As inevitable as death, taxes, and global pandemics. What’s that? Ah yes, Jaguar’s in trouble again. Haven’t we been here before?
An automotive reckoning, long-postponed, now seems imminent. We of course should have had it long ago, and had the surging Chinese economy not mopped up all that excess capacity over the past decade or so, we would be talking about a rather different automotive landscape today.
But not only did the Chinese Crouching Tiger to some extent help prop-up otherwise floundering businesses (and certainly, one could point to Groupe PSA’s remarkable resurgence being in no small part aided by Dongfeng’s largesse), it also made a significant contribution to a lopsided industry model with an over-reliance upon high-end, luxury products.
It isn’t wildly hyperbolic to suggest that Jaguar Land Rover’s post-2010 successes were to a very large extent a product of Chinese market forces, and if anyone doubted that, one only had to Continue reading “Number Nine Life”
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