The Hyundai Motor Group was Europe’s biggest gainer last year, selling 1.02m Hyundai, Kia and Genesis cars, up 21% on the year before to put it ahead of the Renault Group, according to data from European automotive lobby group the ACEA.
Toyota also did well, boosting sales of Toyota and Lexus cars to 760,178, up 9.6%.
Hyundai Motor sales should return to pre-pandemic levels this year, Vice President Gang Hyun Seo said in late January, predicting a return to normal chip production in the third quarter of the year.
The chip crisis has also been navigated well by the Chinese car industry in general.
“China light vehicle production is starting to outpace retail sales, indicating the industry there is getting a grip far more than US and Europe,” said Kelly.
That’s filtering through into good supply for SAIC-owned MG, whose average monthly sales grew throughout the year to reach 30,600 in total, putting it above Citroën, Renault and Honda.
The crisis was manageable if you were able to shuffle chips between brands in a wider group, prioritizing high demand and high profit sectors, such as SUVs, and ignoring the entry models.
Luxury brands linked to wider groups – such as Bentley, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce – all posted record sales for the year.
Entry-level trims or models, meanwhile, were hard to come by. “We’re consciously not allowing customers to order lowest-value derivatives,” said Jaguar Land Rover chief financial officer Adrian Mardell recently.
The trouble for JLR was that it’s all pretty high-value. “We have little margin of maneuver between mitigation between lower-end cars and high-end cars, because we only have high-end cars,” said JLR CEO Thierry Bolloré on the same call.
JLR said it has a huge 155,000 order backlog amid the chip shortage, with orders for the Land Rover Defender currently at 37,000.
