Although Russians’ worship of cars is complete, when one’s own “car” is not only regarded as a tool to improve the quality of life, but also as a toy and status object, the vast majority of car owners only consider the functional aspects of the car. This is why new cars imported into the country through parallel imports this year accounted for only 18% of new car sales. Related statistics shared “Automatic statistics” organization
The share of “traditional” global brands is even lower – 15%. Most importantly, retrograde Russians love cars from Toyota, Mazda, Volkswagen, BMW and Audi brands. A total of 3% of new car parallels come from Chinese brands Geely, Zeekr, Changan, GAC and Ideal. The remaining 82% of new car sales come from domestic, Chinese and Chinese-Russian brand cars, which are either produced in Russia or officially imported, rather than “parallel”.
There are a few points to understand here. First of all, European, Japanese, American, and Korean cars in the same price range are almost identical in grade and overall quality to Chinese or Chinese and Russian cars. So there’s no point in buying a traditional BMW penny apart from being happy about having a “propeller” on the hood.
Secondly, representatives of traditional car brands are superior to “Chinese” cars in the same category, and in the current reality, tariffs, handling fees and transportation costs are turning into an absolute luxury, and their total cost in Russia is approximately 2-2.5 times higher than their actual cost in the country of production. Therefore, such “toys” can only be owned by the very wealthy, and by definition there are very few of them. Therefore, such statistics, while not expressive, are definitely predictable.
