Europe’s car giants are solving the wrong problem. And China knows it

UNTIL recently, I believed that some legacy car brands stood on high ground that would save them from a tsunami of Chinese electric vehicles. Ask someone to trade his Porsche in for, say, an Avatr, and his reply is likely to be something along the lines of, “What in the world is an Avatr?”

But even Europe’s grandee car companies must be feeling the water slosh around their ankles, given how sharply their global sales have slowed down (or at best, stayed flat) this year, while the Chinese continue to gather steam.

It isn’t so much that one continent makes better cars than the other, but that they simply come from different worlds. The grand old names of the car world – Mercedes-Benz, Fiat, Ford and their ilk – were born when the leap from horse-drawn carriage to puttering roadsters and limousines must have felt like entering the rocket era. Driving was glamour itself, and promised freedom, discovery, exploration and the romance of the open road – without the smell of horse manure.