The Price of the Badge: What is a car brand worth when horsepower is free?

8 August 2026 · Approx. 22 minute read

In June 2026, the Australian new-car market had its biggest month in recorded history: 140,058 vehicles delivered. Buried inside that number was a result the industry had been bracing for. Toyota, which has led the Australian brand table almost continuously since 2003, delivered 19,124 cars. BYD, a Chinese company that sold its first vehicle in Australia in 2022, delivered 18,881.

Two hundred and forty-three cars. That was the entire distance between the most entrenched automotive brand in the country and a challenger that, five years ago, most Australians could not have picked out of a line-up.

It is a tempting number to build a story on, and plenty of people did. So it is worth reporting what happened next, because it complicates the story in a way that turns out to be the most interesting thing about it. In July, Toyota delivered 20,409 cars. BYD delivered 7,857. The gap did not narrow. It blew back out to nearly three to one.

Both facts are true, and neither is a fluke. June was a genuine near-miss driven by a stock surge and a subsidy-shaped run of EV demand; July was a reversion to something like the underlying trend line. And the underlying trend line is still extraordinary: through July, BYD holds 8.1% of the Australian market against Toyota’s 15.6%, having roughly doubled its volume year on year while Toyota’s fell 21%.

→ BYD’s Explorer No. 1, the first vessel in a fleet the carmaker built for itself after concluding that shipping capacity was a bottleneck it did not want to rent. The company also makes its own battery cells, its own semiconductors and its own motors. (Image: CleanTechnica)

1 — The invention of the badge

Nobody bought a brand until somebody sold them a ladder

The modern car brand is not as old as the car. For the first quarter-century of the industry, a car was an engineering proposition, bought by people wealthy enough to treat one as a hobby. Around 1900 an American automobile cost between $600 and $7,500 in an era when that was life-changing money; by 1909 there were roughly 306,000 cars in the United States, about one per three hundred people. Economic historians compare owning one to owning a yacht today. There was no ladder to climb because almost nobody was on it.

Henry Ford’s answer was to remove choice entirely. The Model T launched on 1 October 1908 at $850. From 1910 Ford built nothing else, for seventeen years. The moving assembly line arrived at Highland Park in 1913 and cut chassis assembly from twelve and a half hours to two hours thirty-eight minutes. The productivity gap this opened is still difficult to absorb: in 1914 Ford built 260,722 cars with 13,000 workers, while every other American manufacturer combined built 286,770 cars using 66,350. By 1922 the Model T was roughly 47% of every car in America, and the price had fallen towards $300.

Ford’s own account of the strategy has become the most quoted line in industrial history, usually in a form he never used. The actual sentence, from My Life and Work in 1922, is: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” He immediately adds: “I cannot say that anyone agreed with me.” It is worth noting that no contemporaneous record of him saying this in 1909 exists; the story survives only in his own memoir, written thirteen years later with a ghostwriter. The black paint, incidentally, was not chosen because it dried fastest; Ford’s own engineering records show it was chosen because it was the cheapest and most durable pigment available.

→ Highland Park, 1914. Ford solved manufacturing so completely that he mistook it for having solved the business. (Image: Alameda Post archive)

GM built a price ladder: Chevrolet at the bottom, then Pontiac and Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac at the summit. “A car for every purse and purpose” is the phrase attached to it, usually to Sloan, although GM’s own corporate history suggests the underlying idea came from founder William Durant and Sloan simply neglected to say so. The ladder was never as tidy in practice as in the retelling (by 1929 Oldsmobiles were selling for less than Buicks), but as a strategic concept it did something no one had done before. It made the badge on the car a statement about where you had got to in life, and it made trading up an aspiration you could act on annually.

Two mechanisms turned that concept into market share. In 1927 GM created the Art and Colour Section under Harley Earl, the first in-house styling department in the industry, and the 1927 LaSalle became the first mass-production car designed by designers rather than engineers. Annual model changes followed, and with them the deliberate manufacture of dissatisfaction: your perfectly functional car was now visibly last year’s. And in 1919 GM had founded GMAC to lend people the money. Ford considered buying a car on credit morally suspect and refused to offer finance until 1928. By 1930, three out of four vehicles in America were bought on time.

The result: Ford held about half the American market in 1921 and under 20% by 1928. GM passed Ford temporarily in 1927, while Ford’s plants sat idle retooling for the Model A, and permanently in 1931. A 1914 market research study had already diagnosed the vulnerability with brutal clarity: “People will more readily buy Fords where the kind of car they drive has little or no effect on their social standing in the community.”

