They have some incredibly reliable hybrid drivetrains, but have weak EVs and ancient battery technology throughout.
They also spend a lot of money lobbying against electrification regulation, because they really don’t want to make EVs.
They have three full EV's, in rough order of size: CH-R, BZ (previously called BZ4x), and BZ Woodland (basically a long station wagon version of the former).
Subaru is also selling a tweaked and rebadged version of each. I believe these are all made in Subaru factories with Toyota power-train components.
They're also priced pretty competitively.
But the hydrogen infrastructure doesn't exist, and they haven't solved any of the real problems with it. So they're stuck flacking technology that was amazing in the 90s.
By betting on hydrogen, it's possible to take the lead in a smaller pond as a bigger fish. Tho i'm not a believer in hydrogen - it's too difficult, and costs just as much to transition to that as it would electric. It'd be easier to synthesize carbon-based fuels, and that leverages the existing infrastructure for petrol in place for use.
The Lexus ES: https://electrek.co/2026/03/19/lexus-launches-es-ev-with-300...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
As time goes on BEVs will make up a greater percentage of their sales.
As BEVs get cheaper and more practical demand will keep going up. Toyota will follow BEV demand.
I’m personally a huge fan of hybrids
One is that their stock is priced for extreme growth, so they need to be in businesses that can justify that. Cars are not that kind of business. They were for a while when Tesla was much smaller and the only decent EV maker, but not anymore. For any carmaker with a typical carmaker PE, cars can be a fine business.
Tesla's other problem is that Elon did serious damage to their brand, and they're not even getting the growth that other EV makers are getting.
They're getting leapfrogged by Chinese companies despite being extremely early to the Chinese market along with a factory in China.
They've somehow squandered their technology lead despite being profitable and scaled unlike some of the companies leapfrogging them.
They botched the Cybertruck so badly. Imagine an American company failing to make a popular pickup truck. They could have been selling pickup trucks at F-150-like volume and profitability.
Their brand image of tech futurism is outdated and they're squandering the most profitable segments of the automotive market. Just look at stuff that's succeeding and pulling in big money like the Bronco and Toyota TRD lineup.
Tesla is retreating to robots because their CEO gets bored of running scaled companies that aren't startups, and they're also doing a whole bunch of financial manipulation to prevent Tesla stock from crashing due to its fundamentals. Without a future moonshot business, the valuation of the stock makes no sense, and would naturally decline to that of a normal automobile company otherwise. That event would destroy Elon's net worth and probably make him default on a bunch of personal loans. By combining other moonshots like xAI and robotics, it lessens the impact of the reality of the automotive business: a profitable but generally low-margin high-maturity type of business.
Or if you’re one who thinks home charging isn’t a necessary prerequisite to make EVs attractive, it’ll take that long for fast charging tech to improve even more, and for those public fast chargers, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and need tremendous amounts of power which needs to be brought in, are gonna get built.
And you might argue either is a roadblock that can simply be blown up by strategically placed money bombs, but no Western government has that much money just lying around. The $7,500 handout (that mostly padded EV margins) was the best they’re gonna do. The government isn’t going to bankroll every shopping center in America to put in 10 350kw fast chargers at a cost of $5,000,000 per site, or pay $7,000 for every home to get a service upgrade. And even if they did this, it would take a decade just to build and install all that to get to 90% EV adoption. My point is gas cars are going to be popular and sell well for 1-2 decades more at least. “Retreating” from those would be the real bonehead move.
I'm charging just fine with a decent commute, using only a 120V 12A circuit. You don't need a 240V 50A circuit to charge your car in 4 hours.
Technology Connections does an excellent video on this:
It will help update your knowledge on this topic.
Cheers
I've also owned a house before that had old electricity - knob and tube (this was before I had an electric car) and paid less than 10k to get the entire electricity system upgraded to something modern. I dont think your 5k-10k thing is accurate for the vast majority of houses.
In Japan Nissan also had a pure electric kei car they sell.
VW (and their other brands) and BMW have good new EVs coming to market now, while Toyota is waking up too. They will survive I think. Stellantis though, not sure about them. And many Chinese carmakers will be gone too.
So now what?
Yeah, that's kinda how Cuba winds up with everyone (well, the small portion of society who can obtain one) driving 1950s cars around. It's not a good approach.
Doing it to to yourself is a special sort of stupid.
Import limitation is more catered towards saving local economy and minimise dependency.
They trade, limited by their own poverty, with countries that can't be easily bullied by the US.
But it has to be said: the entire car market in Cuba is few thousands cars per year.
Canada and the EU trade fine with Cuba. Spain alone accounts for 20% of the trade.
In fact, both EU and Canada have regulations that prosecute any European and Canadian company that complies with foreign embargoes (Council Regulation (EC) No 2271/96 for Europe and Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act for Canada).
Of course US can pull its gigantic economic and financial levers to out-out specific companies to choose "you either sell here, but don't sell in country X" like it has done with ASML, but it can only push so much.
US laws apply to US citizens and companies.
