Robotics, Autonomous Mobility & EV Tech Leadership Report

The European automotive industry is a continental economic anchor — 7% of EU GDP, €170 billion in annual exports, and 13.8 million jobs including 3.5 million in direct and indirect manufacturing. But competitive pressure is intensifying across every dimension. European incumbents have lost approximately one-fifth of their global market share since 2017, while new entrants have doubled theirs. KPMG's 25th Automotive Executive Survey finds 36% of automotive executives saying their company is entering a phase of deep transformation, with business models, products, and operations expected to change significantly over the next three years. 84% of companies still feel responsible for driving EV adoption — the strategic intent is clear. The gap is in execution capability and leadership.

Germany anchors European robotics and automotive — home to KUKA, the BMW and Volkswagen R&D programmes, and a dense Tier-1 supplier ecosystem now under significant pressure to transform. The UK has strength in autonomous systems, with Wayve the most prominent European AV venture. Sweden (Volvo, Northvolt's restructuring and recovery) and France (Stellantis, Renault's EV programme) complete the major hubs. Each country presents a different regulatory and industrial policy posture: Germany protecting incumbent Tier-1 relationships, the UK aggressively courting AV pilot programmes, France prioritising state-backed EV industrial policy.

BCG's thesis on physical AI is that the world has entered a genuinely new era of robotics — intelligence and flexibility converging with hardware to create systems that can infer human intent, adapt to dynamic environments, and autonomously plan workflows. This is architecturally different from previous automation waves, which were defined by rigid, pre-programmed systems with high integration costs. The WEF Robotics and Autonomous Mobility Platform's finding that 94% of vehicle accidents involve human error is the foundational safety case for autonomous systems — and is driving serious regulatory reconsideration at EU level that will define the deployment window for the next decade.

McKinsey documents that venture capital funding for robotics surged to $40.7 billion in 2025 — more than three times the 2023 level — with robotics CAGR projected above 15% and the industrial automation market alone exceeding $40 billion. The WEF/BCG autonomous trucking analysis projects the European autonomous truck market growing from $13.96 billion in 2025 to $35.76 billion by 2033 (CAGR 12.6%), with Europe holding approximately 34.5% of the global market. Hub-to-hub trucking is identified as the most promising near-term use case — and the executive talent to run these operations is the specific profile in shortest supply.

CTO (hardware/software co-design), VP of Manufacturing Scale-Up, Chief Engineer (autonomous systems), Head of Battery Technology, VP of Supply Chain (critical minerals), Head of Software-Defined Vehicle, and CEO (deep tech, Series B+) are the most consistently requested profiles. The demand is increasingly concentrated in executives who straddle engineering and operations — who have designed a system and then manufactured it at scale. KPMG's finding that only 20% of automotive leaders feel 'very prepared' for AI disruption maps exactly to the gap we see in every search brief: the executive who has designed an AI-native manufacturing system, scaled it from prototype to series production, and managed the organisational transition from engineering culture to operations culture, is genuinely rare.

The backgrounds carrying the strongest signal are alumni of Tesla, Waymo, Boston Dynamics, BMW's software-defined vehicle programmes, Continental, Bosch, and the European autonomous logistics businesses that have successfully scaled to commercial operations. Academic backgrounds from ETH Zürich, TU Munich, Imperial College London, and Cambridge Engineering carry significant weight for CTO and Chief Engineer roles — but only when combined with documented series-production experience. McKinsey's finding that new entrant OEMs dedicate 43% of R&D to software has changed what senior engineering titles mean: a CTO at a software-defined vehicle company is a software leader who understands hardware constraints, not a hardware engineer who has adopted software tools.