And the corollary: equity is spendable

If a badge can be built, it can also be drained. The canonical demonstration is the Cadillac Cimarron of 1982: a Chevrolet Cavalier with a stand-up hood ornament, leather trim and, in its first model year, the same 88-horsepower 1.8-litre four-cylinder engine as the Chevrolet, sold for thousands more. It was not a bad car so much as a public admission that the badge meant nothing in particular. Cadillac spent decades recovering, and arguably never fully did. The lesson generalises: brand equity behaves like a bank balance, not a birthright, and badge engineering is a withdrawal.

→ 1957 Cadillac. The fin served no aerodynamic purpose whatsoever, which was precisely the point: it existed to be recognised from behind. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

2 — This has happened before, twice

The incumbents have run this play, and lost it, in living memory

Anyone arguing that Chinese carmakers cannot displace established Western brands should be made to read the press cuttings from 1970 and 1986 first.

The Japanese entered America and Europe as a joke about tin cans. Contemporary press dismissed the Datsun Sunny as disposable; the Honda N600 was a $1,200 curiosity. Then reliability data started arriving and did not stop. By the early 1980s, the response was not competitive but political: the 1981 Voluntary Export Restraints capped Japanese imports at 1.68 million units, rising to 1.85 million by year four. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland later calculated the three-year cost to American consumers at roughly $2.7 billion, of which about $2.6 billion was simply transferred to Japanese producers and American dealers as windfall profit on artificially scarce cars. The quota did not stop the Japanese. It taught them to sell fewer, more expensive vehicles, and to build factories in Ohio and Tennessee.

Then they came for the top of the ladder. Lexus launched the LS400 in November 1989 at $35,350, roughly $20,000 under a comparable German sedan, and outsold BMW in the United States in its first full month. Thirty-five percent of early buyers traded in a European luxury car. BMW’s US marketing vice-president had publicly predicted Lexus would take customers from Cadillac and Lincoln rather than from BMW. He was wrong within weeks.

Not every attempt worked, which is the more useful half of the lesson. Infiniti launched the same month with a $60 million advertising campaign famous for showing rocks and geese rather than cars. It generated 60,000 phone calls and sold 32 vehicles a day against Lexus’s 134. TIME headlined it “Phantom Car, Faint Sales”; Jay Leno’s line was that sales of trees and rocks were up 300%. Buzz is not brand.

→ The 1990 Lexus LS400. Dismissed on arrival as a Mercedes tribute act; within a month it was outselling BMW in America. (Image: Lexus Media)

The Korean run is the one that should genuinely frighten European product planners, because it is a stopwatch. Hyundai entered the US in January 1986 with the Excel at $4,995 and set an import sales record. Within three years the brand was a punchline about cars that dissolved. Its answer, in 1998, was the ten-year, hundred-thousand-mile warranty: a naked purchase of trust at the precise moment Korea’s financial credibility had collapsed. By 2004, Hyundai ranked second in J.D. Power’s initial quality study, behind only Toyota. Peter Schreyer arrived from Audi in 2006 and gave Kia a face. Genesis was spun out as a standalone luxury brand in 2015. In 2024, Hyundai Motor Group ranked first in the world for initial quality.

That is roughly thirty-five years from market entry to the top of the table, or about twenty-five from the reputational floor. The climb is real, it is repeatable, and it takes a generation.

3 — What actually broke

Performance stopped being expensive, and nobody told the marketing department

Here is the single fact that reorganises everything else. In 2010 a lithium-ion battery pack cost somewhere around $1,100 to $1,200 per kilowatt-hour. In 2025 the global volume-weighted average was $108. In China it was $84, with US packs running about 44% higher and European packs about 56% higher than that.

Lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry, which China dominates and which requires no cobalt, reached $81 per kilowatt-hour at pack level in 2025 against $128 for nickel-manganese-cobalt. It is less energy-dense, which for a mass-market car has turned out not to matter nearly as much as being cheap.

Cost is only half of it. The other half is that China does not merely assemble these cars: it owns the inputs. Roughly 80% of global battery cell output and 85% of capacity sits in China, alongside 85–90% of cathode material, over 90% of anode material, 91% of rare-earth refining and 94% of the world’s neodymium magnet production. CATL and BYD alone account for over 55% of every EV battery sold on the planet. When Europe builds an electric car, it is buying most of the value from the people it is competing with.

