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Originally Posted by P38 in workshop
Let me add this then;MG has been a Chinese owned brand for several years,as has Volvo and more recently Lotus.The largest individual shareholding in Daimler-Benz is held by the Chinese group that owns the last two.
A couple of weeks ago I was prompted to seek out information about the market shares of various electric car producers and was quite surprised to learn that several companies of which I had never heard were achieving growth rates of a couple of hundred percent or more within the sector.If anybody has the interest,there are some statistics here : https://insideevs.com/news/625651/gl...s-october2022/ .Few of the companies mentioned were familiar names.
Why might this be relevant?Well in a little over seven years I won't be able to buy an IC engined car from a dealer and not too long after nor will anybody else in Europe.GM themselves will cease to offer IC vehicles in their home market.So why they chose to partner with Andretti for the new venture is a mystery to me.Particularly when the brand they promote isn't at the top of the wish list of those of us who live in places where the roads are of modest size and fuel is horrendously expensive by American standards and we have no dealer network for a GM brand. |
If I were an auto executive thinking of going in to F1 and you pitched the above to me, I would say there is nearly zero reason to be in F1. The implication that F1 is significantly out of step with their future. Maybe Chinese manufactures see it the same way. Also, if you are seeing massive growth rates without a large F1 sized marketing effort. Why spend the money on F1?
As to GM, I believe they consider Cadillac to be their "luxury" or "performance" brand. So it matches better with F1. We also don't know how much money GM is potentially putting up. It might be a good bit or it might not be much.
Richard