You're right. But trade in US Dollars with other countries need to go through US banks, which can be subject to prohibitions, which can be done by political motivation.
Also, the issue of the PetroDollar complicates things internationally as well. US throws a tantrum when small countries (or countries it can bully) trade Oil in other currencies. That is very important to keep themselves relevant and with some control over international trades.
Yet another aspect is that if any goods, regardless of who is selling it, contains more than 10% of components, technology, produced by a US company, such seller requires an US Export license to trade such goods with Cuba.
So it's not as simple as that.
https://shippingsolutionssoftware.com/blog/products-subject-...
It has rarely worked in history, and when it did, it only did so for very short specific time frames intended to kickstart a sector, never to protect it in its mature state.
Examples are south korean and japanese post ww2 protectionism of key sectors, but again, only to kickstart them. Those very sectors had to compete globally quickly to survive.
We're in capitalism, capitalism is about competition and efficiency.
The moment you're shielding your local companies all that happens is that they can raise prices and have even less incentives to compete and innovate.
And I don't buy the "but China fuels money into their EV industry" either.
So what? How many incentives, bailouts, manufacturing credits, sales credits etc do the European and US industries receive regularly?
And why would I care if Chinese taxpayers subsidize my car? I really don't.
Stellantis, a 20B market cap auto conglomerate has received more than 200B euros in help by the Italian government across the last 3 decades. And what did it achieve? Nothing.
Just made the fiat group less relevant, less competitive, and didn't protect jobs in the long term anyway.
Well, you’re wrong. There’s not much else to say bout that.
> And why would I care if Chinese taxpayers subsidize my car? I really don't.
Because it prices the vehicles below points where others can compete. Then they go out of business, and then the remaining winner raises prices. If you are Germany, Japan, or the United States that means lots of bad things for jobs, and starting a new automaker to bring down high prices later is very difficult.
It’s like, who cares if Amazon or Walmart comes in to your country, subsidizes the prices, and then runs all the competition and small mom and pop stores out of town until you have nothing left but Amazon or Walmart. Right?
That's an opinion, not a fact.
> Because it prices the vehicles below points where others can compete.
This is way too expensive for something like that to last. The rush to the bottom is already killing so many chinese automakers locally. The idea that they can sustain such a money bleed globally is hard to believe.
It’s not an opinion. You’re welcome to go read China’s own self-published strategic plans on this or a litany of news and policy journals discussing this.
> This is way too expensive for something like that to last.
How can you claim it’s too expensive if you’re claiming you don’t even buy that it’s happening??
> The rush to the bottom is already killing so many chinese automakers locally. The idea that they can sustain such an money bleed globally is plain asinine.
Look at German automakers in China for a view of the future.
As Chinese automakers compete and then consolidate they’ll raise prices of course but the level of competition and capacity build out will still have them underpricing other automakers due to economies of scale, cheap labor, and advanced manufacturing. They don’t need to sustain it really, globally they’re already poised to win which is why US, EU, Japan are going to have a lot of import controls, tariffs, and will utilize other tools to protect domestic industries.
I didn't say they don't prop their carmaking, battery or ev industries. I said that I don't buy the argument it's bad for us.
> They don’t need to sustain it really, globally they’re already poised to win which is why US, EU, Japan are going to have a lot of import controls, tariffs, and will utilize other tools to protect domestic industries.
Protectionism historically only helps industries in their earliest stages when you need to kickstart them, never when they are mature.
At the end of the day western consumers and workers are always left with the bill if they cannot compete. It's us who will end up paying twice the amount for cars that aren't competitive, and don't have incentives to compete because they are protected anyway.
You also need to understand I'm European. Not American.
German/Italian economies are strongly export dependent. Exports amount for 50% of german economy and 30%+ of Italian one.
Protecting internal markets achieves little to nothing, which is why Germany and Italy were among those less willing to tariff chinese cars.
US has a giant internal market and is not a good exporting economy, it's core exports are financial and IT services.
And I explained why it was bad for us.
> Protectionism historically only helps industries in their earliest stages when you need to kickstart them, never when they are mature.
Never is a strong word. You're assuming that the Chinese EV industry isn't still in the kickstarting stages. The goal is to, via subsidies and capability to deindustrialize other parts of the world. Through that lens you can see their actions quite clearly.
As a European you should be particularly worried if you value labor. When you say things like German and Italian economies are export dependent it begs the question: what happens when those exports to their #1/#2 export market (China) collapse, and then China - because as you said of course Germany and Italy aren't willing to tariff Chinese cars - comes in to the EU and then outcompetes German and Italian automakers too?
What does that leave you with? It leaves you with:
China - dominating EV sales and a massive player in the auto market.