BYD is the structural extreme. It was founded in 1995 as a battery company supplying Motorola and Nokia, and only bought its way into cars in 2003. It makes its own cells, its own IGBT semiconductors, its own motors and, after concluding that shipping was a bottleneck, its own fleet of ocean-going car carriers. When UBS stripped down a BYD Seal in 2023, it found roughly 75% of the components were made in-house, double the global average, and a cost base about 25% below Western rivals and more than 30% below the Volkswagen ID.3. Legacy manufacturers typically buy in 60–80% of a vehicle’s value from suppliers; several of them actively divested their component arms in the 1990s.

Speed compounds it. Chinese manufacturers develop a new vehicle in roughly 18 to 24 months against 45 to 60 for legacy mass-market groups, a figure independently estimated in the same range by McKinsey, AlixPartners, Oliver Wyman and a Reuters investigation. Reuters also found the average Chinese-brand model on sale was 1.6 years old; for foreign brands, 5.4.

Which brings us to the 1,400 horsepower question

A Xiaomi SU7 Ultra makes roughly 1,526 horsepower and costs about 529,900 yuan, around $73,000. That is approximately $48 per horsepower. A Porsche 911 Turbo S makes 640 horsepower for about $230,000, or roughly $360 per horsepower. Per unit of performance, the Chinese car is seven and a half times cheaper, not marginally so.

→ The Xiaomi SU7 Ultra: around 1,500 horsepower from a company that, five years ago, made phones and rice cookers. Ford’s chief executive imported one to Chicago and told a podcast: “I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up.” (Image: Motor1 / InsideEVs)

The instinct is to argue about the numbers: that a Nürburgring time set by a stripped prototype is not a production time (correct: the SU7 Ultra has three different lap times attached to three different states of tune), or that Yangwang’s claimed 496 km/h was a one-directional run that would not satisfy Guinness (also correct). But arguing the asterisks concedes the argument. If your defence of a €230,000 sports car requires litigating whether the €73,000 car’s lap record was set on the correct kind of run, the performance gap has already closed to within the margin of press-release integrity.

Straight-line speed is over as a differentiator. An electric motor makes maximum torque at zero rpm; adding another one costs a few thousand dollars. Acceleration was expensive for a hundred years because it required combustion engineering that almost nobody could do well. It is now a purchasing decision. Any brand whose meaning rests on being quick is holding an asset that has been marked down to roughly nothing.

4 — The numbers

Europe is where it is happening. Australia is where it has happened.

In the second quarter of 2026, Chinese brands took a record 10.7% of new-car sales across Western Europe’s eighteen markets: 352,098 units. It was the first quarter in history that Chinese brands outsold Japanese ones. A year earlier the figure was 5.7%. In 2016, Chinese brands plus Tesla combined accounted for 0.1% of the market; in Q2 2026 that same “new entrant” group was 13.3%.

Where is that share coming from? Growth isn’t the source; the incumbents are.

Australia is the same film, further into the running time, because Australia has no domestic car industry to protect, drives on the right-hand side that Chinese exporters already build for, and has just introduced fuel-efficiency rules that structurally reward exactly the companies arriving.

The Australian first-half table is the clearest picture anywhere of a market reallocating rather than growing. Total volume was essentially flat (down 0.3%), which means every unit gained by a challenger was taken from someone.

→ Total market 606,793, −0.3%. VFACTS data; Geely’s precise year-on-year percentage varies between sources and is reported here qualitatively.

5 — Adelaide

Australia already lost the brands it loved, and China had nothing to do with it

There is a reason Australia fell faster than Europe: not that Chinese cars are better here, but that Australia already ran this experiment, a decade early, on itself.

For most of the postwar period Australia had what may have been the most tribal car market in the developed world. Roughly half of every car sold in the 1950s was a Holden. The rivalry with Ford was not a marketing construct. It was a genuine social division, red against blue, conducted annually at Bathurst and understood by people who had never bought either. Holden’s veteran Mark Skaife put the taxonomy plainly: “Red vs Blue, Ford vs Holden, Collingwood vs Carlton, Labor vs Liberal.”

What made it work was proximity. The Commodore and the Falcon were designed in Australia, built in Australia by Australians, and raced at Bathurst in a form you could plausibly buy at a dealership. The badge on the boot lid was a claim about where you were from and who made your car, not an abstraction about a company headquartered in another hemisphere. Brand loyalty had a physical substrate: a factory in Elizabeth, another in Broadmeadows, and the people who worked in them.

