BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi’s NEVs are not selling well in China, even salespeople don’t recommend them to customers, and some stores sell only one a month.
In China, German luxury automakers are lagging far behind local brands in sales performance of their electric vehicle (EV) models, despite their efforts to make the transition to electrification.
In a report Thursday, Tencent News‘ automotive channel visited several BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi dealership stores in Beijing and described the dismal reception of these brands’ EV models.
The headline of the story said that BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi’s new energy vehicles are not selling well in China, with even salespeople not recommending them to customers and some stores selling only one a month.
Here are some of the contents of the article.
The number of pure electric passenger cars sold in China in 2021 was 2.73 million, of which Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi together were only about 27,000, which is about equal to the sales of NIO or XPeng Motors in one quarter, and the gap is even bigger compared to BYD and Tesla.
In March, 13 automakers sold more than 10,000 wholesale new energy passenger vehicles in China. Crossing this threshold has been the norm for many companies, but for luxury brands including Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, monthly sales of more than 10,000 seem to be a major challenge.
Some users choose luxury brand NEVs because of the luxury label, but from the sales data, they have not been able to rely on the brand effect to attract the expected number of consumers.
In terms of intelligence, overseas car companies have high compliance costs and a more rigorous development process than the new car makers, “If there are problems with technologies such as autonomous driving, it hurts the brand a lot, so they prefer to be more conservative”.
Many executives of German luxury car companies are professional managers, they can’t decide the direction of the company, and the transition is far more difficult than for startups.
If you wish to learn more, you can copy the original Chinese text into Google Translate.
Note: Weilai refers to NIO and Xiaopeng refers to XPeng in the automatic translation.
Original Chinese text: https://xw.qq.com/cmsid/20220414A0B8RD00
Google Translate at: https://translate.google.com/
This article was first published by Phate Zhang on CnEVPost, a website focusing on new energy vehicle news from China.