America - protected domestic industry that's not reliant on exports, little to no competition from China
Japan - serving US/EU global markets and protecting domestic industries
Europe - Collapse of industrial capacity to make vehicles, maybe with tariffs or import controls will have workers at Chinese factories making cars (with profits and capital of course heading back to the home market). Follows the British model a bit with focus on luxury automobiles (Ferrari, Aston Martin, things like that)
And in China its barely 20%. But most of German and Italian exports go to other EU countries so its not exactly a fair comparison. Not quite the same but not that different to trade between different US states.
https://www.vda.de/en/news/facts-and-figures/annual-figures/...
Number of cars exported to China seems very low based on this? Even lower than Belgium...
But let's say China develops these markets and they can afford more cars. That's great. That means after China develops them, Western countries can come in and sell their cars too at China's developmental expense. Seems like a win-win all around.
What's the median income in Africa, and how much is the cost of a new Chinese EV that is supposed to be sold in Africa? I'm not sure, do you happen to know?
> The western auto manufacturers are turtling up via protectionism, and they are no longer aiming to compete on their products.
Chinese automakers were/are subsidized by the CCP (including "investment" deals via Belt and Road), it's a response to that. Even today China requires joint ventures for western automakers to operate in China (to my knowledge). China already turtled up via protectionism.
When you say western automakers aren't aiming to compete on their products what do you mean? The quality of the vehicles? Capabilities? Cost? All of the above?
Africans are poor but Chinese EVs are cheap. What’s more, they can earn more with better tools, like Chinese EVs and Chinese investments in green energy. If you’ve been to a bunch of poor countries you know how it works by now. Yes, $10k is a lot of money in those places, but it isn’t a horrible amount of money and is realistic for lots of non-rich people.
> Chinese automakers were/are subsidized by the CCP (including "investment" deals via Belt and Road), it's a response to that. Even today China requires joint ventures for western automakers to operate in China (to my knowledge). China already turtled up via protectionism.
Yes, thats definitely fair. But they didn’t turtle up, they innovated and developed new tech instead. The difference is that China used protectionism to catch up, the USA is using protectionism to…be lazy and dumb. Which one do you think will pay off?
> When you say western automakers aren't aiming to compete on their products what do you mean? The quality of the vehicles? Capabilities? Cost? All of the above?
Yes. Germany has the best bet of catching up, the American auto corps have been dying for a couple of decades now and are probably beyond help. Japan (not western, but usually included) made dumb bets on hydrogen that it still isn’t walking back.
No, that's not how this works.
It's either a correct fact or an incorrect fact. And if you don't know whether it's correct or incorrect, that doesn't mean nobody does, and it certainly doesn't mean it's an opinion.
An opinion would be "I think the way China is subsidizing its EV production is bad."
Protectionism can help when you want to develop an industry.
But it never works for mature ones.
Tesla is literally the first mover.
Volkswagen group sells 30 EVs. Both Mercedes and BMW have 8.
Stellantis has at least a couple dozens.
Unprotected, western EV manufacturers die on the spot. Which is fine by me, until the Chinese don't have to compete on cost anymore, and can dictate the price.
To claim that what they need to succeed is less protectionism is a misunderstanding.
The issue with car industry at least in Europe is not price. This is the last branch that is more or less alive, employs a lot of people and generates added value domestically. If it’s ceded to China, that means that you are at the next stage of deindustrialisation. From where we stand, it looks like that would mean economy collapse and crisis that we haven’t seen since… ever? If this is the way, we’ll have to figure how to live without relying on jobs as the way to survive (ubi, resource-based economy, etc). Since this is not even on the horizon, keep the tariffs for now, thank you.
EVs are so different that the know-how of the combustion engine power automobile industry does not extend to them. In fact, it can be detrimental.
All they have to do is hide some remotely activated punches inside the black box battery that can start off the chain reaction. Drive into a military base at full speed, activate the punch, and cause mass confusion, chaos and destruction.
And then do that many times all at once, with helpless drivers stuck inside right before you invade an island nation you claim ownership of.
It's the Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Alcatel, Grundig, Nokia, Thomson, Gigaset, SAgem, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge put on imported Chinese components assembled in EU, while the small remaining European operations focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/aerospace/etc.
Nearly all these carmakers already do make plenty of EVs. If I’m very wrong and people there wish to buy EVs exclusively, that’s what will sell and what will get made.
I know multiple people that have had to upgrade the main electrical panel in their home to support an EV charger, because their older building did not have enough capacity.
EU typically from what I've read uses 240 V compared to 120 V in the US. They are usually 16 A compared to 15 A in the US.
That gives them 3840 W vs 1800 W for the US, but that would just be for intermittent loads. For continuous loads you are supposed to derate that. In the US the continuous limit is 1440 W. From what I've read it is 2800 W in much of Europe.
At 3.5 miles/kWh that gives 5 miles/hour charging in the US and 9.8 miles/hour in the EU.
In most of the EU that would be enough to cover the average daily commute with 2 hours of charging.
Homes in the EU can draw more power than homes in the US as we use 240V with the same amount of amps. That’s also part of the reason why we use kettles as we can boil water roughly 2x faster (they can draw up to 3kW while operating!)
Most Europeans don't live in single family homes for this to be a practical advantage.