Then it went; for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with China.

Timeline: the end of Australian car manufacturing

→ Elizabeth, South Australia, October 2017. Sixty-nine years of Australian car manufacturing finished on a Friday afternoon. (Image: ABC News)

Then GM tried to keep the badge without the car

This is the part that matters most, because it is the Cadillac Cimarron all over again: same mistake, different hemisphere, thirty-six years later, and this time with an audience that had every reason to take it personally.

Having closed Elizabeth, General Motors kept the Commodore name and applied it to an imported Opel Insignia: front-wheel drive, built in Germany, available with a four-cylinder or a V6, and for the first time in forty years, no V8 at all. More than three million Commodores had been sold since 1978. Australians looked at this one and declined. Sales fell over 60% in 2018, then another 37% in 2019 to 5,417 cars. GM axed it in December 2019, two years after launch, and reportedly paid penalties to the German factory for not taking its allocation.

The collateral damage went further than one model. Industry surveys tracked the number of people intending to buy a Holden within the next year falling from 8% to 4% almost overnight when the factory shut, buyers concluding, not unreasonably, that a company that had stopped making cars here had stopped being theirs. Holden then declined to renew franchise agreements with some of its longest-standing dealers, who promptly installed Nissan, Kia and Hyundai signage in the same showrooms. Every one of those brands went on to outsell Holden. By 2019 the former number-one brand in the country held 4.1% of the market and tenth place.

That sentence is the whole argument of this essay, written seven years before the Chinese wave arrived, by someone watching a different fire.

Which is why Australia had no defences left

By the time BYD landed in 2022, Australia had become the most brand-agnostic developed car market on earth, and it had got there entirely without Chinese help. Every car on sale was an import. No badge had a local claim on anyone’s loyalty: no factory, no jobs, no plausible line about supporting Australian workers. Ford still sold Rangers and Mustangs, but the Falcon was a memory. Holden was gone outright. The Supercars grid, which had once been a direct extension of the showroom, had become, in driver Nick Percat’s flat assessment, “hand-made race cars… other than the body panels, they’re nothing like a road car anymore.”

So when a Chinese manufacturer arrived with more equipment at a lower price, the emotional switching cost of moving from a Toyota to a BYD was approximately zero. Not because Australians are unsentimental (they had been extraordinarily sentimental, for seventy years), but because the objects of the sentiment had already been taken away and replaced with imports, by the very companies that had earned the loyalty in the first place.

Which makes Australia less a preview of Europe’s future than a controlled experiment on what Europe still has and is at risk of spending. Europe retains the substrate: Wolfsburg, Zuffenhausen, Mirafiori, Gothenburg, Sochaux. Factories, jobs, national identification, the sense that these companies are in some meaningful way ours. That is what the tariff arguments and the localisation fights are actually about, underneath the trade law: not protecting margin, but protecting the physical basis on which a badge can still make a claim on somebody.

6 — The great sorting

Two economies, and the brands trapped between them

The question “do people still care about car brands?” has no single answer, because there is no longer a single car market. There are two, and they are separating fast.

The first is the appliance economy. Four wheels, a family, a school run, a price. This is most of the market by volume, and it always has been. The difference is that buyers now have the information to act on it. They can compare specification, warranty, range and monthly payment on a phone before they ever see a dealer. In this economy, the badge functioned mainly as a proxy: a shorthand for “this will probably not break, and someone will fix it if it does.” When you can verify those things directly, the proxy loses value. And a Chinese manufacturer can deliver more equipment, more technology and more electrification for less money, which is precisely the offer that wins here. In the appliance economy, brand is not dying so much as being priced correctly, and the correct price is low.

The second is the identity economy. Here the car is not a solution to a transport problem; it is a statement about the person driving it. Mercedes’ design chief Gorden Wagener puts the distinction more bluntly than any analyst: “A Mercedes should not be like a fridge — something you need… luxury is something you want, not what you need. We don’t build appliances on wheels.” That is not marketing fluff, it is a segmentation strategy. In this economy the badge is the product, and its price is whatever meaning it carries.

That statistic is the single strongest piece of evidence that brand equity remains a real, monetisable asset, and also the most dangerous thing an incumbent could read, because a 71% refusal rate is a starting position, not a moat. In 1989, the share of BMW owners who would have considered a Japanese luxury sedan was surely higher than 29%, right up until it wasn’t.

