Young people have become a driving force in China's car consumption.
Zhu Zhenyu is the marketing director of Changan Mazda. At the ongoing 2014 Guangzhou Auto Show, he revealed that young consumers account for the majority of the company's sales.
"Our most popular models include Mazda 2, Mazda 3, Axela and CX-5. Their owners are mostly young people between 20 and 40. That means people born in the 1980s make up about 80 percent of our customers."
The post 1980s generation has unique spending habits. Changan Mazda is aware that these young people are constantly hooked to the online market.
"We realize the 1980s generation pay more attention to the internet and often access the internet using their mobile phones. So we've been building our sales strategies based on the internet."
Zhu's company is one of the many carmakers to set up flagship stores on Alibaba's Tmall and so far, achieved satisfactory sales results this year. On November 11, Chang'an Automobile sold more than 3000 cars online.
Meanwhile, with the popularity of smart phones, consumers are also expecting an intelligent system to aid their driving. At the Guangzhou Auto show, Ford appeals to their potential customers with its Sync infotainment system AppLink. Shao Xiaoling is Ford's product manager.
"We've already established partnership with 8 companies to offer 12 APPs on our AppLink System, including Baidu Map, Tencent Music and Weibo."
While some demands of the younger generation are easy to meet, others can be challenging at this point.
"I want Auto Navigation, I want to be able to play music and watch movies."
"I want it to follow my voice command and help me park."
"I want to be able to unlock the car with an APP, and interact with me via voice command."
This is why Ford has shared the source code of its AppLink system, so that more developers can contribute more Apps. But since all carmakers are trying to come up with their own smart system, it could take sometime before one or two systems could exert their dominance on the market.
