Discussion

‘It’s stupid’: why western carmakers’ retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance

fullshark: Isn't it over and China owns this market anyway? How can any other country possibly compete?

tahoeskibum: Weird headline: Japanese carmakers are doing the same error, while Tesla (an American company) is the one of the leading electric carmakers... I'd just replace it with Legacy Carmakers (e.g. Ford, GM, Toyota and so on).

a-saleh: I thought Totyota is still one of the EV leaders. Alongside Kia and Hyundai?

impossiblefork: I feel that Renault is also standing out as a company that's going in the opposite direction.

hyperionultra: By limiting imports and offering alternatives in home. Also, the myths about reliability ads a lot.

tpm: On long-term support and parts availability perhaps - I seriously doubt most of Chinese models bought now will have parts readily available in 5+ years.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.

p-e-w: The same way Chinese tech companies “compete” with Western ones: By not permitting them to do business in China.

joe_mamba: I think Ferrari, Lambo, Rolls Royce, Bugatti, Zonda etc. will do just fine with selling luxury ICEs with many cylinders that go vroom to rich people. The other western brands, no so much.The Audis, BMWs, Fiats etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Thomson, Gigaset, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge while they'll focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/etc.

breakyerself: Tarrifs mostly

ceejayoz: > By limiting imports and offering alternatives in home.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.

PreciousH: no one is willing to admit the EV tech isn't just there yet to fully replace gas powered cars?

ceejayoz: Strawman, basically no one argues "fully". Yet.

izacus: VAG group has EVs (and pretty good ones) across the board: VW with ID series, Škoda with Enyaq/Elroq/Epiq, Audi with eTron series (SUV, sedan and estate), SEAT with Cupra Born and others. BMW just launched Neue Klasse, with iX3 selling like hot cakesa nd i3 looking amazing, with i7 in pipeline. Mercedes also launched a great new platform with CLA which is coming to other sizes as well.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?

ceejayoz: > Sooo... where's the retreat?As the article says; "In the US"

fullshark: So essentially western government intervention in the economy is the only way and every company is behaving rationally by retreating until the government steps in and makes the long term math make sense for them.

hyperionultra: Correct. When billions of eur involved, nothing moves without support from gov.

fullshark: Tesla is also retreating from the being a car company, at least they don't see being a company that sells electric cars to consumers being a great business to be in long term.

froh: I see two things discussed too little:* 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 * automotive has created amazing r&d processes for the mechanical vehicle design. they are centered around early decomposition, isolated component engineering and then composition. integration in that world men's: screwing and plugging the pets together. if the hinges and flanges are to spec things integrate nicely. 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.

Ifkaluva: lol no. They have been dragged kicking and screaming into offering just one model, the bz4x.They also spend a lot of money lobbying against electrification regulation, because they really don’t want to make EVs.

vel0city: Toyota barely makes any fully EV cars, and their bZ series hasn't been very great. They have a number of hybrids, but even those are often based on dated battery technology. They're still selling new cars with NiMH batteries.They have some incredibly reliable hybrid drivetrains, but have weak EVs and ancient battery technology throughout.

applfanboysbgon: 98% of new car sales in Norway are EV at this point. How do you admit something that is not true?

quickthrowman: A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.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?

lycopodiopsida: Why talk about “western” then, not about “US”? Because clickbait?

whynotmaybe: Everybody knows it won't fully replace it.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.

luizfzs: AFAIK, they're not limiting imports. They are heavily embargoed since 1960s, which also affects other countries' abilities to trade with them, under the threat of themselves being sanctioned.

seb1204: Porsche... Eye roll

margalabargala: > FullyEveryone'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.

ceejayoz: An embargo is an externally imposed limit on imports.Doing it to to yourself is a special sort of stupid.

hyperionultra: Embargo is a political tool designed to crush and for e to submission by barring required goods.Import limitation is more catered towards saving local economy and minimise dependency.

ceejayoz: That may be the goal. It is rarely the result. We have plenty of historical evidence on the downsides of protectionism.

ceejayoz: https://imgur.com/a/XCQQ3cD

lycopodiopsida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

applfanboysbgon: > which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.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.

quickthrowman: I agree that we’ll eventually fully convert to EVs, it’s just going to take way longer than a lot of people expect. It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.

delta_p_delta_x: > In the USAmerican car marques are nearly completely irrelevant outside the US.

galangalalgol: Ive seen plenty of fords in Europe but they have evs

otherme123: I went to Cuba, and they were a good amount of Kia Picanto, Daewoo and cars from China brands I could not recognize. Of course they can't import from the US due to the embargo, and Europe would be unreliable for after-sell service.They trade, limited by their own poverty, with countries that can't be easily bullied by the US.

jfengel: Toyota pioneered hybrids, but they remain committed to the idea that a fossil fuel component is necessary. They continue to push for hydrogen, which is generated primarily from natural gas. With a hand-wave that maybe it'll be renewable some day.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.