Uh, where are you getting that from? From what I can tell at sources like [0] "most" Europeans overall (though with very significant country variance) do live in detached or semi-detached housing. Most also own it. Further, even for those in flats the higher voltage EU's grid runs at still means easier higher kilowatts at parking lot or garage chargers, so it's still an advantage anyway?
----
0: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
You cannot connect a cable from your home at the 10th floor to a car that may be hundreds of m away.
A law made up on the way the economy and purchasing power was going in 2020. The reality now is way different. If you don't adjust laws based on economic reality you're gonna have a bad time.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
Some companies accept a profit loss in some markets compensated by the profit gains in others in the interest of capturing a growing market so this might distort VW's success in China.
* in the ICE world, California and EU norms created a tight barrier to entry. the patent portfolio protected the old automotive industry. they only built their patent protected ICEs, and they bought everything else from suppliers.
electric circumvents that barrier and that enabled dozens of new automotive OEMs: the first big disruptor
too bad the hard part for software instead is system integration. consistency cross all components.
all the great hardware engineering processes are completely ND utterly misguided for software system engineering.. integrate rely, often, continuously vs clearly specified interfaces and isolated component engineering with expensive and thus relatively rare integration.
that's IMHO the second disruption for automotive.Meanwhile, Renault 5 is selling very well with Renault 4 in the pipeline. Zoes have been selling well too. Peugeot also has good EV models (208 is really fun to drive).
There pretty much isn't a single European car manufacturer that wouldn't have a compact car or an SUV in EV market and most of them have good range, decent pricing and are moving to 800V platforms as well.
Sooo... where's the retreat?
As the article says; "In the US"
American car marques are nearly completely irrelevant outside the US.
After the huge hits of the focus and to some extend Mondeo, the Kuga has sold subpar. There were only a few new ones around here. Now you see some new EV Ford Explorer SUV and just a tiny account of the big old Explorer. (Yes, the traditional Explorer suv counts as big here.)
In the mean time there is an explosion of BYD, Volvo, Skoda Enyaq, etc happening. Mostly driven by which model has the most beneficial tax package for lease.
I own a Plugin one, I completely understand why. It's "meh", plus all the recalls because Ford cheaped out on the battery production and Samsung (the battery cells) can't do inventory management. For the US audience: it's the Escape (they are identical in all but numbering).
They have (almost) nothing to do with North American Ford vehicles.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gqyyly9v8o
Volkswagen has said it will cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as its profits dropped to their lowest level since 2016.
It said it was hit by US import tariffs, intense competition from China and high restructuring costs from the shift to electric vehicles.
Honda to lose as much as $15.7 billion this fiscal year.
The write-down is latest in industry grappling with EV transition.
Article seems to be gibberish, carmakers don't seem to be retreating from EVs.
It's not a matter of belief: what does the data you presented (profitability and employee count) have to do with the claim about product types?
I mean, you could have presented data showing that the sky is blue - your data is correct, but irrelevant to whether the manufacturers are cutting down on a specific product type.
If you actually read the article, it says the profitability and employee count are a direct consequence of the product type. It explicitly says EV was a factor in the source cited.
If manufacturers cutting down on product types isn't evidence of cutting on product types, then what is?
Here's more data: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g68920984/evs-discontinued...
I’m baffled how you think “it’s going to cost us a lot to shift to electric vehicles through 2030” could be read as “VW is retreating from electric vehicles”.
I'm baffled how you refuse to read further into the topic - How does cutting 50,000 jobs due to EVs translate to "it's going to cost us a lot to shift to electric vehicles" according to you? That's just shifting the baseline of the argument.
VW even cancelled EV models after posting this loss. Again, Google, first page.
The original link literally shows job losses due to lack of demand for EVs. If that's not a data point indicating retreat, then what else is according to you?
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/volkswagen-cuts-...
This is not restricted to VW. This is across manufacturers. Google, first page.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g68920984/evs-discontinued...
Next time, please read into the data properly.
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." — Aldous Huxley
VW ID.3 vs BYD Dolphin: https://www.bike-ev.com/reviews/byd-dolphin-vs-volkswagen-id...
Audi Q4 e-tron vs Zeekr 7X: https://www.carsguide.com.au/audi/q4-e-tron/vs/zeekr-7x
People will pay a premium for a brand they recognize, but for how long?
For that, you get more range, faster charging, and better highway driving, even aside from the brand premium.
That doesn’t seem like a slam dunk to me, especially since the Chinese EV market is at the peak of deliberate over-production:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/11/china-elec...
The easy explanation is that it's because it is there. The article is about the rapid decline of companies that believe otherwise. They aren't doing to great.
The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions of vehicles every day going to come from?
100M vehicles times 10kW divided by one million is One Million Megawatts.
One Thousand Gigawatts. That’s five hundred 2GW power plants. Four thousand solar panels make 1MW, four million solar panels make 1GW, four billion solar panels make 1000 GW.
And that’s 40% of the fleet converted to EVs, and does not account for diesel semi-tractors being converted to EV.
