Impact of Coronavirus to new car purchase in China

The Coronavirus outbreak has changed people’s daily mobility pattern and attitude of buying cars.

Many industries have been serious impact by the Coronavirus outbreak in China. Automotive industry is one of them. The external source shows the number of passenger car sales dropped by 80% in February in China. As China is the largest automotive market in the global place, we were keen to understand how the Coronavirus has changed consumer’s daily mobility pattern and the attitude of buying new cars.

Ipsos in China conducted a quick survey in the end of February to monitor the new car purchase intention under the impact of Coronavirus in China. The learnings we have from this survey are:

• Non-car owners have higher intention to acquire new cars, due to lack of trust in public transportation
• Frequency of digital touchpoints is increased
• Health-related features are favoured
• Online sales and aftersales services are preferred

Car manufacturers will need to adapt to the changes in consumer’s attitude and behaviour. This quick survey could help our clients to consider different product offers, shifting more resource to online communication touchpoints, while broadening the sales and aftersales services to online territory.

The survey was conducted on 24 Feb 2020 and 1620 interviews were completed.