Recently, the US consulting firm AlixPartners released a study on France's transition to electrification, which is not optimistic about the future of the French auto industry and expects the country's auto industry to lay off 15%-30% of employees by 2030, with 52,000 unemployed people, most of them from automakers and the rest from auto parts companies.
The main reason is that the entire French automobile industry chain still relies on traditional fuel vehicles, and the popularity of global electric vehicles is accelerating, while the speed of French brand transformation cannot keep up with the progress, and its competitiveness will continue to decline. Automakers bear the brunt of the burden, and downstream auto parts suppliers are also at risk of being eliminated by the times (parts from France will be reduced by 11%), and when the performance is not good, they can only cut jobs together to cut expenses.
In addition, Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess and Stellantis Group CEO Carlos Tavares have said that in order to compete with electric car giant Tesla, large-scale layoffs are a possible approach to the need to significantly improve production efficiency.
French cars: It's not just the present that's embarrassing
Although the study is only a prediction, it is enough to reflect the embarrassing situation that the French car is facing at the moment.
Unlike Tesla and Toyota, which are all over the world, peugeot, Citroen and Renault, although the sales of the three major French brands in Europe are relatively good, but in China and the United States, the world's two largest car markets can be described as complete failure, there is no sense of existence to speak of, this is not a so-called international brand should have a situation.
In 2020, PSA (when Stellantis was not yet established) sold 2.5 million vehicles worldwide, down nearly 30% year-on-year, of which the contribution rate from the Chinese market was only 2%; while Renault's total global sales of 2.94 million vehicles, down more than 20% year-on-year, Dongfeng Renault, which was established for only 7 years, was also delisted in the same year, and its contribution to sales was nearly zero... The status quo of French cars in China is that you say it is not good, but there will always be a wave of people blowing up how bullish the French car is; you say it is good, and the sales have always been very bleak. In the United States, for various reasons, French cars are also difficult to win a place.
Briefly talk about the current situation, and then talk about the future. The most embarrassing thing about French cars is that the status quo is not very good, and there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the future.
The transformation of automobiles towards electrification and intelligence is the consensus of the global automotive industry, and it is also an irreversible trend, especially the former. Friends and businessmen are in full swing, many of which have actual results landed, while French brands are in a worrying progress, and there is nothing that can be done so far.
What is the opponent doing?
Volkswagen is a traditional brand in the transformation of relatively early, spend a lot of resources to build the MEB electric vehicle modular platform is a concept we are very familiar with. In 2016, Volkswagen released the "TOGETHER-Strategy 2025 ‖" strategy, which will make electrification one of the most core strategic cornerstones for the next 10 years, including battery technology and autonomous driving technology. Volkswagen has also used the MQB platform to produce new energy vehicles, the so-called "oil to electricity", but from 2020 onwards, MEB is the main production platform for new energy vehicles, and the ID family that is being vigorously promoted is the first batch of achievements of the MEB platform.
The ID.3 is the first mass-produced model of the ID family, which quickly became one of the best-selling electric vehicles in the region after its launch in Europe last year, and the subsequent SALES of the ID.4 were also good, but this year it was greatly overtaken by Tesla. The ID family landed in the Chinese market at the beginning of this year, and Volkswagen even created a special ID.6 for us, but the initial promotion was not smooth, until the total sales of the four models of the entire family exceeded 10,000 in September, but the situation seems to be improving - and then for three consecutive months, volkswagen has a considerable user base in China.
As a representative of the American brand, GM released the third generation of global electric vehicle platform Ultium in 2020, which also emphasizes modularity and intelligence, and the new platform will be the cornerstone of GM's comprehensive electrification. GM also introduced a new platform into China in September this year, named "Aoteneng", and by 2025 there will be more than 10 new domestically produced cars based on the Aoteneng platform, covering the three major brands of Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac.
Cadillac LYRIQ is the first production model of the Aoteneng platform and has already opened pre-sale and will be officially launched next year. LYRIQ was very stunning when it first appeared, the appearance is futuristic, the large screen in the car is also very sci-fi, equipped with Aoteneng battery after supporting 255 kilowatts / 440 Nm maximum output and 650 km of endurance, is a joint venture brand in the more interesting electric vehicle. The latest news shows that LYRIQ pre-sale for one month, orders exceeded 5,000 units.
On the road to electrification, Japanese brands are the kings of hybrid technology, but this is always a transitional solution, if it comes to full electrification, their movement is still a little slower. However, Toyota has clearly proposed the e-TNGA pure electric architecture, and the completion of the first model under the new architecture, the bZ4X CONCEPT, is quite high and should not be far from mass production; Honda also released a new pure electric platform e:N Architecture in October to accelerate the pace of electrification.
In addition, savvy Japanese understand the benefits of working with others to save resources, such as Toyota and BYD teaming up, Honda plans to use the universal Ultium platform to develop two medium- and large-sized pure electric vehicles for the North American market.
Independent brands needless to say, the arrival of the new energy era has given them a rare opportunity to overtake in the corner, a large number of new forces in the country have emerged, and at present, the more successful is "Wei Xiaoli"; traditional brands are also actively transforming, there is a pole Krypton that takes the international style, there are playing retro Euler, Salon, as well as BYD, Eian, Zhiji and so on... They have built very competitive products around the two cores of electrification and intelligence, automatic /assisted driving, on-board 5G, large-screen intelligent interconnection and other intelligent configurations have been played as standard by independent brands, and the new energy vehicles of the joint venture brand look less competitive, look at the monthly new energy vehicle sales list, in addition to Tesla, almost all of them are independent brands.
What are the French doing?
In 2019, PSA released the electrification strategy for the next 5 years: based on the original CMP and EMP2 platforms, from the launch of new energy models in 2019, to the launch of 15 new energy models in 2021, and then to 2025 all car series have pure electric or plug-in hybrid versions. However, the new energy models that have been listed at present, such as Peugeot e2008, 4008 new energy, 508L new energy or DS3 pure electricity, are all "oil to electricity" things, and there is no too prominent competitiveness.
In July, the combined Stellantis Group unveiled its latest electrification strategy: it plans to invest €30 billion in the group's electrification and software development by the end of 2025, with a target of more than 70% of sales in Europe and more than 40% of sales in the US by 2030 from low-emission models, and requires best-in-class electric solutions from all 14 of its brands.
In addition, Stellantis launched four STLA all-electric platforms (small, medium, large, structured) in one go, but didn't say much about the features, details or decent concept cars of the new platform, and maybe not see more practical action until 2022. But to show its determination to promote electrification, Stellantis has signed a 16 billion yuan power battery order with Hive Energy.
Another major French brand slightly better, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance has launched a new CMF-EV pure electric modular platform capable of producing both sedan and SUV models. Although the first product was not Renault, but Nissan Aria, which was ready to be mass-produced and launched, it shows that the platform is already ready to lay eggs. At the end of last year, Renault released the first new car from the CMF-EV platform: the Megane eVision concept car, that is, the pure electric version of the Megane, and the mass production version is believed to be launched in 2022.
On the whole, the transformation of French cars to electrification is a relatively slow step, and there is no time to take care of intelligent things such as automatic driving, will it be abandoned by the times because the transformation is too slow as the opening research report said? There are still 8 years left for French cars to see if they make up for the missed time or use the traditional French skill of lying flat.
Another point is that Stellantis did not mention the Chinese market when it released its new electrification strategy, and Renault is even less likely to return to China - although they all cooperate with Chinese suppliers, will the transformation process be more difficult without the participation of the Chinese market?