That is not a tech problem, which is the claim I was replying to.
I saw your deleted comment about four charging stations costing $200,000 or so. Four petrol stations also cost that much. Nobody is saying infrastructure is free, but phasing out infrastructure is simply a matter of time and political will, not a fundamental tech problem.
Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.
Would certainly happen a lot faster if, for example, America spent the $200 billion the Pentagon just asked for the Iran war on infrastructure instead. It would even benefit Americans, imagine that! America is the wealthiest country in the world by far, it has the capital to facilitate the process, but taxpayers would rather blow it on bombing schools across the world.
I think if you look at poll numbers, you'll find that taxpayers, on the whole, would very much rather not be bombing schools across the world.
Trump's pointless (indeed, highly counterproductive) strikes on Iran are not at all popular, and quite the opposite of the platform he campaigned on.
The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just chooses to spend it on other goals such as bombing Iran.
This is not a particularly useful statistic when talking about the number of cars being bought.
Almost invariably, "per capita wealth" uses mean wealth. This is dramatically different from the median wealth.
When you've got a few individual people worth upwards of $200 billion, that means that each one of them adds roughly $1000 to the "per capita wealth" number, while only ever accounting for something like a dozen cars at the outside.
When you're trying to build out dozens or hundreds of those across the country, there's no way we can ramp up capacity at that rate.
You sound like a broken record.
> Remove the EV subsidies and ICE taxes.
Of course, no cars is even better. If we could all ski, cycle, or run, it would be even cheaper and better for our health. It’s a trade of.
any spending on EV adoption should be considered part of the NATO commitment
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
Saying EV tech isn’t there to replace gas is like saying gas tech isn’t there to replace diesel.
Gas powered cars are niche or legacy.
of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.
The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.
[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...
Everyone's willing to admit that.
EV tech is there to replace the vast majority of gas powered cars.
We don't need to get to "fully" to have a replacement event. Horses can travel down trails that cars cannot, that didn't save them.
It's impossible to go on a long off-road travel with the EV equivalent of 50L of gas in a jerrycan.
But some are twisting the narrative to say that because of that reason EV will fail.
Millions of people could use an EV in their daily life, just like I can go without a pickup in my daily life and rent one whenever I need one.
Each time I travel oversea, I take a "public transportation plane", not my private jet.
It's not because an EV doesn't fit for 100% of your requirements, that it doesn't fit for everyone.
No car fits for 100%.
if you arent affluent, all the costs that come with car ownership are a bit excessive.
even still you might want to go for the cheap EV, and just not do things that require a pickup, rather than paying the costs of the pickup all the time
Obviously that's not "fully replace" territory, but that is most definitely a critical mass beyond being a niche vehicle category.
The EV market globally is growing much faster than the ICE market. At the rate of technology and pricing improvement, EVs taking over the majority of sales is almost inevitable.
It's just not growing as quickly in certain markets like the USA, and many predictions were too aggressive.
Who is really going to prefer ICE vehicles when we start seeing median MSRP vehicles start to reach customers with 400-500mile+ range numbers? This isn't some crazy idea (e.g., see the 2026 BMW i3, estimated range of 440 miles in an entry level premium sedan - in 5-10 years that's the kind of spec you'll be seeing in a cheap Kia).
There just isn't that much more progress in battery technology and pricing left to achieve to make ICE fully obsolete, and that is exacerbated by oil prices that are now set to rise for years to come.
After three years and 50k miles with a Model X, the idea of buying a non-EV seems ridiculous.
I’m not sure it’s the infrastructure so much as the cost for these vehicles. Well, Tesla has political problems but Rivian and Lucid don’t - but they are priced quite high.
Of course there are also new vehicles that cost quite a bit less than a base Model 3, but they invite a discussion of not being all that comparable.
Lucid and Rivian don’t have those problems but they are quite expensive relatively speaking.
37k with 20% down payment means you borrow $29k at say, a 4.79% interest rate for 60 months so... $556/month. I know we're on HN with high salaried tech workers but c'mon, that's a lot of money and doesn't even include insurance.
That and their base model 3 is RWD which makes it a non-starter for anyone who drives in snow/ice. The AWD model starts at $47k.
I've owned a base model 3 RWD and live in Ohio where we regularly get all of the weather, sometimes the same day even. I would rather drive that than an AWD Honda or Toyota or similar. The weight and center of gravity, especially with the right tires, makes it a very nice vehicle to drive in adverse conditions. Those "average" market SUVs aren't very good in snow/ice either. At least in my experience.
I'm not sure people are reading my comments above as making 2 comparisons. I used "decent hybrids" as a group of cars that are roughly comparable to the Model 3, but more convenient in areas where chargers are sparse (in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, you pretty much have to plan your route to the available chargers).
And then I noted that there are cars that are available for quite a lot less, so anyone that is price sensitive probably isn't going to be shopping for a new electric vehicle that costs nearly $40k.
