The content of the article:
- Advantages and disadvantages of the bill
- Prospects for the domestic automotive industry
- Whether to invest in Russian cars
- Will the Russian auto industry survive thanks to the "parent capital"
The State Duma is constantly looking for new opportunities to support the domestic automotive industry, especially in the current protracted crisis. This is how the idea was born to allow maternity capital to be spent on purchasing a car for the needs of the family.
Advantages and disadvantages of the bill
Only large families with foster children or disabled children will be affected by the amendments to the legislation. The choice of vehicle will be limited to a Russian car, which then cannot be sold for 3 years. Moreover, it will be possible to spend maternity capital by paying a car loan.
This extraordinary decision was caused by two reasons:
- Many families cannot decide what to spend their maternity capital on. There is too little of it to buy an apartment or build a house, parents are able to earn money for kindergartens on their own, and it is still too far from college and pension. Thus, more than 47% of parents do not know how to use the funds allocated to them wisely.
- The drop in sales in the car market must be stopped urgently. If all other support programs - loyal loans, First Car - have already exhausted themselves, you need to look for help in another area.
And the new bill will simultaneously provide social assistance to citizens and pour fresh blood into the domestic industry. The advantages of this idea include the following points:
- assistance to large families or those with a sick child in moving around the city, which is difficult to do on city transport;
- improving transport accessibility for residents of suburbs and rural areas with the city;
- the possibility of additional income for the family due to greater mobility and time savings;
- the ability to use the subsidy without additional investment. If you have to invest your own funds in buying an apartment or building a house, then a Russian-made car can be afforded for the entire amount of accrued capital;
- car market support.
There are also quite justified risks that can stall the implementation of the project:
- the likelihood of instant resale of the purchased vehicle;
- the risk of losing a vehicle as a result of an accident, theft or any other way of damage to property;
- in the context of a domestic product, there is a too rapid aging of the machine, and, consequently, a loss of its value.
As of the beginning of 2017, maternity capital funds will definitely be enough to purchase Lada Kalina, whose cost varies from 254,000 to 318,000 thousand rubles, and a number of outdated, non-functional, and therefore cheap representatives of AvtoVAZ. For example, a VAZ-2105 for 160 thousand rubles.
Prospects for the domestic automotive industry
The current crisis can be called the most difficult over the past 15 years. Support measures provided by the state only allow not to disconnect life support systems from a dying patient, but not to restore his health. Even Belarus and Kazakhstan were let down at a difficult time by closing off Russian supplies.
The hopes for the localization of the assembly production of foreign cars did not come true either, for which there is not enough experience, technology, or resources. AvtoVAZ alone has clearly demonstrated that even effective foreign managers are unable to bring a national product to a competitive level with sheer enthusiasm alone.
Sad statistics show that in 2016 car assembly plants in Russia produced 28% of cars less than the previous year. Consumer demand is also relentlessly declining and shifting towards maximum budget models. The segment of SUVs and crossovers has lost ground to representatives of the B-class, giving them 8% of sales.
Although Dmitry Medvedev regularly talks about the need for state support for our car industry, this is clearly not enough. In 2015, 43 billion rubles were allocated to stimulate the industry, in 2016 - 50 billion, in 2017 all 62 billion rubles are planned, on which over 750 thousand cars are expected to be sold.
In addition to thoughtless financing, it is necessary to update the strategy itself and the mechanism for the further development of the industry, including more accurately forecasting the car market and more actively developing the export of Russian technology. In addition, the share of purchases of Russian-made cars by natural monopoly entities and companies with state participation should be increased. In this case, such state intervention will act as a stabilizer of demand for domestic products, and the volume of local output will stop decreasing along with the car market. So far, no specificity and clarity can be traced in state aid, and the program for updating vehicle fleets through utilization and trade in will be terminated before the end of the first half of the year.
Whether to invest in Russian cars
If the bill restricts citizens to the purchase of cars not just assembled in Russia, but exclusively of local production, then they will have a very limited choice. Currently, our car industry consists of the only passenger car representative - Lada.
We must pay tribute to the Volzhsky plant - it manages to incur colossal losses, but still function and even develop new models. Of course, the modern product is strikingly different from the Soviet "kopecks" or "sixes", but it is still very far from ideal.
In the words of a well-known satirist, a Russian person should be praised for his intention. In 2016, a real Xray crossover appeared in the AvtoVAZ family. It sold 20,000 models, and even though the same Hyundai sells so many SUVs in just a quarter, for us this is already a result. The company has listened to the criticism of car owners and is constantly working on its mistakes. So, she finally equipped the car with a 122-horsepower engine with a quality Renault manual transmission. The Xray never got all-wheel drive, but it got large-diameter wheels and even ESP.
The stand of the automaker's novelties presented at the Moscow Motor Show turned out to be so large that they started talking about it even abroad. I was impressed by the prototype of the Lada X-Code crossover, which received Steve Mattin as a designer. A former Volvo employee has previously worked on the Russian Xray and Vesta. It is still difficult to say whether the SUV will enter serial production, but the development trend of the Volzhsky plant is very encouraging.
Sufficiently running Vesta ranks 5th in popularity among passenger cars in the Russian market and only 99th in the European market.
Compared to its "brothers" Hyundai Solaris or KIA Rio, it is fundamentally inferior in quality. However, if you recall the handicrafts of the previous decades, Auto VAZ has grown a head, showing that the Russian auto industry has not completely disappeared from the face of the earth.
Will the auto industry survive thanks to the "parent capital"
The idea of the bill is not new, a couple of years ago it already caused a stir in the ranks of the state. Officials were divided. Someone is sure that parents with two or three children will find a better use of money than buying a "tin", in which thousands of hard-earned money will have to be invested annually for service.On the other hand, very low-income families will gladly accept even a cheap car, but practically "as a gift." Although skeptics are sure that there will be no more than 500 people throughout the country.
Still, the key idea is to show everyone how the state worries about the domestic industry, trying to revive it by any means. So far, all the rescue measures being implemented have not fully justified hopes - just recently, experts from the Ministry of Industry and Trade again predicted a decrease in the number of vehicles that will be purchased thanks to concessional lending. No matter how “preferential” it may be, the majority of the population now does not have free funds to participate in such a tempting program.
Even Viktor Pokhmelkin, who is the head of the Russian Motorists' Movement, admitted that by approving this bill, the government would sign its own insolvency. It will show that all the previous resuscitation measures - increased duties on the import of foreign cars, billions poured in to support AvtoVAZ, loan proposals - were useless.
