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Renault-Nissan dismisses 'peak car' notion

Posted on 17 September, 2017

The chief executive officer of the Renault-Nissan alliance has dismissed the notion that the era of personal ownership of cars is ending, predicting in Paris yesterday that his alliance will sell more than 14 million cars a year by 2022, Forbes reports. Carlos Ghosn says that this number is more or less inevitable. “Fourteen million is not a target, it is not an objective,” Ghosn says. “What I am telling you is what our assumptions are. Our forecast is that by the end of 2022, we should reach 14 million cars. We estimate that the total market by the end of 2022 will be between 108 and 110 million cars.” This would be significantly up from a worldwide volume of 95 million units in 2016. In this sense Ghosn seems to dismiss the notion that ride sharing and autonomous vehicles will eat into the personal car market. “When you take a look at the total revenues from selling cars and the expected revenues of mobility services, even six years down the road it will be totally imbalanced,” Ghosn says.  “I don’t think that mobility services will represent a big portion of revenues, compared to selling cars, parts, accessories, servicing of cars etc.” With Avtovaz, the Alliance has Russia’s largest carmaker. In India, Renault outsells all European and American OEMs. The Alliance’s Mitsubishi is also strong in South East Asia. Renault and Nissan are invested in the EV market, having recently announced a joint venture with a Chinese company to produce EVs in the PRC. There are some 1.4 million EVs on the world’s roads, and more than half a million of those have been made by Alliance partners.