Automotive Value Map 2016 → 2025

The tail starts in 2016 and its width is annual volume, so a brand that grows leaves a widening stream. The arrowhead is the selected year. Click any bubble, line or brand name for that brand's ten-year detail.

Axes are fixed, so brands stay in the same place as you filter. €/car draws lines of equal money earned per vehicle: a brand sitting on the €10k curve earns €10k on every car, whether at €40k and 25% or €200k and 5%.

Drag across the main map to set this window yourself — a window you draw stays put as the years pass, which is what you want once you are following particular brands. Left alone, the band is where the middle of these brands sat in the selected year, so it travels as prices do — from €11k–€44k in 2016 to €16k–€52k in 2025. A brand priced outside that year's band sits off the frame and its tail enters from the edge: Tesla arrives from the right once the Model 3 replaced the Model S mix, and Geely from the left as it scales. BYD moves the other way: its revenue per vehicle peaked at €24.5k in 2022 and has fallen every year since, to €17.4k in 2025 under the domestic price war.

The panel takes one brand and draws two bands on a single axis of years: margin above, price per vehicle below, with the tenures of its chief executives laid across both. They are not stacked on top of one another, because a percentage and a euro price share no scale and a second axis would let the drawing decide the answer; a vertical slice through the pair is what shows whether a brand held its position while its profitability moved. The switch chooses what the two bands measure: vs segment plots the distance from the segment average, Absolute plots the brand's own figures with the segment average drawn alongside as a second line.

Three rules do the work, and each exists to stop the chart flattering somebody. Against the rest of the segment first: most of what happens to a brand in a year is the industry — 2020, the chip shortage, China, tariffs — and subtracting the others leaves the part that can be argued about. The brand itself is never in that benchmark: in a segment of three it would be a third of the line judging it, which would shrink every gap by a third and flatter everyone. The absolute view is there beside it, and the two usually agree; where they do not, the disagreement is the finding. The brand's own margin sits in the same row as the gap, because a gap can widen two ways and they look identical in a relative column: the brand rose, or everyone else fell. In 24 of the 70 measurable tenures here the two point opposite ways. JLR's Adrian Mardell gains nearly 25 points on the rest of Luxury while JLR's own margin goes from 2.3% to 0.7% — Porsche fell from 14.1% to 1.1% and Maserati to −27.3%, and the benchmark dropped out from under him. That is not a turnaround but a slower descent than Porsche's. Both figures are counted from the data rather than typed. Read the two columns together or the table flatters people. Every tenure gets its own zero: the dashed rule is the level that person inherited — the last reported year before they arrived, the state of the company on the day it changed hands. It begins at that exact point on the curve, so it can be checked by eye rather than taken on trust, and the shading between rule and curve is what the tenure moved: green where ground was gained, amber where it was lost. A handover straight after a freak year does inherit the freak year, which is the price of a reference a reader can see. The first year is dashed and left out of the arithmetic: the car earning a margin in a given year was signed off three or four years earlier, so judging anyone on the year they walked in credits them with their predecessor's product plan.

The heading says who was in the chair, not who is responsible. A change of chief executive is more often a symptom of a bad run than its cure, and Aston Martin — four names in ten years, the margin roughly twenty points below its segment throughout — makes the point better than any caveat. In the table, the per year column matters as much as the total: eight years at three points is not the achievement two years at three points is. Two entities cannot be measured this way at all and say so — Stellantis was created in January 2021, so its first chief executive inherited nothing, and Porsche's Michael Leiters took office in January 2026, after the record ends.

The second table is a profit bridge: profit is volume × price per vehicle × margin, and the three columns are how much of the change each lever accounts for. The arithmetic is exact — the three sum to the change, to the euro — but like every bridge it depends on the order the levers are peeled off: credit margin first and it takes what this order gives to volume. The order used here is the order the business runs in — how many were sold, at what price, and how much of it stayed — and it is the same for every tenure on the page. Every date carries a source link — company press releases, SEC filings and company newsrooms, with a leadership or governance page where a founder has simply never been replaced. Where a title and the job diverge, the date follows the job: Maserati's Davide Grasso was announced as chief operating officer in July 2019 and titled chief executive later, but July 2019 is when the brand passed to him, so that is the date used, with the discrepancy stated in his row. That is the same rule the rest of the page follows: no figure without a document behind it.

