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 roughly €9k–€43k in 2016 to €18k–€50k 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, BYD and Geely from the left as they scale. BYD's last step turns back left — revenue per vehicle fell 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 because the two disagree in about one tenure in six, and when they do, the disagreement is the finding: JLR under Adrian Mardell gained nearly eight points on the luxury segment while its own margin fell, which is not a turnaround but a slower descent than Porsche's. 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: operating 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 Volume band gave up about twelve points of these brands' sales — from roughly 82% to 71% — while selling only some 5% fewer cars, and almost all of what it gave up went to the Chinese challengers, who rose from about 2.5% to 14%. 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. Twenty-three reporting entities carry most of the industry's value and a large part of its volume — around 57 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.

Ultra-luxury — Bentley, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Ferrari. €246k–524k.
Luxury — JLR, Maserati, Porsche. €75k–130k.
Premium — Tesla, Volvo, Audi, BMW, Mercedes. €38k–53k.
Volume — Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, Volkswagen, Stellantis, GM, Ford, Honda. €22k–40k.
Chinese challengers — Geely, BYD, Xiaomi EV. €15k–32k.

Two things about that list are worth stating plainly, because the colours invite a different reading. The groups are positioning, not price bands. They line up neatly by price today, but they do not over ten years: premium reaches €83k in 2017 while luxury starts at €54k in 2016, so the two ranges overlap by nearly €30k, and volume's ceiling passes premium's floor as well. The reason is visible on the map. Tesla ran from €83k per vehicle in 2017 to €38k in 2025 — it began above where JLR sits now and ended below Volvo — while Honda climbed from €24k to €40k into premium's lower edge. If the segment were a price band, both would have changed colour mid-decade, tails 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 €15k–32k they sit entirely inside the volume range, 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 volume 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 volume 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 23 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.

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. 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. Toyota, Honda and JLR report to 31 March, so their year n covers April n – March n+1. Non-euro reporters are converted at annual average rates. 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.