European market recovering but comes out of crisis completely transformed. - The European passenger car sector is beginning to recover from the crisis and appears transformed by it. Purchases of cars are currently rising much faster in China and India. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), global car production will reach 68.7 million vehicles in 2010, almost the same as in 2008 (66 million cars), following a lean period in 2009, when only 57.5 million units were produced. Retail growth is increasingly unbalanced between emerging countries, desperate for access to the automobile market, and the more developed countries, which are saturated and moving towards alternative more environmentally-friendly modes of transport. Out of the 11.2 million additional cars that will be manufactured this year, around 6.5 will be assembled in the Asia-Pacific region, mainly China, for local market needs. At the same time, factories in Western Europe will only manufacture 400,000 automobiles more than in 2009. In Eastern Europe, factories will only be manufacturing an additional 900,000 units. This hierarchy between the emerging and developed countries is so rapid that the latter might for the first time represent half of global car production by 2012, underlines PwC, which previously forecast this shift taking place in 2014. Going beyond the question of volume, car “consumption” has profoundly changed. In Europe, between 1990-2010, production of big saloon cars (group D) fell by 1.5 million units, whilst at the same time, segment C increased by 1.8 million units. The small car segment of the market (sectors A and B), which only accounted for 30% of the European market in 1990, now accounts for 47% (2010). In 2008 and 2009 alone, it increased its market share by four points. This explosion can be explained by two reasons: the considerable improvement in segment B models, the choice on offer, their size and their level of comfort; the level of comfort has become the same and enables consumers to purchase more compact, less expensive and easier to park vehicles. Finally, the post-crisis car in Europe is increasingly characterised by “à la carte” vehicles. New niche markets have massively increased and we now observe the emergence of vehicles that are difficult to categorise, with each of them finding their own consumer target audience. (I.L.)