Dear Friends,

Today, February 2019 domestic passenger and light commercial vehicle sales figures were announced by ODD. Figures are not upbeat again. On a monthly basis, there is a 47% shrinkage compared to February 2018. Looking at the first two months of the year, the shrinkage is 52%. Let us remember that the Special Consuming Tax ( OTV ) discount still continues in these days. This discount period will be over at the March end. It seems car market will be more difficult if new measures are not taken by April. As I mentioned my previous articles , the solution is to bring the national income per capita level closer to car prices in our country. The healthy and sustainable way of this is to have a wealthy economy based on production. 

Today, I would like to share with you the content of a news report announced by BBC on February 28, 2018. According to the report, Daimler and BMW announced their cooperation agreement with a budget of € 1 billion on driverless and pay-per-use cars .
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47376677
In fact, the cooperation of these two German giants in fierce competition with each other is an important message : Traditional automotive brands are in an effort to prepare for the future of the automotive industry, which will upend the industry with next-generation technologies, Their aim is clearly not to be defeated by Silicon Valley players.
Most recently, Ford and Volkswagen have agreed to collaborate on electric and driverless vehicles.  Honda has contributed $ 2.75 billion to the driverless car efforts of General Motors. Other examples of similar cooperation steps are between Tesla and Daimler, PSA and Volvo. 

All of these efforts have been made to minimize the risks of uncertainty in future mobility. 
Car sharing based business models with electric and driverless cars will significantly reduce the car ownership. Automotive brands are struggling to be alive in this inevitable future. They well realise how Uber style applications with Google Waymo style cars threaten their own production . They also struggle to maintain their financial structure while moving to these new technologies that require billions of dollars of budgets. In short, the issue is the effort to be able to exist in the future at the time to prepare for new technologies. 

See you,

PS. You may follow my articles at motor1.com.