A VROOM WITH A VIEW
I’m sorry, but this is going to get nerdy. I’m fascinated by the weird and wonderful statistics the motor industry is throwing up at the moment. Almost every month there’s something that requires a little head-scratching and some “where-thehell-did-that-come-from?”.
I was working at a car company when Covid hit: I watched bedlam unfold in a corporation that had every disaster management plan under the sun, except, regrettably, for a pandemic.
March 2020 seems a lifetime ago. Around the world, with the tail of the pandemic, have come supply chain disruptions, component shortages, a war, regulatory earthquakes, raging inflation, boardroom bloodletting and model changes. In South Africa we’ve also contended with looting, political atrophy, institutional decline, surging crime, climate-related disruption and the reality that a crisis is usually an opportunity for somebody.
We may be getting accustomed to living in perma-disruption, but one outcome is that it’s hard to discern a baseline for anything. What does normal look like now?
A few weeks ago I reviewed a Chery Tiggo 8, a big Chinese SUV I thought was pretty okay for the money. Now, I’ve driven a midsize SUV from the company, the Tiggo 7, and I have to say it’s actually a few clicks more than okay for the money. What I did not expect was for Chery to blast into the top 10 sales charts for July, but there they are; no less than 1,262 South African driveways were bedazzled with a chintzy new Chery SUV in July. That’s impressive.
As the year progresses, and – hoping nothing new gets set on fire; no new pandemics emerge; no climate catastrophes, wars etc – we might get some sense of what normal means. Certain things are coming back to capacity. I don’t want to jinx it but, in the coming months, we may be able to discern the outline of a hint of a baseline and actually see how the world has changed. Globally, it seems manufacturers are getting hold of the bits and pieces they need to build cars.
July production figures show that India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, the UK and South Korea showed annual production growth of 7.7%, 31.5%, 59.1%, 33.4%, 10.5%, 9.1% and 10.1% respectively. In Germany, July was the third month in a row production grew significantly year-on-year.
In South Africa, Toyota’s vast Prospecton factory in Durban is recovering from severe flooding, and its lines of critical models – the HiAce “taxi”,
Hilux and Corolla
Cross – are back up to speed. At the same time,
– it feels like a lot of car for the money.
Ford’s Pretoria line for the new Ranger, another important and popular local model, is coming on stream.
It’s tempting to extrapolate somewhat lazily from this that our sales charts will start to resemble something we recognise – along with foreign production starting to meet the demand for imported cars. Instinctively, though, I feel like we need to be careful. The world is a very different place from when everything was last running at full tilt, and South Africa is fundamentally different after two-and-a-half years of economic and social trauma in which the middle class buyers of cars have been battered.
That brings me back to the Chery Tiggo 7. I quite liked a lot about it, delivering little more torque than a 1l Volkswagen engine. I drove a very new car, so to quote the figure for an engine not yet run in feels unfair, but I have to say it was verging on unacceptable.
In the real world, the Toyota Corolla Cross hybrid will use less than half the fuel of the Chery. I think that’s going to be a factor in sales figures in the future.
That being said, Chery is here now and isn’t going anywhere. Its tech-heavy offering, ease of use, premium interior, spaciousness and good looks will continue to attract fans and, as our market shifts towards alternative drivetrains, betting against Chery as a future contender is a fool’s errand.
Predicting car sales is silly. The world is changing fast around us and we’re seeing future players establishing footholds. History is written in the past tense and I get the feeling that, as in the global motor industry, in South Africa it hasn’t quite happened
yet. Hold tight.