The World to Come: Key Challenges for the Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is going through a paradigm change that will affect the entire supply chain and have the potential to redraw the boundaries of the sector, redefine the key players and sourcing practices, and affect the relative advantage of countries and regions, reshaping existing industrial geographies. We address the issue of the reorganisation of the global value chains in the face of various challenges: new, large markets opening up and new, aggressive competitors emerging; an increasingly unpredictable global geopolitical context, translating into the forging and undoing of trade agreements; the reorganisation in value chains induced by new digital technologies; the redefinition of what a "car" is, determined by electrification, autonomous driving, and new mobility. These simultaneous changes impact upon the geographical location of the industry, the distribution of power within the value chains and between incumbents and new players entering the industry (from energy firms and power utilities to battery producers and big tech monopolists), with obvious consequences for the distribution of production and employment across countries and within manufacturing and service sectors.