As an aside I've been to the UP and it's lovely up there. At the time (2020) there weren't really any charging stations except Maciniac City where there was a Tesla Supercharger and Marquette where, my wife and I found ourselves for about 12 hours charging our car in a parking garage. But Tesla has built a few new Superchargers in the area and they are to varying degrees open to other EV manufacturers.
I also know a lot of drivers who plan to get an EV when their current car stops working. A lot of people are feeling economically anxious right now. They know gas is a dead end so they are squeezing every last mile out of the cars they currently own. Car companies can't exist on the wishes of their customers. Everyone is doing a lot of hoping that its the right time. The EV rebates were a great tool in getting to that tipping point but they were cancelled too son in my estimation.
Also charging at home is a significant part of EV infrastructure which is also sorely lacking in the US
Above, I said the current level of the adoption of EVs in the US is 1% to 2%. That’s how many vehicles on the road today are EVs.
As I’m sure you know there’s multiple places to charge electric vehicles. You can charge them at home but when you’re on a long trip, you have to charge them somewhere else.
We need more infrastructure investment, both in public charging and in residential charging. The public charging infrastructure that exist today supports that 1 to 2% of vehicles that are currently EVs.
Yes, chargers are everywhere here. But making multiple “stops” to charge that you wouldn’t otherwise make definitely isn’t saving any time.
The seats are horrid.
Watching the windshield wipers freak out over nothing is funny.
“Full self driving” is a bit of a joke.
And yes Teslas aren't for passengers but for drivers.
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.
Skoda and Cupra are thriving, and it’s not just because of their affordability. They are steadily increasing their EV sales percentages while heavily promoting them as first class citizens within their portfolios. Porsche, by contrast, is hitting roadblocks because they are trying to retrofit their new EV first models to accommodate ICE powertrains. Meanwhile, Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge just posted their best quarter ever, driven specifically by their ICE lineup.
The main problem for German automakers was losing their core identity by chasing a "Modern Luxury" business model prioritizing low sales volume in exchange for high per unit margins. Electricity prices are simply not a factor in their demise.
The EV industry in general is growing quite well in Europe. It's just that China is capturing the biggest share of that growth.
The Volvo XC90 EV is about 90k the petrol equivalent is 60k
Then if you drive 100,000 miles in it you’ll spend £20,000 on petrol.
100000 miles / 32 mpg = 3125 gal 3125 × 4.546 L = 14206 L 14206 L × £1.45/L = £20598.70 ≈ £20.6k total petrol cost
Even with free electricity petrol wins on cost.
If you buy the car used then the story changes.
BMW is coming on strong though, and gives us close equivalents to compare. The 2027 i3 is supposed to start at $53K according to Car and Driver,[2] and Edmunds agrees.[3] It's all-wheel drive with fast bidirectional charging, 440 miles EPA range, 463 horsepower, and plenty of high-tech features. By comparison, the gas-powered all-wheel drive 3-series starts at $50K, and has 255 horsepower.[4] The M340i has 386hp and starts at $62K, and if you want more power then you'll be up into the 70s or more.[5]
For SUVs you could compare their iX3, coming out this summer, with the gasoline-powered X3. The M50 X3 at 393hp costs $67K, and the iX3 at 463hp will start at about $60K, with a 400 mile EPA range.[7]
[1] https://v2charge.com/byd-car-pricing-electric-hybrid-cars/
[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/bmw/i3
[3] https://www.edmunds.com/bmw/i3/
[4] https://www.bmwusa.com/build-your-own.html#/series/3/sedan
[5] https://www.bmwusa.com/build-your-own.html#/series/M3/sedan
Not Europe, but unfortunately, my state of Massachusetts has terrible electric costs for complicated reasons, so I understand what the OP is saying. I had to keep explaining this to my friends in MA - I replaced a Prius with a Nissan Leaf and my running costs are far higher.
(note that these prices are yearly averages for the state selected, but you can also fill in your own values since things change)
You understand what OP would be saying if most of Europe had gasoline for $3.50 a gallon. Put in $2/liter instead and the crossover goes from 29MPG to 62MPG.
- the range was miserable
- the software quality was bad
- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)
- slow charging
- poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
I should have known that a 35 kW battery wouldn't deliver great range or charging speed. But I didn't fully appreciate how limiting it would be.
Last year, I bought a new Mini Cooper e. Larger battery. Better software. BMW's quality actually delivered this time. The car feels objectively nice. The software is polished. There are updates. Few bugs. But the range still leaves something to be desired. In summer it's okay. During winter 30-40% of the range just melts away.
Public charging in Northern Germany still sucks:
- too few public chargers
- chargers are often broken or out of service
- pricing is intransparent
Municipal utility companies ("Stadtwerke") seem especially bad at maintaining their charger fleets. Every second charger that I want to use is out of service. The one next to my apartment has been labeled as "defective" for a couple of weeks now. Nobody seems to care...
I still like (love during summer) my car. It's a cool car. It feels luxurious. It's comfortable. It's fun to tear around corners. It's still compact enough to maneuver through the city. And it looks cool. But it also costs 40-50k EUR and only has limited range. And public charging really needs to improve.