The stack answers the two questions the other charts cannot: how large this set of brands is, and whose it is. On Units the top edge is the sum of the brands in view, with the year totals written along it. On Share % the same bands are stacked to 100%, and size drops out of the picture entirely: what is left is the mix. That distinction is the point. A segment can hold its cars and still be losing ground, and only the share view shows it: between 2016 and 2025 the Mass-market band gave up about 11 points of these brands' sales — from 85% to 74% — while selling only some 6% fewer cars, and almost all of what it gave up went to the Chinese challengers, who rose from 2% to 13%. Switch to Brands to see which companies inside a segment did the moving; band order is fixed, by price from the bottom up, so a shift reads as a shift rather than a reshuffle.

The caveat is in the panel's name and worth repeating: this is the total of the brands in view, never of the world. These 28 reporting entities carry most of the industry's value and a large part of its volume — around 63 million cars in 2025 with every brand selected, against a global market well above that — but the makers outside this set are real, and nothing here should be read as an industry share. Filtering changes both, which is the honest behaviour: remove a brand and it stops counting in the denominator too.

Every brand belongs to one of five groups, fixed for the whole decade. Prices below are revenue per vehicle in 2025.

Two things about that list are worth stating plainly, because the colours invite a different reading. The groups are positioning, not price bands. They overlap even in the latest year — GM at €39.1k sits above Tesla at €37.6k — and they overlap far more across the decade: premium reaches €83k in 2017 while luxury bottoms at €53.9k in 2017, so the two ranges overlap by nearly €29k. The reason is visible on the map. Tesla ran from €83k per vehicle in 2017 to €38k in 2025 — it began just below where JLR sits now and ended below Volvo. If the segment were a price band, it would have changed colour mid-decade, its tail would break in the middle, and the segment averages would jump as brands moved between them. Fixing each brand's group for the whole period keeps a ten-year path readable as one path.

The Chinese challengers are a group by origin, not by price. At €14k–32k they sit inside the volume range, which runs €9k–39k, and on price alone every one of them would be a volume brand. They are kept separate because the question they answer is a different one: how much of the field new entrants have taken. Read their band in the total-sales panel as share won, not as a price tier — and read the mass-market segment knowing its most direct competitors are drawn beside it rather than within it.

Segment average adds one dashed line per segment to every chart: on the maps a hollow bubble with a dashed tail, on the volume and revenue panels a dashed line, each in its segment's colour and named in italics. Every figure on it is the plain mean of the brands in that segment that reported that year — revenue per vehicle, margin, volume and revenue alike. It is deliberately unweighted: weight the mean by size and the mass-market segment becomes Toyota with company, and the line stops being an average of brands.

Which brands go into it depends on what the line is being asked to do, and the label always says which. With two or more of a segment on screen the line is descriptive — where the segment sits — and it is the mean of every brand in it, labelled Luxury average · 3 brands. Filter down to a single brand and the same line is being read as that brand's benchmark, so the brand comes out of it: Luxury excl. Porsche. The reason is arithmetic. A segment of three means a company is a third of the average judging it, and the gap it appears to have is only two thirds of the real one. With two or more brands in view no such subtraction is possible — a single line cannot leave out all of them — so it reverts to the plain mean and says so. The leadership panel always excludes, because there the subject is always exactly one brand.

Everything on this page describes 28 reporting entities, chosen because each publishes revenue, a profitability measure and unit volumes on a comparable basis. It is a large sample of the industry's value, not the industry: makers outside the set — and the parts of these groups that fall outside the entity named in the register — are simply not here.

Two brands are off this map because the arithmetic does not hold. SAIC and Changan carry their Chinese joint ventures at equity: the ventures' cars appear in the volume the companies report, their revenue never enters the accounts, so revenue divided by volume measures nothing. The rule is that revenue and volume must describe the same perimeter. A brand is left off when nothing in its own reporting says how large the mismatch is, and marked on the page when the company prints enough to bound it.

Three rows divide across a seam and are marked for it. Ford counts wholesale units that its own filing says include vehicles whose revenue is not in Ford's revenue — 9–13% of the denominator in the three filings that state it — and Ford publishes no line without them. Kia's unit count carries an equity-accounted Chinese joint venture that its consolidated revenue does not, through 2021. Geely counts Lynk & Co, and later Livan, at a hundred per cent — up to 13% of the units — against revenue that does not consolidate them, through 2020.