GenerWork: Remove the EV subsidies and ICE taxes, and what would that number switch to?

whateverboat: Also europe.

epolanski: I really struggle with this model.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.

kdheiwns: I only hear people in certain countries say this. Meanwhile many countries with rough terrain and long roads are already all in on EVs.

thyristan: Western car makers learned the hard lesson that, at least in most of Europe, electricity prices are far too high, EV prices are too high, and customers do know how to use their calculators. In Germany, the only thing propping up the EV market are tax subsidies for commercially used EVs, so company cars are very likely to be EV or at least hybrid. For the rest of sales? Only idealists buy EVs, and then only those with deeper pockets, their own home charger, etc.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.

BoredPositron: French manufacturers, on the other hand, are experiencing a revival by prioritizing EVs and treating ICE vehicles as a secondary focus. If you look at the numbers across the Volkswagen Group (the entire AG, including Audi, Porsche, and Skoda), a clear trend emerges: the only brands currently in trouble are those that abandoned an EV first approach.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.

burnt-resistor: Embrace and skip to extinguish. Remember the EV-1 anyone? The standard strategy for a Detroit mfgr is to half-heartedly go through the motions of EV offerings so they can "prove" "no one wants them", it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that also discourages change influence on the customer side as well. Marketing, advertising, and investment with intent and impactful efficacy would manufacture consent for different products.

thyristan: Porsche isn't so much into the car business as it is into the genital enlargement business...

Forgeties79: Norway is hardly alone. More and more countries are increasing EV purchases and decreasing ice purchases. We are clearly headed in that direction

delta_p_delta_x: [delayed]

M0r13n: I've had a rough time with the last two EVs I've owned. I bought a Honda e in 2020 because of its retro-future charm, but ended up being disappointed by several things:- the range was miserable- the software quality was bad- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)- slow charging- poor public charging infrastructure in GermanyI 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 intransparentMunicipal 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.

ericmay: > And I don't buy the "but China fuels money into their EV industry" either.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?

epolanski: > Well, you’re wrong. There’s not much else to say bout that.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 an money bleed globally is plain asinine.

wasabi991011: > A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.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.

orange_joe: America clearly has an EV industry (Tesla, Rivian) but its adoption is pretty limited by infrastructure.

yardie: It's not even the infrastructure. It's generally a lot of FUD. Everyone fears they have to buy a 800-mile range SUV for the frequent roadtrips they take apparently. I commute 1000 miles every month. That is 4x DCFC every month vs 2.5 petrol fillups for the same period.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.

delta_p_delta_x: [delayed]

4ndrewl: Right, but Ford Europe is, and always had been, a different beast to Ford America.

quickthrowman: I agree, I’m just saying it’s easier for a country with a sovereign wealth fund and ridiculous oil royalties to handle upgrading their infra to handle EVs for 6M is much easier than doing it in the US which has extremely low average population density, 250M+ vehicles and 400M people, and a mess of separate but inter-tied grids and varying levels of infrastructure investment depending on which state you are in.

varjag: We have the wealth fund precisely because we don't discretionally spend oil royalties.

ericmay: And Lucid.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.

maxerickson: It's kind of a yes both. A base Model 3 is in the same price range as decent hybrids that will be more convenient for many owners given current highway adjacent charging infrastructure.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.

youknownothing: the question is where they'll be able to sell them: Europe is going to ban the sale of ICE cars from 2035 so, unless someone finds a loophole, that's a whole market gone.

xp84: Europe will change their mind when protests start that many people can’t buy a car that they can charge because their home doesn’t have the capacity and public charging scarcity and congestion makes the 1970s gas rationing look convenient.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.

DeathArrow: Somehow having freedom to choose is bad?

