Mini-mini-vans, microcars, roadsters
New lines of microcars are coming from many manufacturers. Roadsters have made a comeback, too. And off-road vehicles and mini-vans are all the rage in Europe. It’s the age of niche products. Nearly every major carmaker at the Paris World of Autos exhibition was showing off some special vehicle intended to reawaken the emotional appeal of the automobile.
“We must not overlook the trends in the global automobile market,” said Hans Riedel, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Porsche AG. “The most important trend is the increasing segmentation of the market,” he said, adding it is “particularly evident through the success of novel niche cars, such as sport-utilities, convertibles, roadsters, mini-vans and pickups.”
For Porsche, that doesn’t just mean its Boxster entrant in the booming market for two-seat convertibles. The German sports-car maker is considering teaming with Mercedes-Benz AG on an off-road vehicle and with Volkswagen AG for a mini-van project.
Meanwhile, Mercedes has its a joint venture with Swatch watchmaker SMH SA to make a microcar known as the Smart. That’s on top of the Daimler-Benz AG’s new SLK roadster, the new M-Class off-road vehicle and the new V-Class mini-van.
“Cars are emotional products,” said Amanda Blair, spokeswoman for the Smart project.
Ford Motor Co., which has mini-vans and four-wheel-drive vehicles, added the Ka microcar to its lineup in Paris.
DRI/McGraw Hill, which forecasts auto demand, estimates sales in the microcar segment will nearly double to 1.1 million units a year by 2000 from 530,000 units in 1995.
“We think this growth will cause the small car segment, which is already the most diverse, to broaden even further,” said Alex Trotman, chairman of Ford, in an interview.
The outlook for the segment is making the world’s largest carmaker, General Motors Corp., give the microcar concept more thought, said Richard Donnelly, president of GM Europe.
“The thing about niches, there’s low volume and there’s high volume, and we certainly would prefer obviously the high volume,” he said.
Donnelly said he considers GM’s small, sporty Tigra, introduced in Paris in 1994, a prime example of a high-volume niche product.
The car outsold GM’s projections its first year with 66,000 deliveries instead of 50,000.
The company also is touting its Frontera, an off-road vehicle being sold under the Opel brand, as another “lifestyle vehicle,” and plans to import a U.S.-made mini-van, the Sintra, which has been overhauled by German engineers for the European market.
“We’re using one facility and one design to leverage the world,” Donnelly said.
Volkswagen, one of the original names in the European van market, updated its mini-van lineup with the Sharan last year.
“This is getting to be a crowded market,” said VW spokesman Hans-Peter Blechinger. “Already people are talking about mini-mini-vans as a subsegment.”
That’s the segment Fiat S.A. is targeting with the new Multipla. The bubble-like car looks like a high-roofed station wagon or a condensed mini-van with three bucket seats in front and back. The two-tier front end starts out the same size as a normal car and then leaps skyward at the windshield to create more interior space. It’s an exaggeration of the design concept being used for microcars to shorten length without too much internal cramping.
That’s the way Volkswagen will likely go if it launches a micro car in the next few years, Blechinger said. Not to be left out, Europe’s largest carmaker also is developing a new range below its Polo line, though the green light hasn’t been announced, he said.
High fuel prices and rising concern over pollution are pushing the manufacturers to build smaller cars. Renault leads the way in France with its Twingo, a two-door subcompact that gets roughly 48 miles to a gallon.
Plus, there’s a new generation of young people without families and empty-nesters who want cars easy to maneuver in increasingly congested cities.
“We’re going to be in an era where we have a very wealthy clientele of urban dwellers,” said Tom Perves, marketing chief for Rover, the British unit of BMW.
Even BMW, after much hemming and hawing, has announced that its Mini will get a makeover and a new version will come out after the turn of the century.
And traditionalists such as Sweden’s Volvo AB are revamping their image to meet changing consumer demands. Eventually, the company might “take up the competition of the sport-utilities,” said Hans-Olov Olsson, Volvo president for marketing in Europe.
