Casting trends in the automotive industry will feature among the crucial focal themes of the world's leading foundry trade fair GIFA held as part of the Bright World of Metals in Dusseldorf from 12 to 16 June 2023. E-mobility has created completely new challenges. E-mobility is reshuffling the cards in the automotive market - Elon Musk and Tesla are a prominent example of this. But experts doubt that newcomers will ring the death knell for established automakers. "The Chinese and Tesla are far from delivering the growth they promised. Well-established producers like VW, BMW, Mercedes and GM have been able to stand their ground very well on the markets," as Franz-Josef Wostmann, Head of the VDI Conference "Casting Technology and e-Mobility" in Bremen in October noted with reference to current sales statistics. Wostmann, Head of the Department for Early Detection and Exploitation of Technologies at Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Applied Material Research - IFAM in Bremen, reminds us that back in 2019 Tesla still seemed the unrivalled No. 1 with 245,000 e-vehicles. Since then the e-vehicle pioneer has been able to multiply sales by a factor of 4 to some 936,200 vehicles in 2021, but over the same period VW has leapt from the middle ranges to almost first place by catapulting sales from 41,000 vehicles in 2019 to 762,000. "VW has multiplied its worldwide e-vehicle sales more than ten-fold within three years. Not even Tesla has succeeded in making such a quantum leap," adds Wostmann providing food for thought. Other long-established players like BMW and Mercedes have also succeeded in massively increasing their output. And these established players - unlike the e-mobility newcomers - have done so while also keeping an eye on their standard production. But as the statistics of the past few years show, they have very good cards and are either massively catching up, or already overtaking sales of the new entrants.
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