Battle for market share: Which car brands are the kings of registration – and which beggars

When looking at the European car market statistics for 2021, the German manufacturers, who are otherwise used to success, are usually only in the bottom places this time, among the brands that have lost sales more or less significantly.

Tobias Piller

Editor in Business.

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Only the Smart and Porsche brands have made substantial gains.

However, the smart city cars belonging to the Daimler Group are no longer those that are built under German supervision in Alsace.

They are now purely electric and come from China from a plant operated jointly by Mercedes and Geely.

Porsche, on the other hand, brought an upswing to Stuttgart with the new sporty electric model Taycan, which also developed into a hit in terms of sales figures.

Clear differences

Among the mass brands, there are clear differences between losers and those who were able to maintain their production and registration numbers.

The new Stellantis group with Peugeot, Fiat and Opel also performed significantly better in the registration figures for the group (minus 0.8 percent compared to 2020) than the Volkswagen group with a total of minus 3.5, but minus 6.2 percent for the Volkswagen brand. Renault had to lose even more feathers, with minus 9.5 percent in the group and minus 16.4 percent for the main brand. It looked even murkier for Ford with minus 21.6 percent.

BMW was the only major premium brand able to keep its European registration figures at the level of the previous year, ahead of Audi with a 1.5 percent drop compared to the previous year and Mercedes with a drop of 14.3 percent.

Despite the negative values, the mood is not as gloomy at the moment as the poor December figures in particular might lead one to expect.

Because the order books with the German manufacturers are full to bursting with orders, the showrooms of the dealers are already so empty that there are hardly any popular models available for the showroom or for test drives.

According to industry publications, delivery times for a compact Mercedes with a combustion engine are up to twelve months.

You have to wait up to a year or more for an electric-powered Audi or for the cheapest electric vehicle on the market, the Dacia Spring.

According to the industry, the lack of semiconductors is to blame for the situation, but the consequences of this shortage are very unequally distributed. BMW obviously suffers from this much less than Mercedes. The Korean Hyundai Group, to which the Kia brand also belongs, has reported delivery times of five to six months for some combustion or electric models, but these are paired with rapidly growing market shares.

The car companies do not want to talk openly about their ordering strategies for the semiconductors.

But it is clear that during the lockdown of 2020 some wanted to reduce their costs and thus their orders for chips.

Apparently, this primarily affected the standard goods, which were assumed to always be available.

But it wasn't, because electronics manufacturers were busy with additional orders from the chip factories.

To make matters worse, production was temporarily halted in some Asian factories due to the pandemic.

Anyone who uses individually configured, more expensive chips in car production is obviously better off and has better connections to individual development partners and suppliers for the semiconductors.

This apparently also applies to the American electric car maker Tesla, which was one of the winners in the car market in 2021, although it is not included in the statistics for the members of the European Auto Industry Association. Tesla has also revolutionized the electronic architecture of cars, because there are not many decentralized control centers for individual technical tasks, but one central computer that controls the entire car.

Because it takes about two years to build or expand a new chip factory, it can be expected that the supply of semiconductors to the automotive industry will be restored by autumn 2022.

Only then can the brands compete again based on the strength of their products and the attractiveness of their prices.

Because of the semiconductor problem, with some brands like Alfa Romeo, Lancia or Jaguar, the general weakness in the market was masked by the general negative tendencies in the market.