The loss-makers are off because the margin axis cannot hold them. Lucid sold about 15,800 cars in 2025 at roughly $85,000 each at a gross margin of −92.8%, before a dollar of research or selling cost, against a floor of −31% here. McLaren is the same problem with clean data: nine years are complete from the statutory accounts of McLaren Automotive Limited (01967717) — the car business alone, a single entity, volumes stated as wholesale units — and the company earned +8.3% in 2019 and lost −199.3% in 2023, with three of the nine years below the floor. Widening the frame to hold either would compress every brand here into a fraction of the height it has now, and the distance between Ferrari and Nissan is the subject of the page. A brand joins the map the year its margin comes inside the frame.

Revenue per vehicle is each company's reported revenue for the stated entity divided by its reported volume for the same period; margin is the profitability measure that entity publishes. That measure is an operating margin for every brand here but two. BYD and Geely publish no operating profit line that isolates the cars, so both are drawn on a net margin — profit attributable to shareholders over revenue — which sits below the operating margin the axis would otherwise show. Two of the operating margins are wider than the cars and are named for it in the register: GM's is EBIT-adjusted, which is company-wide and carries GM Financial, and Tesla's is the company operating margin, which carries energy and services. A brand's track begins in the year its reporting entity began: Stellantis in 2021, at the FCA–PSA merger, and Xiaomi EV in 2024, at first delivery. Two denominators need naming. BYD's volume is total vehicle sales, not NEV sales; through 2021 roughly two thirds of it was combustion. Bentley withdrew unit disclosure after 2023, so its last two volumes are derived from published revenue and the price and volume movements the company stated — the derivation is set out in Per OEM — method. Seven of them report to 31 March, so their year n covers April n – March n+1. Seventeen of these entities report in something other than the euro, so a conversion rate is an input to every value they carry, exactly like a revenue figure. Every rate used is set out below and traceable to a central bank table.

The yen, year to 31 March. ¥119 to the euro for the year to March 2017, then 130, 128, 121, 124, 131, 141, 157, 164 and 175 — the first two read from Mazda's results speech outline for the year to March 2017 and the one for March 2018, the rest from Mazda's and Toyota's annual results documents. Toyota and Mazda each publish an average rate for this fiscal year and the two are identical to the yen in all six years where both appear; Nissan agrees for the last two, and Suzuki's and Mazda's series differ from each other by at most 0.78% across the decade. Toyota uses its own figure. Honda and Subaru publish a dollar rate and no euro rate, so both borrow this one, and both say so. The other eleven use a central bank. The rate is the annual average of the European Central Bank's daily euro reference rates, as compiled by the Deutsche Bundesbank ("Euro-Referenzkurse der EZB"). A central bank rather than an aggregator, and the same table for every currency, so that a brand cannot arrive carrying a rate chosen to suit a figure already computed. The whole table is below, read from the Bundesbank's exchange rate statistics, section II.3, annual averages. Every non-euro brand on this page divides by the figure for its currency and year, so a reader can redo any horizontal position from the company's own reported revenue without asking what rate was used.

JLR is converted at a rate a quarter of a year out of step. It is the only entity here that closes on 31 March and does not report in yen, and it publishes no fiscal-year euro rate of its own to borrow. The size of that is bounded: blending the calendar averages nine months to three, as an April-to-March year would, gives 0.8338 rather than 0.8195 for the year to March 2017 and 0.8787 rather than 0.8767 for the year to March 2018, moving the price by −1.7% and −0.2%. That is a bound, not the figure — a blend of two annual averages is not the average of the daily rates over those twelve months.

The spread across the decade is why the rate is taken year by year rather than fixed at one: 12.3% on the dollar, 8.6% on the pound, 14.7% on the renminbi, 21.2% on the krona, 25.7% on the won and 40.6% on the yen. For a brand priced near €25,000 a car, forty per cent of currency movement is worth more than a decade of pricing.

Why the six Japanese filers are the exception. A calendar-year average does not describe an April-to-March year, and for these six the mismatch is not small: the yen moved 47% across the decade on the companies' own fiscal-year rates, against 40.6% on the Bundesbank calendar series quoted above. So they are converted at the fiscal-year rate the companies publish themselves, which is the closer instrument. The two approaches agree where they can be compared — the Bundesbank table gives 169.04 yen for calendar 2025, between the 164 the companies print for the year to March 2025 and the 175 for the year to March 2026.