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 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.
Sounds Bad in the north. In the south I have a charger max 10 min away in every direction. And 300kw charger are also the norm for long distance charging. I was surprised to see that even some Aral gas stations removed some of their pumps and replaced them with high speed chargers around here.
Seams to be a non issue in the south, I can charge near my house, everywhere I have to do something and at work.
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.
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.
Does the random reboot affect the motor, lights, defogger, signals, anything else absolutely essential to driving?
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
It depends where you are. I live in a somewhat rural area in Northern Germany. There are some chargers, but many of them are out of service like the one next door. I've never stumbled upon a free charger though.
I work all over Europe and I’m not super impressed with the state of charging infrastructure in general and it seems particularly bad in German.
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.
> why the fuck do I need some shitty app to use your charger?
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.
It doesn't have to be an app to handle small transactions - different countries already have mechanisms in place to handle that - e.g. any credit card purchase under $5 gets a $1 surcharge, to avoid the surcharge you can tap with a debit card (with much lower transaction costs).
Public AC charging in Germany isn't great, but DC/Fast charging is quite good. I traverse the entire country with a Kia Nero EV, and that's not really a problem using either EnBW, Tesla or Ionity chargers. Besides these networks there are enough others with mostly nation-wide coverage (but not as cheap as these).
(EnBW and Ionity for 39ct/kwh, tesla for a bit more or less, depending on time and location)
Inversely I leased a Fiat 500e for a year in Detroit Michigan and had no issues with range ~130 miles. I would plug it in nightly as I had a level 2 charger installed at my house.
The experiment was quite successful. I just didn’t like front wheel drive on somedays with heavy snow.
I used it for commuting to work, buying groceries and visiting friends nearby. It met my needs and I feel a slightly bigger car with 4 doors and 200-250 mile range should be sufficient for most of the people (assuming it is affordable)
It's not a prerequisite: I see lots of people plugging their cars at public chargers in my residential area; I assume they charge once a week while doing groceries or dining out.
You're making me very happy with my decision in 2021 to resist the appealing design of the Honda and buy an id3 with a reasonably sized battery.
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.
That's not really the context of the comment though. The point is just that an EV turns ~80% of its fuel energy into motion (with the rest as heat) and an ICE turns about ~30% of its fuel energy into motion (with the rest as heat).
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 second factor is your battery needs heat. So you may be forced to generate excess heat even if you aren't using it in the cabin.
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.
The Mini Cooper E, the one adapted from the i3 platform from 2013 but without the nice parts of the i3 such as the light carbon fiber monocoque, the aluminium frame, and the rear wheel engine and rear wheel drive?
I hate to say it, but doesn't a lot of this have to do with your poor choice of vehicles? You bought a 35kW battery-equipped EV and replaced it with an EV with a 32.6kW battery. What did you expect?
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.
I agree. Though I replaced it with a car with a capacity of 40 kW and better overall efficiency. You're right, however, that I could have bought a used VW ID.3 or similar. But I can't stand how these cars look or feel. I'm also not complaining. I really like my car. I just wanted to share my experience :)
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.
I could see a future integrated feature among cars brands doing this with their cameras. Teslas in your area on the road are already monitoring everything, then flag available street parking spots so autopilot cars looking for parking are dispatched to the nearest one. No need for drones if you already have a sufficiently large fleet of cars on the road.
Why wouldn't we just wire up all the parking spaces with sensors and then have a city wide parking app just for this? That seems far more efficient and safer over having a fleet of parking scout drones randomly flying throughout the city.
Because the car owner has an incentive to spend a couple thousand extra for a scout drone, but cities have very little incentive to spend many millions on a major infrastructure project that achieves the same. Despite that being cheaper than everyone getting a drone port in their car
It feels intuitive that cities would have the same incentive to maximize use of parking spots as they do having them in the first place. Cities want commerce to flow.
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.
Make the drone carry a couple of orange cones (or just look like an orange cone itself) and you can even have it save the spot it finds until you get there.
> 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.
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.
A lot of modern SUVs have "360° backup camera" features which work similarly - the car uses footage from cameras mounted around the vehicle to synthesize a top-down view. It's great for backing out of tight parking spaces, and I can only imagine it's even more useful on a bus.
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.
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.
> and high restructuring costs from the shift to electric vehicles.
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”.
> You are free to believe what you want, I'm just presenting the data.
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.
I went to a car show in Australia last year. VAG was out in full force displaying all the models you mention... but so were the Chinese manufacturers, who were 25-50% cheaper across the board, for all models and all price points.
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.
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).
Ford of Europe has succeeded because its direction and leadership are completely different to its American outfit, and has released models targeting European sensibilities. You will probably not find Mondeos or Focuses in the North American market. Nor will you (easily) find an F-150 in Europe. A Ranger, perhaps, but not the F-150.
Same name, mostly same internal components, different chassis (mostly bigger) afaik. Same for Fiesta's except for some models (e.g. ST). I know for the Fiesta since the electronics are the same but the dash components are made for a bigger chassis (to make it fit you have to dremel quite a bit).
You've shown your words to be meaningless. You said the U.S. car brands were "completely irrelevant" outside the U.S., here you admit that's wrong. You move the goalpost and change your assertion to something entirely different. But there is no reason to think this statement has any factual basis either. You're just talking out of your &ss.