The genuine casualty of this sorting is neither the cheap car nor the exceptional one. It is everything in the middle: the mainstream brand that charges a premium over the value players on the strength of reputation, without offering anything the identity economy would pay for. Volkswagen at 10.2% and falling. Ford below 3% in a market where it held 9% in 2009. Nissan at 1.6%, now outsold in Europe by BYD, Tesla, MG and Chery. These are brands discovering that the middle of the ladder was the rung nobody was standing on for emotional reasons, not brands being beaten on product.

7 — Stuttgart

How Porsche competes with 1,400 horsepower: by not competing with 1,400 horsepower

Porsche is having a genuinely terrible time, and it is important to be accurate about why, because the reasons are mostly not the ones in the headline.

Three guidance cuts in 2025. Demotion from the DAX to the MDAX in September of that year. Roughly 9,000 job reductions programmed through to 2035, about one position in five. A dealer network in China contracting from around 150 outlets towards a target of 80. And in September 2025, a strategic reversal: the new SUV positioned above the Cayenne, previously planned as an EV, will now launch with combustion and plug-in hybrid power, at a one-off cost of up to €1.8 billion and total extraordinary charges around €3.1 billion. Volkswagen Group absorbed roughly €5.1 billion in knock-on impairment.

But disentangle the causes. US tariffs cost roughly €700 million in 2025; Porsche builds nothing in America and North America is now its largest market. The China collapse is substantially a demand-side story about a property downturn and newly discreet wealth, not solely a competitive one: Mercedes fell 27% in China in Q3 2025, BMW 11% over nine months, Ferrari 13%. And Porsche’s own software problems were inherited: Volkswagen’s CARIAD division lost more than €6.9 billion between 2022 and 2024 and delayed the electric Macan by years.

Even the alarming Australian number has an innocent explanation. Porsche Australia’s June deliveries fell 33% to 342 cars, driven by the Macan collapsing 83% from 241 units to 41 as it transitioned to an EV-only line-up. In the same month, Cayenne Coupe sales rose 27.7% and Cayenne Wagon 44.8%. Porsche Australia’s chief executive said flatly: “this is not a Porsche problem, this is an industry situation.” On the evidence, he is right.

→ The 911 retains roughly 60–78% of its value after three years depending on the methodology, and 92% after five years in US data, against an all-vehicle average of 58%. Depreciation is brand equity you can measure in cash. (Image: Porsche Newsroom)

So what is left to defend?

Not speed. Porsche cannot win a horsepower war against a company that will sell 1,500 of them for $73,000, and the strategically literate response is to stop entering that war. What survives commoditisation is everything that cannot be specified on a comparison table:

That said, Ferrari also demonstrates the limits. When it revealed its first EV, the Luce, unveiled in Rome in May 2026 at over €500,000, the stock fell 8.4% in Milan, having already dropped 16% the previous October on underwhelming long-range guidance. By late July, orders had reportedly hit the roughly 500-unit target, helped by Chinese demand. Even the most insulated brand in the industry gets marked down when the market suspects its meaning does not transfer to the new technology.

8 — Gothenburg

The Volvo paradox: a Chinese-owned brand that stayed Swedish

If the question is whether Chinese ownership destroys a European brand’s meaning, the experiment has already been run, and the answer is no, with conditions.

Ford sold Volvo Cars to Geely for $1.8 billion in March 2010, an act widely reported at the time as the end of Volvo as anyone understood it. What followed was the most successful period in the company’s history. In 2011, its first full year under Geely, Volvo sold 449,255 cars on revenue of SEK 126 billion with SEK 1.6 billion of operating profit. By 2019 it sold 705,452 cars, the first time above 700,000 in a ninety-year history, on SEK 274 billion of revenue and SEK 14.3 billion of operating profit. In October 2021 it listed in Stockholm at around $18 billion and jumped 22% on debut.

Volvo’s own account names the mechanism explicitly. The 2010 arrangement was built on “technical independence, a global manufacturing footprint, a strengthened brand identity and arms-length governance by Geely.” Li Shufu bought a brand and then, crucially, did not touch it. Håkan Samuelsson’s summary: “we completely renewed our product portfolio, established a global presence, almost doubled our sales and went from break-even to profitable.”

→ The Volvo EX30: designed in Sweden, initially built in China, and since April 2025 also built in Ghent, Belgium, after a €200 million investment prompted directly by EU tariffs that apply to the Geely group at 28.8%. (Image: WIRED)

The comparison case is instructive. MG, under SAIC, kept the octagon and discarded almost everything else: the badge survives as a value proposition, competently executed and emotionally hollow. Volvo kept the meaning. The difference was whether the owner understood that the meaning was the asset, not the nationality of ownership.

