Industry Expert Blogs

At "Ludwigsburg", officially the International Autombil Elektronik Kongress, there was a push this year to be more international. In particular, attendees last year had asked for a deeper perspective on what is happening in the largest automotive market of all. There were several presenters who covered different aspects of the market and I learned a lot from very basic facts (all interenal combustion cars in China have to be kept off the road one day per week) to more technical (self-driving cars in China assume that there will be a 5G network that can be relied on).

The most comprehensive presentation was by Dr Volkmar Tenneberger who works for the VW Group in China, and I stole his title for the title for this blog post.

It is easy to fall into the trap that the market you know best is the leader in some sense, and China, still being relatively poor, is not yet that significant. But here are a few statistics Volkmar presented to show just how big markets are in China. The per-capita GDP may be lower than the US or Western Europe, but there are a lot of capita. All data in this table is 2017, so it is pretty much up to date.