Volkswagen’s electric ID.3: It’ll cost you about 35,000 dollars in Germany – after
rebate … and less than half as much in China. For virtually the same car.
But why?
Volkswagen is caught in a price war in China: Slashing prices in a desperate attempt to
keep their position in the market. Because the competition in China has
become fierce …. and foreign carmakers are losing.
Their sales are slowing.
Their market share is shrinking.
And the reviews have been brutal:
I mean how the hell did they come up with this @$%&!
Now it’s Chinese car companies that are on the
rise – and preparing to shop their electric models around the globe.
Any market they enter outside of China is going to be easier than the Chinese market right now.
Why are the world’s biggest car brands suddenly getting beat in China,
their most important market? How much of it is because Beijing did things right...
They know battery cars are much easier and cheaper to build than engine cars.
And how much is because the big carmakers did things wrong?
The batteries are not better than their competitors. The
software in many cases is actually worse.
We’ll answer those questions – and look at how Chinese electric vehicles could
reshuffle the global car industry … on this episode of Business Beyond.
To understand what’s going on right now in China, it’s helpful to understand how
things began. One company in particular is worth a closer look: Volkswagen.
Let’s go back to 1978. China had just emerged from the cultural revolution.
And was still quite poor. But it needed vehicles. So, it turned here, to Germany.
One day a Chinese delegation, led by the country’s minister for industry,
simply showed up at Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg. Unannounced.
Nobody thought of China in 1978 because China was closed for more than 40-years – isolated.
This is Felix Lee. He’s a former China-correspondent for a German
newspaper. In 1978, his father was working as a department-head at Volkswagen.
Somebody from the main entrance asked him if he still speaks Chinese because there is somebody
here. He says he is the minister for mechanics and for industry. And my father thought, ‘No way.’
China wanted trucks and buses more than private-passenger cars,
which Chinese households couldn’t yet afford. The two sides eventually agreed on another approach.
My father had the idea, if you only sell Volkswagen private cars as taxis, as cabs,
and maybe for the government, by numbers this will already be worth it for Volkswagen.
In 1984, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl flew to China for the ground-laying of
a new joint venture, Shanghai Volkswagen Automotive Company.
Up to that point in time, only one other company – Jeep – had tried a joint-venture
in China after the Communist takeover. And it hadn’t gone well. Volkswagen had more luck.
When you went to China in the 80s or the beginning of the 90s, in Beijing and Shanghai all the cabs
were Santanas, a Volkswagen. And that’s how the business with China started for Volkswagen.
We all know what happened next: This very poor country gradually -- and then quickly -- turned
into an economic power. And as personal incomes grew, so did the market for private cars.
Other companies like Toyota, GM and Ford arrived after Volkswagen. But
none were as successful as the German company. Into the early 2000s Volkswagen
still had a whopping 50 percent of the Chinese passenger car market. (source)
A lot of Chinese really thought that was their own car, because Volkswagen was so
dominant at the beginning – especially at the beginning of the economic rise. And of course,
this was a big advantage until recently. Volkswagen had the biggest share on the
Chinese market because Volkswagen was the first.
But success in China carried its own risks for car
companies. A growing dependence. For no company was that truer than Volkswagen:
As the years passed, more and more of its sales were tied to one country.
Those sales, in turn, were all tied to models with internal combustion engines.
China wanted its own car companies. But after years of struggling to produce gas-engine models,
it didn’t have much to show for its efforts. It needed a new technology.
In 2001, China decided to fund research and development projects
for battery-EVs alongside fuel-cells and hybrid.
But the real move to electric only gained traction years later. In 2008, a former auto
engineer and a Tesla-fan named Wan Gang became China’s minister of Science and Technology.
He had a technical background,
and he came into the ministry of science and technology with a clear thinking on this.
Ilaria Mazzocco has testified before the US Congress about
China’s industrial policy for electric vehicles.
So, the idea was, you know, if instead a different technology takes over,
there would be more of a level playing field. And Chinese automakers would have
a better chance of competing directly with the western automakers. It was a gamble.
Gang’s ministry introduced China's first consumer subsidies for electric vehicles.
And -- just like with Volkswagen – it connected EV companies to taxi fleets
and government deals. Electric, in other words, was getting scale.
When it was first introduced around 2009-2010,
it was really a pet project coming out of the Ministry of Science and Technology that
wasn’t getting a lot of attention outside of that ministry. By 2015 this has changed.
An entire supply-chain for electric vehicles had emerged. It benefited from
China’s industrial know-how, its battery production, even its mineral refining.
Older companies like BYD – which used to make batteries for phones – found new
purpose in electric vehicles. Startups like Leapmotor and Nio quickly gained prominence.
Beijing was there to help its companies at every step,
and not JUST with subsidies and big government-purchases.
There’s a whole subset of non-explicit types of support. Access to credit,
that’s really important. Access to below-market equity is also really important. In 2020,
the Chinese company Nio was having a very hard time, and it received an injection of
funding from a local government which saved it. And now the company is doing fairly well.
In other words, Beijing could stabilize young companies with
cheap capital or by purchasing shares.
There was just one problem with China’s new EV market:
The quality still wasn’t good enough to compete globally – with the likes of, say, Tesla.
But that soon changed -- when Beijing allowed Tesla to build in Shanghai.
This really started to shift when Tesla entered the market and production started
to scale up. And then 2020 when Giga-Shanghai was really running, that’s really when the
EV market took off. And I think a lot of that was the appeal of Tesla as this new,
iconic American brand that’s really shaping up the market, through new sales channel,
the kind of direct sales which is not something a lot of Chinese companies were doing before then.
