Ah, the good old days of the popular car! Grandparents proudly showed off, on the threshold of the 1960s, their new Renault 4CV, Dauphine, or other German Beetle. The heyday of the Billancourt factories, near Paris, the first holiday traffic jams and happy farmers.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but the return of the people’s car seems relevant again. After filling their pockets by selling wealthy cars, thanks to post-Covid shortages, car manufacturers are returning to basics. Not everyone can be Porsche or Ferrari. To save money, you need volume. And to generate volume, you have to sell cheap cars. Even the electric car revolution is no exception to this basic rule.
Emblematic case, that of Tesla. Elon Musk’s firm has prospered until 2022 on its superiority in this field to sell its cars on all continents and exceed the symbolic threshold of one million cars sold in one year. Then, in 2023, the dynamic gradually broke down.
To further increase sales and support Chinese competition, the manufacturer began to lower the prices of its models and ended up seeing its growth decline. The company’s 2023 turnover, presented on Wednesday January 24, increased by 15%, to more than 80 billion dollars (73.4 billion euros), but, in the last quarter of last year, its sales only increased by 3%. A virtual stagnation.
Chinese competition
In the meantime, the Chinese BYD has moved ahead in terms of global sales, with much more affordable models. It must be said that China is full of competitors. For BYD, as for MG or Geely, international is the only escape route in the face of the slowdown in their domestic market. To counter them, no mystery, we must reconnect with the charm of the popular car. Elon Musk announced the construction of a factory in Austin, Texas, which would present a good automobile market starting at the end of 2025, with a “revolutionary technology”.
In Europe, Renault and Citroën, the old veterans of inexpensive cars, are stepping into the breach. Renault has a head start thanks to its Romanian brand, Dacia. Its Sandero model is the second best-selling car in Europe in 2023, just behind… the Tesla Model Y. All this is good news for the energy transition, since transport remains Europe’s main black spot in this area. It remains to be demonstrated that the manufacturing of these models is competitive in our regions, which is still far from being the case.
