In car-production terms, 2021 was the year of the audacious overtake. India and South Korea soared past Germany. Indonesia did the same to the UK. and the style continued with under-estimated Spain doing the unthinkable by overtaking an over-confident USA that utilized to be the world’s No 1 car producer – but has now enabled itself to plummet to eighth place. Ouch. That need to hurt.
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There’s no doubt that, of the major players, Germany, America, Mexico and Canada were among the big losers in 2021 compared with 2020, as all four experienced large reduces in output.

‘UK car production has been completely cut by 50% in just five years’

But at the same time, rapidly emerging producers such as Argentina and Pakistan both doubled their car production year on year. It seems these two unlikely countries were not hit by the same level of chip shortages, Covid complications and lack of confidence that crippled other ‘better and stronger’ automotive nations last year. Interesting, that.  
Closer to home, Austria, Finland and Portugal are on the up, while Germany, Holland and Slovenia aren’t just on the decline, they’re deeply down. and in the middle of all this is the UK, whose output did dip – by around seven per cent – in 2021 vs 2020. but despite being overtaken in the car-production league table last year by Indonesia (how the hell did we allow that to happen?) we remain in the top 15 of global producers with 900,000 vehicles created in 2021, so for that small mercy we must be grateful.