Tesla brought new competition to the Chinese EV-market. But – significantly -- it also
raised the standards for Chinese suppliers. Now they had to create electronics and components to
Tesla’s specifications. And that meant they now could offer similar quality to Chinese carmakers.
Until Tesla came, Chinese carmakers were always seen as cheap. And they can produce very cheap,
and this is definitely an advantage, but they don’t have much this luxury
prestige. And when Tesla came, their production of electric cars was also
much cheaper as what Volkswagen does. But they sold it on a premium level,
they sold it as a luxury car. And this changed the conception of an electric vehicle.
Suddenly Chinese cars had checked-off all the major boxes: They were faster to build,
less expensive than their competitors. And their
quality was comparable – if not better in many cases.
In 2021, sales of passenger EVs in China soared -- by a whopping 170-percent from the year before,
to about 3 million vehicles. About half of all EVs sales worldwide that year took place in China.
Top seller? BYD. Tesla was number three. Electric hadn't just arrived in China. It was finally being
driven by Chinese companies … who were suddenly competitive with the world’s top EV producer.
Still, none of the traditional carmakers appeared worried. Volkswagen, Toyota,
Honda for example, had the benefit of scale over Chinese carmakers and
Tesla. So eventually they'd dominate the volume market for EVs. Right?
Not really.
And this has become an emblem of what went wrong. Well,
not karaoke like this. But karaoke in a car – like this.
The thing is the big carmakers had several problems when it came
to electric vehicles. Battery costs, for one. But also, software. (PAUSE)
It turns out that companies with good engineers weren’t necessarily good at programming.
That became clear when Volkswagen rolled out the ID.3 in 2021 -- its
first EV-hatchback set on a purpose-built chassis.
The operating system turned out to be buggy. It was slow. And the updates had to be installed
at the dealership. Chinese car companies, by comparison, were already doing updates remotely.
The ID.3’s problems weren’t lost on Chinese reviewers.
Compared with BYD or SAIC, you have to swear
at the onboard system from ID 3. Otherwise, you’re being too nice.
The ID 3 onboard-system -- you have to tell it off. But I wasn’t surprised. Maybe that’s what
I expected. I never had any expectations for this VW system so for a Volkswagen-EV,
it’s just the "normal" that I expected.
Other foreign carmakers also faced problems:
Both Mercedes and Toyota have issued recalls in China over software issues.
And even Tesla has seen a major recall due to its own software.
But beyond glitches, many of the new EVs were frankly more limited than
their Chinese rivals. There were fewer fun apps. Like selfie-cameras... or karaoke.
Karaoke is of course just a symbol of it,
how good especially on software these new tech companies are. For them,
the car is software on wheels, or batteries on wheels. And they think completely different.
I think at the moment the software, the digital connectivity of the car is
becoming so much more important for Chinese consumers. Often they don’t really go long
distances. They don’t necessarily need a powerful car if they’re stuck in traffic
in Beijing or Shanghai, where a lot of these vehicles are sold at the moment.
For Volkswagen executives, karaoke became a kind of symbol for early mistakes -- a
shorthand for software problems as well as a misreading of the Chinese market altogether.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step, right? But software issues still plague
the big carmakers, including Volkswagen, Toyota or Honda. And again, that's just
part of a larger picture of why they’ve become less attractive to the market -- from price,
to reliability and features – and even a growing nationalism in the Chinese consumer market.
Volkswagen doesn’t really have any distinguishing features that really set them apart from other
car makers. The batteries are not better than their competitors. The software in many cases is
actually worse. So why would you buy a Volkswagen if you could get a BYD for a cheaper price?
One solution? Lower the price.
Which brings us back to today – prices have indeed been falling fast in recent months. But
less as a strategy than a necessity: The Chinese market is now so overcrowded,
that carmakers are resorting to desperate measures to hold on to market share.
Volkswagen sales actually jumped in August, because of those prices. But
its overall market share continues to fall as customers buy fewer non-electric models.
After years of hovering around 15-percent market
share in China – Volkswagen fell to close to 11 percent last year.
The big Japanese carmakers – including Toyota and
Honda – have done even worse – losing close to six percent.
And then, for the first half of this year:
BYD overtook Volkswagen as the number one brand in China.
It’s fair to say the big car companies have learned a painful lesson:
Don’t rest on your past accomplishments.
And be careful about underestimating Beijing’s industrial policies.
My sense was that western automakers, western executives were consistently
surprised that this policy was moving forward. They felt that this was,
they didn’t feel this was realistic and they were consistently surprised
that Chinese automakers did take this seriously and put in R&D and succeeded.
Volkswagen is moving quickly to repair the damage – by investing more in Chinese tech.
It’s set up two new joint ventures in the past few months – one with
Chinese software maker Thundersoft … and another with Chinese carmaker XPENG,
which will it help it develop two new models by 2026.
I think Volkswagen is taking some really unusual steps right now, also that really set them apart
from other carmakers that are also struggling. For instance, the Japanese car makers. Toyota has the
tie-up with BYD, but there’s nothing really of the intensity we see from Volkswagen…so I think this
is really showing that Volkswagen is really eager not to lose their position in the Chinese market.
The problem is that carmakers have lost precious time – and now the other shoe is dropping.
That crowded Chinese market is now pushing domestic carmakers there to look globally.
And if the Chinese market is any sign, it's going to spell more trouble for the big brands.
Just look at this year’s IAA auto show in Munich, where BYD was one of the
most anticipated exhibitors. It unveiled five new models for the European market.
Chinese carmakers are betting that consumers around the
world --- and not just in China -- want more digitally connected cars.
The Chinese consumer is perhaps going to be,
let’s put it this way, the bellwether for what other consumers globally is going to want.
And it’s all unfolding right now. How it pans out in the end … will likely be
the topic of another Business Beyond. We’ll see you then.