Editorial

Abstract:

Two years after the beginning of the COVID crisis, its impact on the automotive industry is still unclear. On the one hand, massive state interventions have softened the simultaneous demand and supply shocks generated by national lockdowns and we will probably see their real damages on companies and jobs only when these exceptional measures will fade away. On the other hand, the collateral disruptions of the supply chain (the global chip shortage) triggered by the COVID crisis have blurred the picture making difficult to understand what is due to what and where the industry will eventually stand when things go back to ‘normal’.
However, it is already clear that the COVID crisis has contributed in accelerating a series of transformations that the automotive industry was already undergoing before the crisis. In this special number, we look in particular at two of them: the electrification of vehicles and the digitalisation of manufacturing processes that have become more prominent during the last two years.