When the show begins on Monday evening in the brand-new Shanghai e-sports center, the speakers boom and bang as if they want to Volkswagen all the rivals that have recently joined in China get in the way, drown out the evening before the Shanghai Auto Show.
Then VW’s new beacon of hope finally rolls in. The ID.7, brand boss Thomas Schäfer (53) promises, should not only be “100 percent electric, but above all 100 percent emotionally charged.” An electric Passat that should build on the times when Volkswagen dominated the European and Chinese markets equally.
The message is unmistakable: Volkswagen wants to recapture the world’s most important car market from Shanghai. An electric car market that was recently dominated by completely different brands. In 2022, three out of four of the more than three million e-cars sold in the People’s Republic came from Chinese manufacturers. BYD stood out with a market share of 28 percent. Tesla’s market share was 14 percent.
And Volkswagen? With around 150,000 vehicles, sold a similar amount to Nio, XPeng or Hozon and had a share of just 5 percent.
But that should change quickly now. Stefan Mecha, the Chinese brand director, at least hopes that a new strategy will take effect with the ID.7: “From China for China.” Because they just learned the hard way at Volkswagen: Chinese customers are not the same as in Europe. For a long time, this hardly affected sales. But now combustion engines are yesterday and are selling worse in China every year.
As early as 2023, VW strategists in the largest cities such as Beijing expect the tipping point. Then, for the first time, more electric cars will be sold than combustion engines. By 2030, the same can be expected in the countryside. The consequences for VW are also so enormous because without the competitive advantage of “combustion engines” the deficit in the software is all the more significant. And the Chinese in particular are particularly persistent in asking for sophisticated applications when buying a car – and not just for the karaoke function of the music app.
The Chinese have been buying their first new car much earlier than the Germans for many years. The average age for car drivers in China is 34 when they go to a dealer and buy a new car in China Germany these buyers are on average 56 years old and their needs are very different from those in the Far East. If you don’t shop there straight away, you buy the car there, where you can also get handbags, chairs or Lego toys for the children. For example in the huge malls in Shanghai, where Tesla just a few steps away from the Steiff stuffed animal shop.
Also Audi has long since built a flagship store in the center of Shanghai. In it: not only an Audi Quattro, but also a play paradise for children who should learn how to drive with the help of the fantasy figure Adui. This is how the customers of tomorrow will be wooed.
The reason for this can be heard from VW brand manager Mecha on Monday evening: He wants to emotionalize the driving experience again, speaks of a “perfect customer experience” that one strives for.
This signal is supposed to go out into the world from Shanghai, and so hundreds of journalists and almost the entire Group Board of Management gather in Shanghai for the ID.7 premiere. It is the prelude to the most important car show in the world, which is attracting tens of thousands of car managers to Asia after a year-long Covid break.