Dear reader,
China? Difficult. USA? Difficult. Can India help alleviate the export woes of the European automotive industry? The EU Commission around President Ursula von der Leyen (67) is celebrating its closure Free trade agreement with the country of 1.5 billion inhabitants To be on the safe side, this is called a “milestone”.
While India was previously an export country with a tariff of up to 110 percent for car manufacturers, this is now to be gradually reduced to 10 percent. A market with strong growth dynamics awaits. In 2021, less than 3 million new cars were sold in India; last year there were already almost 4.5 million. Only China and the USA are larger.
How suitable India is as a cure for Volkswagen, Mercedes and Co. remains questionable. Indian car buyers are extremely price sensitive. And India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (75) does not want to expose himself to a European “car tsunami”: there is an export limit of 250,000 vehicles per year.
On paper, the business of car rental companies looks like a simple triad: buy vehicles cheaply, rent them out expensively and long-term, and market them profitably; Anyone who succeeds in this shouldn’t have any problems. In practice, however, this model is fragile and extremely susceptible to crises. So much so that some car rental companies have taken more than one wrong turn. Starcar is bankrupt and had to stop operations, Europcar and Hertz are burning a lot of money. There are also examples like Sixt that show that you can be successful with the business. But: Concerns are increasing there too, especially with a view to new requirements for electric cars. What else is going wrong in the industry? Read our large defect report here
.
After the spin-off, the next round of savings awaits: automotive supplier Aumovio cuts 4,000 more jobs, affecting research and development. Continental’s former automotive division went public last fall. While still under the Conti umbrella, the then division head and current Aumovio CEO Philipp von Hirschheydt (51) had already ordered a major overhaul with the elimination of thousands of jobs.
Deepdrive: German skepticism about China
While Chinese automobile manufacturers are making rapid progress in more and more European countries, BYD, Nio and Great Wall Motor are having a comparatively difficult time in Germany. Here too, the market shares have recently increased somewhat faster, but: According to the just published “DAT Report 2026
“For only 5 percent of those who are currently looking for a new car, switching to a Chinese model would be an option.
Maybe the Chinese manufacturers just need to knock on the door of Germany’s most prominent new car dealer. When Christian Lindner (47) announced that he was joining Autoland AG (“Germany’s largest car discounter”) at the turn of the year, he raved about how much “the middle class” had always impressed him. Now Lindner is looking for himself via LinkedIn
by staff. “Special motivation and entrepreneurial thinking are expected” if you want to support the ex-FDP boss as a board officer, press spokesman, board driver or working student. It sounds a lot like a corporate hydrohead or a big ministerial staff – but maybe it’s just the new normal for middle-class car dealers.
If you apply, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Yours, Christoph Seyerlein
Do you have any wishes, suggestions or information that we should take care of journalistically? You can reach my colleagues in the Mobility team and me at manage.mobility@manager-magazin.de
.
You can also find our newsletter “manage:mobility”. here on our website.