“Competition is good for the industry”. Inchcape CEO’s case for optimism in automotive’s next chapter

The automotive industry is going through massive transformation and there are a number of driving forces behind it. One of the biggest is the move to new-energy vehicles. If you go back five or six years, people thought the electric vehicle future would happen by 2030—the industry got that wrong. Now, the smart automotive manufacturers know that, for the transition to work, it has to be consumer-led, not regulatory- and technocrat-driven. Our industry is responsible for 15% of world greenhouse gas emissions. This move to new-energy vehicles is massively important, but you can’t just regulate for it, it has to work for consumers. This is something I think a lot of the industry—and certainly governments and regulators around the world—have completely missed. The pace of change is different in every market and therefore the bit that manufacturers have learned is that you have to have a multiple drivetrain approach. That is, a strategy where you develop vehicles which can support several different propulsion systems. You’ve got to have EVs, of course, but, most of all, you need a hybrid approach. You’ll need to be in all forms of new-energy vehicles, including hydrogen, but that can be really expensive. The second factor driving industry transformation is the rise of Chinese brands. These brands have been around for a long, long time, but if you look at the last five years, they’ve really moved out of the world’s biggest automotive market—more than 30 million vehicles are sold per annum in China—and they’re entering all markets around the world, save the United States, and creating more competition. Another thing that’s changing in our industry is how consumers buy vehicles. Everyone starts their journey online now. Today, the default for consumers around the world is Google. But if you use ChatGPT or Perplexity, and that’s your home for finding out about the world, automakers have to really master that technology to meet