The way into the realm of the big competitors begins for Volkswagen board members on Tuesday afternoon around 3.40 p.m. There they march on Shanghais auto show off to their rivals. Via headphones, the managers learn which competitors to look out for and which gimmicks they should urgently learn from the competition.
These tours are legendary, in the days of Martin Winterkorn they were merciless. Woe betide if, for example, your own steering wheel rattled and that of the competition could be adjusted noiselessly.
This time, however, the team around Volkswagen boss Oliver Blume (54) hardly had to bother with such small things. This is about bigger things. “You noticed as early as 2021 that something was changing, but nobody noticed. Hardly anyone was here,” said a buyer from the Volkswagen group in the morning during his inspection tour. Now the upheaval is omnipresent. The Chinese car market is no longer in European hands.
The largest Chinese manufacturers, first and foremost BYD and Nio embodied a self-confidence on their brightly lit stages that is second to none. This self-confidence was broadcast live across the country on Tuesday. Because the fair is mostly populated by video journalists who, like Xinyue Cao (28), immediately put their videos online.
Cao works for the TikTok subsidiary D car and has traveled from Shanxi province. She films short films in front of the new cars and immediately uploads them to TikTok’s Chinese app Dong. She reaches an audience of millions with her videos. Shortly after the shoot, she stands in front of the new BYD study in a black dress and black T-shirt. Why here? “The company is growing very quickly China and is making rapid advances in technology,” says Cao. Should the established German manufacturers worry about their market share? The young video journalist smiles. “You can see what’s going on here.”
And indeed, the stand is packed. Dozens of Chinese make videos like Cao. They buzz around the latest models like a swarm of bumblebees and send their messages out into the world via smartphone.
At the booth opposite bmw on the other hand, things are much more comfortable. “With the new car brands, it’s like a new fad that has come to the country,” says Cao. Her parents bought a VW Tiguan 13 years ago. Now parents would also consider getting a BYD at the age of 50. As a result, BYD can proudly announce at the booth that the company sold almost two million cars in 2022 and grew by 155 percent year-on-year. Nobody in China sells more electric cars.
The Germans only play a subordinate role there. This is masked by the billions that companies still earn with their combustion engines. Only: Hardly anyone in Shanghai has seriously advertised them in the 13 exhibition halls. VW also presented its Tesla hunter ID7 in Shanghai
, but it will be really tight in the first few days at the booths of the Chinese competition.
Hardly anyone could experience this more impressively than VDA President Hildegard Müller (55), who rushed from one press conference to the next. From VW to Audi, to Porsche to Mercedes and so on. Mueller will as well as other car lobbyists from Europe
looked closely at what was happening in Shanghai. The trade fair is now the new benchmark in the automotive world. Because while the Geneva Motor Show collapsed in the pandemic, the IAA 2021, organized by the VDA, tried to reinvent itself – as a mobility fair that tried to reconcile the bike with the car. In the end, climate protectors blocked the highway. In Shanghai, on the other hand, the industry paralyzed itself – with a traffic jam at the exhibition center, where the Mercedes delegation was also stuck in the morning.
Not every envoy from Germany was able to experience live what was later demonstrated in the halls. The new car cockpit world also offers virtual 3D movies to pass the time. The karaoke program is also an integral part of most cars made for China. And the voice software implements the driver’s wishes with increasing precision.
The Volkswagen managers had barely returned from their tour when the group announced that it would invest one billion euros in an innovation and procurement center for fully networked intelligent electric cars – in the Chinese town of Hefei. If a German car manager had previously doubted the sense of this investment, he was taught otherwise during the tour in Shanghai.
There was only one thing the VW managers were looking for in vain among all the SUVs and limousines on the stands of well over 100 exhibitors. A small car that can get one person from A to B efficiently. There seems to be no room for that in Shanghai.