THIS is where public subsidies makes the difference, finding and spending the way out of the pain points to make the adoption curve steeper.
Dunno, had a trip through it last year, there are more than enough chargers. Some of them were literally free.
I have 70kWh battery though. Also, I paid much less than 40k for my chinese SUV. The software is buggy though, a random reboot on motorway doesn't feel nice.
I charge with the granny charger at home.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be annoyed and unsettled if the sound system or gps or whatever rebooted while I was driving, I'm just curious just how dire it is
The rest of the car drives fine.
So clearly entirely separate systems, despite it is obviously also running Google maps to show the route. Presumably this is quite common.
One thing that’s super annoying and this is not specific to Germany, but why the fuck do I need some shitty app to use your charger? Should be tap and go like any other purchase. You know, like how I pay for my petrol?
Seems to me like everyone wants to force an app down my throat where it’s really not needed. It especially sucks when you’re a visitor to the country.
I have PHEV that doesn't pull much from a charger, and I usually don't use chargers for money, but... When I charged for fun while I was shopping at a grocery store, it ended up being like a 70 cent charge. If you bill 70 cents to a credit card, it doesn't make sense. Tieing it to an app, you can either charge more and have me loan you the balance, or you can wait until I acrue enough debt that it's economic to charge me.
With full EVs, they can usually pull enough current to reach a billable amount in a short time, but aggregating charges may still be useful.
And a charger network can have a running balance for small payments without a garbage app.
Yes, the entire economy is beholden to two payment portals (WeChat and Alipay) and I'm sure the analytics are off the scale and you're completely fucked if you can't use or get banned from the platform but the actual 99% user experience is exactly the microtransaction dream that people have been unable to solve in the west for decades.
If you can time it with some errands it’s less of a hassle, but that was one of the main non-car annoyances with my EV rental (the other was the flakiness / unreliability of getting a charging session to start).
And even during long legs I don’t need to piss for 30mn every two hours.
#ElectrifiedEnvironmentalDestruction
However I don't find anywhere claiming anywhere near <5%. Can you back that up?
Example source of manufacturers claiming >95% [0].
0: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicl...
https://www.ameslab.gov/news/new-lithium-ion-battery-recycli...
There's no virtue in recycling equipment for recycling's sake alone, we do it in exactly the situations where some raw material in the equipment is expensive enough to justify the cost of the recycling process.
Lithium batteries are highly recyclable, so is all the copper in the motor. I can promise you that fiat will never en on a landfill battery and all.
And fake meat is highly edible. But do many people eat fake meat? No. Do many people recycle lithium ion batteries? Also, no. Less than 5% is the current estimate for what percent of lithium ion batteries is recycled.
Related: The problem I have with Fiat is that there's an obvious step to combat the impression of poor reliability/durability: Increase the standard warranty. If Fiat declines to increase the standard warranty, the impression is even worse — it's that they're not increasing the warranty because it isn't financially viable for them to do so, because the reliability is bad and that Fiat can't afford to warranty the cars past 3 years. Compare to e.g. Hyundai with a 10-year/100k-mile powertrain and 5-year/60k-mile general in the USA.
Also related: I'm in Canada but looked up Hyundai's USA warranty there just to give more-broadly-applicable numbers. It seems that Fiat's warranty in the US is actually better than in Canada, where it just seems comically low — other than for the high-voltage battery the Fiat 500e new vehicle warranty is lesser of 3-years/37k miles.
Most cars are sold by the first owner between 30,000 and 60,000 miles. Hyundai's warranty is cut in half for the second owner, 5/50k powertrain and 2.5/30k general. There's nothing to cover, so it's basically free to put 10/100k in all of the commercials.
I don't see poor software as a problem that's related to the powertrain. My ICE vehicle from 2016 has poor software that never gets updates.
You overspent on a Mini because Minis are overpriced vehicles. On mobile.de I see a used VW ID3 (82 kW (Pro S)) with 60000 km miles on it listed for 22000 euros. I see a Kia EV6 GT-line with 18000km (77 kW) for 33000 euros.
I totally understand the issues with broken and insufficient chargers, as we have that same issue in the USA, but that's why you maybe avoid getting the kind of vehicle that has some of the smallest battery on the market if you need that range.
Also your in winter are you running the heater constantly? I find just dressing for outdoors, leaving the heater off and using heated seats/wheel means I only lose maybe 15% range.
Nope. But last winter it got really cold (< -10°C). Also the Honda was aggressively heating the battery
Something every car prior to this has been able to do without any impact on performance.
> means I only lose maybe 15% range.
Which could be a reasonable sacrifice if you choose to make it. It's certainly not included in the marketing for these vehicles.
If you need heat, an EV needs to turn more of its fuel energy into heat, while an ICE can just repurpose what was otherwise being dumped.
