From “dieselgate” to the war in Ukraine, the seven years that revolutionized the car
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The scene takes place on the Ressons-sur-Matz area (Oise), along the A1 motorway, Saturday July 30. More than ten electric cars line up at the charging stations, promised to wait a long time. Photographed by a passer-by and sent to Twitter, the image will make some Internet users react, before giving way to the indifference reserved for banal moments. However, this scene – and, even more, its normality – has something unheard of. They sum up the immense upheaval, the “perfect storm”, that the automobile has experienced in a few years, on the scale of its history. Seven years precisely.
It was in the summer of 2015 that the Volkswagen scandal broke out, the “dieselgate”, the start of this great transformation. Under pressure from the American authorities, the German firm admits having installed fake software in its vehicles intended to hide the reality of the pollution from its diesel engines. “Cheating has had the effect of demonetizing the words of car manufacturers, says Flavien Neuvy, automotive economist, director of the Cetelem Observatory.
“From then on, the influence of the car manufacturers was replaced by that of the NGOs, adds Eric Champarnaud, partner and co-founder of the marketing analysis firm C-Ways. In the end, this gives, this summer, a European Parliament which bans the heat engine in 2035. ” It is therefore time for a major transformation, which can be summed up in the triptych of electrification, digitization and inflation. The combination of the three phenomena, accelerated or highlighted by climate change, the Covid-19 crisis from the start of 2020 and the war in Ukraine since February 24, will revolutionize the economic model of manufacturers.
Sales collapse
The latest automotive news figures illustrate the extent of these changes. In France, sales of new cars, down 7% in July, experienced their fourteenth consecutive monthly decline. The phenomenon of declining volumes is global. These declines in registrations again affected almost all the major markets: United States (−12%), Germany (−13%), United Kingdom (−16%), Japan (−7%)… “The golden decade 2009-2019, an almost uninterrupted period of automotive expansion, has come to an end”, Judge M. Neuvy. “The industry has experienced the illusion of a market with infinite growth, driven by China, the world’s largest market”explains Mr. Champarnaud.
The automotive peak was reached in 2017 and 2018, with 94 million new vehicles sold worldwide. Then, after a slight dip in 2019, overall sales collapsed in 2020 (−18%). According to forecasts, in 2022, for the third consecutive year, they will be a little below 80 million, whereas in 2015, experts saw them briskly exceeding 100 million at the turn of the 2020s. in the structure of sales is the most striking. After the “dieselgate”, the diesel sank much faster than what forecasters imagined just after the scandal.
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