“The moment you don’t have a chance to sell cars on the domestic market, you try to get them all over the world. The problem is not only within Europe, but also within other markets, where China’s exports, including fossil cars, have increased fivefold year-on-year,” he says.
“If Europe was ready to secure all supply chains, I think that the problem would not look as intractable as it does today, when we have few competitive car companies in the lower and middle segment,” he adds.
Zdeněk Petzl, director of the Automobile Industry Association, claims that China will not be 100% electric for decades to come. “We see that in Europe we managed to satisfy the first group of so-called early adapters, people who wanted to try it, but at the same time we have customers here who are used to something.”
He adds that it takes time to move from one technology to another, while in China, customers are willing to go for something completely new. “This is simply not the case in Europe, we need time to explain the fleet change to customers,” he says.
Readiness and competitiveness
China has a problem with exports, because it had set production targets for the domestic market so high that now it cannot sell cars on the domestic market, Hataš claims.
“We are talking about millions of internal combustion cars that go here for export, and hundreds of thousands of electric cars every month. Most of the electric batteries are produced in China, where they are therefore able to control the price more than European car companies, which in this case are more like buyers.”
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“And if European customers had an electric car for something expensive and with a small range, today, when they go to buy it, they will get a vehicle with a range of 500 km and more. And they get it for a price practically identical or very similar to an adequate internal combustion car. But the European producers are not ready for that,” he adds.
Petzl disagrees, saying they will be able to compete. “The production processes of Europe and China are more or less similar. The European car industry is not less competitive, rather we perceive that we are regulatory shooting ourselves in the foot with measures such as increasing tariffs on battery vehicles, which is unnecessary,” he says.
The current price difference is around hundreds of thousands of crowns. Nevertheless, Petzl believes that European electric cars will be able to compete on price with Chinese ones. “At the same time, it is necessary to realize that everything is not only about the price, but about what you get for the price,” he claims.
Listen to the entire debate in the introduction to the text.
2023-12-27 23:10:00
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