The point being is that EV cars are a great idea, but the American auto market was not a good _general_ fit, and manufacturers didn't tailor their products enough to actually be successful. They really just pushed a bunch of product onto the market to capitalize on government subsidies.
Which, to me, is the real "risk." Manufacturer incompetence. That all being said my next car will probably be a hybrid.
Eh, yes? They are presenting a new technology and want us to switch - they should prove their technology is superior.
I got a heat pump and using the heater or AC only needs around 1 kWh during the winter or when it’s hot.
But winter tires increase the power consumption by 30%, just like with a diesel.
(EnBW and Ionity for 39ct/kwh, tesla for a bit more or less, depending on time and location)
It used to be actually true in the 1990s, but right now, I definitely expect better public services in Poland than in DE.
Aka, every super market has at least one charger. Most parking spaces have 2-3 chargers. From various vendors. Some even for less money then you can get for your own house per kWh.
I also had no issues in the north east so far or in north rein westfalia.
Chargers usually don’t break but get shut down when the grid can’t handle their load currently.
When people see you your EVs are a bug ridden mess and say no thank you, they're not rejecting your electric cars because they're electric. The answer isn't to retreat from electric and then excrete the same shitty software from the shelved EVs into the legacy ICE models. Now you just made people annoyed by the remaining cars that you do sell.
Updates should not be neccesary. An update can affect the resale value of my car by downclocking it "for safety"
In theory if you bought your phone from one of their vendors you could get your cash back. In practice, the phone was old enough to have already been resold and there's no way you could claim that rebate
Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...
Makes me happy for once about the restrictive drone policies where I live.
His idea was like a back up camera, but front-facing and elevated (retractable).
But let’s simplify it down a bit further: pretend all parking spots are for-profit. These lots would want to communicate vacancy to maximize use. Much like how motels are motivated to tell you when they have vacancy without you having to stop to find out.
The Yutong electric buses that Ember use around where I live have something like this but I guess it just uses the cameras mounted around the bus. When the driver closes the door, the central screen on the dashboard does a kind "fake drone flyaround" of the bus, even showing reasonably realistic depictions of vehicles on the road around it.
If you want to make synthetic fuels it’s similar effort and efficiency to make methane as it is to make hydrogen. In fact converting one to the other is trivial and the conversion from methane is how we actually make hydrogen today.
Hydrogen has a lot of issues. It’s a pain to store since it’s corrosive and does not liquify or stay liquified without cooling and extremely strong pressure vessels. Methan is already used pretty commonly. A lot of busses run on methane today.
So we’re taking methane, a fuel that’s used in transit already and that we gave a shortage if right now since it makes fertilizer and the hormuz straight is blocked. We’re taking that precious methane and converting it to hydrogen (not at all green to do this and the carbon goes into the air at this point) and then we’re awkwardly transporting this and storing it in cars with all the problems that has just to burn the hydrogen in the car pretending that we never released co2 in the process.
Now you might say ‘yeah but in theory you could use electricity to make hydrogen’ and I’ll point out that’s grossly inefficient to just using a battery electric vehicle and it’s not at all done at an industrial scale due to the reality that it was always just a way to sell fossil fuels with an obfuscation of where the release of carbon occurs and never intended an actual reasonable way to store electricity.
Also, a hydrogen car needs a battery anyway. Just make a bigger battery and skip the hydrogen part. Cheaper, simpler, lighter,…
And increasingly I think that is being quietly admitted. It has a weird afterlife in buses (where the range potential is interesting for long-range intercity routes), but even there, at this point, it’s marginal. The Irish transport authority placed an order a few years back for 800 BEV buses… and three hydrogen buses, for instance. A decade ago, BEV buses and hydrogen buses were both basically experimental. Today BEV buses are ordered by the thousand; hydrogen buses are still experimental.
(Also I expect hydrogen _trains_ to hang around as a concept for a while, and it _may_ actually be viable there where adding overhead lines is not.)
> It would allow legacy vehicles to stay on the road
How? Hydrogen cars _are electric cars_; they just have a fuel cell instead of a battery. If you’re imagining that they have, er, a four stroke engine that they burn hydrogen in or something, yeah, that’s not a thing.
I suppose if you wanted to get _really_ weird you could have a hydrogen turbine car? But again, that’s nothing like current petrol cars tech (and would be horribly inefficient relative to the fuel cell ones).
You need to use energy to create hydrogen - and the energy required is 5x what would be required to just store the same amount of energy as electricity in a battery.
55kWh of electricity for hydrogen generation results in around 10kWh at the wheels of a hydrogen car.
Or you can just shove the 55kWh directly to an EV battery.
It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.
Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.
There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."
But yes, at least where I live, there's a major infrastructure problem that nobody -- consumers included -- want to pay for, and for a lot of us EV's aren't an option until said infrastructure has been upgraded.
And the Iran/Hormuz situation actually strengthens the case for EVs, not weakens it. Swedish electricity is almost entirely hydro, nuclear and wind. When oil spikes, petrol drivers feel it immediately. EV drivers barely notice. Pulling back from electrification right now is doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.