible reasons why global car sales in 2018 experienced falling demand are:
- Because China, the world’s biggest market, has experienced a slump in demand.
- Stricter emission controls are making the development of new cars that will meet emissions regulations a lot more difficult. The need for new technology to meet these higher standards makes it more expensive to build cars.
- The big movement to make electric vehicles (EVs) requires new investment. While it would also be fair to say that many countries just aren’t ready with the infrastructure to handle millions of new EVs. Global sales of battery electric cars surged by 73% in 2018 to 1.3 million units, but 1.3 million is still just a fraction of the 86 million cars sold worldwide. China is making great strides in creating plenty of EV infrastructures. The other difficulty with EVs is they have very limited driving range.
- As more and more driverless cars become mainstream it is conceivable that car ownership habits may change. If one driverless car drives as safely as the next driverless car then it might be that people would be happier to share or group-rent a vehicle rather than buy one outright just for themselves.
Level 2, 9 Help Street