Which is why the current chapter matters. Volvo is struggling: it abandoned its 2030 all-electric pledge in September 2024, took a roughly $1 billion impairment in 2025, and brought Samuelsson back as chief executive in April 2025 on a two-year term after Jim Rowan’s departure. And Li Shufu has begun publicly arguing for the opposite of the original doctrine: deeper integration with Geely and Polestar, more shared China-based R&D, to avoid what he called self-destructive obsolescence. Fifteen years of deliberate arm’s-length separation is being unwound under financial pressure.

That is the real test, and it is running right now. Volvo’s Swedishness was never a fact about its cap table; it was a discipline about what the owner refrained from doing. Discipline is cheap when profits are good.

Set Volvo against Holden and the variable isolates cleanly. Both were national brands owned by a foreign parent. One owner treated the meaning as the asset and left it alone, and the brand grew from 449,000 cars to 705,000. The other treated the meaning as a balance-sheet item it could keep while disposing of everything underneath it, and destroyed a seventy-year-old institution in three years. Neither outcome had anything to do with the nationality of the owner; both had everything to do with whether the owner understood what they had bought.

9 — The reckoning

Who survives, and on what basis

Sorting the field by what each type of brand actually owns, rather than by nationality or size:

The Chinese challengers’ weakness is worth stating precisely, because it is routinely overstated and routinely understated in the same conversation. In Australia, the depreciation penalty is real: the BYD Atto 3 lost 35.8% in just over a year and the Chery Tiggo 7 Pro 42.0%, against MG ZS retaining 57–68% over four years versus 72–78% for a Mazda CX-3. But in the UK, cap hpi’s 2026 data has the MG 5 among the strongest performers on three-year residuals, while the value stress sits in premium EVs: the Genesis G80, Lexus RZ, BMW i5, Jaguar I-Pace. A Tesla Model Y lost 48.9% since 2022.

Conclusion

The badge has to be paid for again

Car brands are not dead. Unearned car brands are dead, and most brands have been coasting on unearned equity for about thirty years.

The century-long bargain was that a badge stood as security for things a buyer could not check: whether the engine would last, whether the car would be safe, whether it would be worth anything in five years, whether the neighbours would read it correctly. Sloan monetised the last of those and the industry lived off the arrangement for four generations. What has happened is not that Chinese manufacturers built better cars, but that they, along with the internet and the electric drivetrain, dismantled the information asymmetry the whole arrangement rested on. When a buyer can verify range, warranty, equipment and price in ten minutes on a phone, and when 1,500 horsepower costs $73,000, the badge is no longer collateral. It is just a claim, and it now has to be true.

Which brings this back to where most people actually live. If you need four wheels to move a family from A to B, you are being served better than at any point in automotive history, by companies that did not exist in your consciousness five years ago, and you are right not to pay a premium for a logo that no longer certifies anything. That is the correct pricing of a service, not the death of taste.

And if you chose a Volvo because something about the way it holds itself matches something about the way you would like to hold yourself. That is not sentimentality either, but the last remaining thing a car brand can sell that cannot be copied by a company with better batteries: a specific, coherent point of view about how to move through the world, executed consistently enough that other people recognise it. Volvo’s Swedishness survived a Chinese takeover because Geely understood it was buying a meaning, not a factory. Whether it survives Volvo’s own cost-cutting is a genuinely open question.

Australia is the cautionary version of that sentence, because Australia has already been through it and the culprit was domestic. Nobody took the Falcon and the Commodore away from Australians except the companies that made them. The badges were spent: first on a factory closure that was probably unavoidable, then on an imported saloon wearing a name it had not earned, which was entirely avoidable. What arrived from China four years later did not conquer a loyal market. It walked into an empty one.

The comforting version of this story is that Europe’s heritage brands have a moat and China has none. The real version is that 71% of European luxury buyers said they would not consider a Chinese car: a number that describes a lead, not a wall, and one that reads uncomfortably like what BMW’s marketing chief said about Lexus in October 1989, three weeks before Lexus outsold him.

Brands were never about the metal. They were about being the only people who could make the metal work. That job is finished. From here, a badge is worth exactly what it means to the person looking at it — and meaning, unlike horsepower, was never something you could buy by the kilowatt-hour.