Trade Deals Are Accelerating the Chinese EV Shock For Legacy Automakers
If you take Carney’s Davos framing seriously, you have to stop reading trade deals as “extra access” for legacy automakers and start reading them as normalization events for Chinese EVs.
For a decade, legacy carmakers have treated Chinese EVs as a political problem: something to be contained with tariffs, safety rules, industrial policy and vague talk of “strategic autonomy.” That bought time and created the illusion that, if things got uncomfortable, you could always lean on politics to slow entry.
That stance was never tenable, today’s geopolitical situation only accelerates what was inevitable; that reality is here in the form of the first of what should be numerous other trade deals between countries and country-blocs.
Canada’s agreement with China and the EU’s agreement with Mercosur are the first manifestation of this accelerated timeline for legacy automakers.
What was already looking to be an expensive, even existential, competition sometime in the future is looking to be exactly that, but it’s already here.
Chinese EVs: Strategic Options for Legacy Carmakers
Chinese EVs are reshaping Europe’s car market. This hub summarizes the strategic options for European automakers: brand, longevity, and racing-driven emotion.
Going Racing Is No Longer Optional: Why Emotion Will Decide the Future of Car Sales
In an era defined by electrification, software, and regulation, motorsport is framed as a legacy indulgence; useful for engineers, irrelevant for sales.
That logic is dangerously outdated at best, and completely wrong at worst.
Racing’s Second Revolution - Part 5: The Objections That Will Define (Or Crush) Motorsport’s Next Business Model
The sponsorship model has been in use in some form or another almost since Formula 1’s inception, and as imperfect as it is, it’s safe.
But is it really safer in the long-term?
Arguably not, because not doing anything is itself a choice, without the benefit of having a say in the potential consequences.
Ulimately, if anything derails Racing’s Second Revolution it won’t be technical factors, since everything we’ve talked about so far rests on well-known business fundamentals.
In this fifth and final installment of the Racing’s Second Revolution series, we’ll cover the aspect of any great change initiative that is never talked about directly until it’s too late, yet has the potential to derail new ideas from the start: resistance.
The main risk is nothing more complex than skepticism.
This article addresses that head-on, and while the feeling is always the same, there could be multiple reasons behind that doubt.
Here we’ll lay out nine likely objections that executives, series managers, and investors will raise when confronted with the idea of moving beyond sponsorship, and of course we’ll explain how each can be addressed with a reliance on facts rather than gut feel.