1970-01-01: Yes it's bad when you're set to pick big overconfident losers. See also: 1929

bastawhiz: Toyota has a magical vaporware battery that they announce is just a couple years away every couple years. We're likely to see general quantum computing and an operational fusion plant before Toyota productionizes their first "real" EV with said battery.

ericmay: My post was poorly worded I meant to say Tesla wasn’t too high of a price but it has political problems (we won’t buy another one for example).Lucid and Rivian don’t have those problems but they are quite expensive relatively speaking.

maxerickson: But Tesla is priced high for anyone that is even moderately price sensitive. Even the base model of their cheapest car.

gmac: Renault Mégane and Scenic EVs are also great.

kube-system: Toyota’s leadership is staunchly anti-EV

passive: In the US, automakers are still a big source of union power, which is at least part of the reason Trump is pushing them to drop EVs. In a fascist state, you want all powerful industries closely tied to the rulers.

spockz: Here in the Netherlands ford sales seem to have completely consumed by Kia sales. Around me houses that typically had Fords now have Kia’s, Toyota, Tesla or small Volvo like EX30/40.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.

ericmay: Sure if $37k is a lot for a car I’ll agree with you. Then I think Tesla is now just joining Rivian and Lucid by being too expensive. The infrastructure would be besides the point then because you don’t care about that if you can’t even afford the car.

jolux: You could definitely buy the Focus in the US.

DennisP: There are a couple good reasons for Tesla to do that, which don't apply to most carmakers.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.

simonw: The other day I was joking with friends about how I'd love to have a car with a deployable surveillance drone to help with parking and so if I'm stuck in traffic I could have my drone scout ahead and see what's up.Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...

black_puppydog: Dear god, the street level noise pollution of flying taxies, but democratized so everyone can have it! :/Makes me happy for once about the restrictive drone policies where I live.

siim_osur: Tesla is a hype company more than a car company. Also, me personally, I consider them all rolling coffins.

qwerpy: They’re some of the safest cars ever made, unless you drive them into a tree at 110mph.

whamlastxmas: Parent commenter is a new account that is seemingly only Elon bashing to the point of now clearly making stuff up. I see this a lot anywhere online.

declan_roberts: I don't think this is true, at least for Tesla, which has a very mature and wide range of chargers almost everywhere. AFAIK, Rivian can also use Tesla chargers now.

kube-system: It is mature enough to barely support the current level of adoption which is between 1 and 2% of cars on the road.Also charging at home is a significant part of EV infrastructure which is also sorely lacking in the US

seabrookmx: Even the Fiesta was sold in the US and Canada off and on.

spankalee: Western governments should have been intervening like China does.

neya: > Sooo... where's the retreat?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. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/13/honda-flags-first-annual-los... Honda to lose as much as $15.7 billion this fiscal year. The write-down is latest in industry grappling with EV transition.From Google, first page.

sirjaz: But what about Hydrogen? Many ICE companies would be better to focus on that. It would allow legacy vehicles to stay on the road, and fix the range anxiety in places like the US which is way bigger than all of the EU and bigger than the populated parts of China.

sawjet: Hydrogen ICE is not a viable technology for many reasons. Combustion temperatures would require exotic alloys to manage and the power density is quite low. I remember BMW made a H2 ice version of one of their large V12s and it made like 125hp...

xp84: GM has a ton of EV models and has been doing a ton of EV investment, R&D, etc. How can you say they’re somehow not EV enough? I think this article’s author is an absolutist and believes any company that doesn’t go 100% EV regardless of market demand is stupid. I think that’s irrational. And I love my EV. But it’s going to take 20 years or more for the entire country to even get to a place where all your suburbanites can afford the $5,000-$10,000 for the panel upgrade and wiring to charge at home. And they are the easiest to win over. Urban is tougher (and I assure you, many people drive in cities!) due to lack of residential garages, and parking garage facilities don’t have sufficient capacity to “just” add 500 level 2 chargers. Typical 500-car garages today have about 5. And of course rural has longer range needs which raises cost.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.

dimmke: My home charger was like $500 ($300 with the credit I got from electric company) and install was like 250. No upgrade needed.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.

nullpoint420: How long ago was that? Things have changed in the economy recently

kuschku: Unless you need to leave the rear seats when the electronic door openers don't work anymore. It's possible the parent was referring to that, which is to be fair not just a Tesla issue, but Tesla is probably the most extreme example.

DennisP: Electricity costs more in Europe than the US, but so does gasoline, by about the same ratio. EVs in the US have lower running costs than internal combustion cars.The EV industry in general is growing quite well in Europe. It's just that China is capturing the biggest share of that growth.

chii: It's because japan can't really compete with china in the EV battery space (nor can anyone else really).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.