Mobility

Thanks to its more than one-hundred-year history of precision engineering and its exceptional location, good infrastructure and highly skilled workforce, the Czech Republic plays a significant role in the automotive industry and related sectors. The country is home to three key automobile manufacturers, namely Škoda Auto, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Czech Republic and Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Czech. The Czech Republic also offers outstanding business opportunities for suppliers and is prepared to strengthen its position as one of the leading European centres for design and research and development in the mobility sector.

The sector has recovered from crisis attacking pre-pandemic volumes. According to the available data, domestic passenger car manufacturers increased production by 16.2% year-on-year in the first ten months of 2023, producing a total of 1,162,315 vehicles. Production of electric vehicles also increased. In the same period, a total of 157,856 units were produced, including 114,024 pure electric passenger cars and 43,811 plug-in hybrid passenger cars. The increase in the number of passenger vehicles produced since the beginning of the year, or the figures for October alone, when production jumped by 42.9% year-on-year and even exceeded the volumes of the pre-crisis year 2019, are all clear confirmation of the vitality of domestic passenger vehicle manufacturers and good news for the economy as a whole. The same can be said about the growing interest in battery-powered cars.

The Czech Republic also includes other important mobility sub-sectors such as the production of railway equipment (ŠKODA Transportation), trucks (Tatra) and buses (SOR, IVECO), as well as agricultural equipment (Zetor) and aviation technology (Aero Vodochody, Aircraft Industries, Primoco), which is also undergoing major development due to war in Ukraine.

However, other solutions are also being developed, e.g. for autonomous driving (Bring Auto, Vanilla robotics) and solutions for urban mobility, such as Road Twin and Citya.

The Czech Republic is a competitive location for establishing research and development centres. Its technical universities and research centres routinely collaborate with global manufacturers and provide services in the area of research, development and testing. Valeo already has research centres for autonomous technologies here and BMW and Accolade are currently working on such centres of their own.