Ford of Europe is arguably a European car brand which happens to be owned by a US company (in much the same way as Chrysler/Jeep etc are clearly American car brands, despite being owned by a European company).
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).
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.
"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.."
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:
My home charger was like $500 ($300 with the credit I got from electric company) and install was like 250. No upgrade needed.
I've also owned a house before that had old electricity - knob and tube (this was before I had an electric car) and paid less than 10k to get the entire electricity system upgraded to something modern. I dont think your 5k-10k thing is accurate for the vast majority of houses.
5,000$ dollars! Do you mean to tell me that most people do not have any spare space on their electric panel for an extra 220v plug? I didn’t but that’s because my house was owned by cheapstakes who saved 100$ by installing a slightly smaller panel that few electricians I talked to had ever seen. That can’t be most people?!
Places with natural gas heating/stove are more likely to run into the issue because the builders never planned for any of the 'important' appliances to need 240V plugs. My new (old) house had exactly that problem once I started looking at replacing some older gas appliances.
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.
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.
It's priced for extreme growth cause that's the way the CEO and board want it to be. They don't want to make cars and sell them to consumers for a small profit cause that's not an extreme growth opportunity so the focus is elsewhere.
It is a great business to be in, they just aren't run by a sane person who is good at business. If it weren't for massive conflicts of interest their CEO would have been fired years ago.
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.
Nissan at least seems to be somewhat leaning into EVs. The Ariya was released to little fanfare but has seen sales pick up over time (though it’s on pause in the US for 2026 due to tariffs), and they just released a freshly redesigned proper modern EV version of the Leaf at a surprisingly affordable pricepoint. They’re also working with Mitsubishi to sell a Leaf rebadge (which I’d speculate will come at a lower price point with a more stripped down feature set).
In Japan Nissan also had a pure electric kei car they sell.
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.
The third-biggest BEV maker is VW AG, a legacy car brand. Likely soon the second, given their hefty (33% last year) growth vs Tesla’s modest shrinkage; unless something changes they’ll overtake in a year or so.
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.
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.
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.
They were late to the game but are definitely investing more now.
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.
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.
The “retreat” framing is too US-centric. I’m in Sweden and European OEMs aren’t retreating — BMW Neue Klasse just launched, Renault 5 is a hit, Skoda Enyaq/Elroq are everywhere. These are competitive new platforms shipping right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I see arguments in the comments about 'I had a disappointing experience a few years ago' where the entire point is that China has been betting on the future and putting the work in to get there. They had disappointing experiences too, but they learned and improved. We just give up. The whole point of this article and the rise of china in general is that the west keeps looking at just the now and 5 years ago and saying 'meh' while china looks at 5+ years from now and figures out how to build for that. Charging speed is slow? Start investing now in megawatt infrastructure at all levels expecting it to be the norm. Range worries? Invest in better batteries. Etc etc. Get people using the tech and the rough spots will work out more quickly. Instead we have governments retreating from subsidies in EVs while fossil fuels continue to get massive ones that keep growing in cost each year. (war is a subsidy. pollution is a subsidy. cheap/free drilling leases are a subsidy. etc etc) Fossil fuels are dead. EVs are the now. The only reason we still see fossil fuel vehicles on the roads and still in production is because we have no vision and the wrong incentives.
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.
The implementation details of government intervention in the economy is critically important for success and I don’t really think there is consensus as to how it should be done. Seems like the major tariffs on Chinese EVs are mostly about buying time, but western manufacturers see the writing on the wall and are leaving the market.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really struggle with this model of protectionism.
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.
It has worked plenty. The US built its entire industrial base behind tariff walls in the 1800s. Japan protected Toyota and Sony until they could compete globally. South Korea did the same with Samsung. And China itself got there through decades of protectionism and subsidies.
> 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?
> 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 a money bleed globally is hard to believe.
The ev and chip market may indeed be insurmountable to their subsidy model, but it has worked on so many other sectors that now only exist in China. They do have troubles discontinuing subsidies to sectors that capture government. But mostly the subsidize to bootstrap has worked wonderfully for them. Tariffs are one counter. But subsidizing your own existing sector to counter it is necessary as well and tariffs have the down side of making your industries uncompetitive globally. Argentina demonstrated this for us. An evenhanded subsidybthat doesn't pick winners is also necessary. China broke capitalism the same way VC does. Come in with a big enough bank roll and it doesn't matter if you are better if you can keep spending until the competition folds. The open question is if China's demographic issues will outpace productivity gains.
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.
There are plenty of countries that lack domestic automotive production that are very OK using Chinese EVs. Nepal for example, is all in in Chinese EVs now since it’s people couldn’t afford much gas or ICEs before, and with some hydro investments (also aided by China), they can now better afford to buy (cheap Chinese EVs) and drive cars (cheap hydro). There are a hundred nepals out there that the western and Japanese countries aren’t going after.
There's nothing wrong with Chinese EVs (or any EVs) going to Nepal or something. China is closer, it's a tough country to get to, makes sense that China (or India perhaps) would be their primary supplier.
Logistics through Tibet wasn’t really a thing until recently, China had to invest there. But it’s not just Nepal, it’s most of Africa, southeast asia, as well as Australia/NZ. China is literally creating markets for its products that simply didn’t exist at all before.
Sure, though I'm not positive that's a good economic strategy outside of perhaps SE Asia. Market size in places like Africa, along with general instability presenting challenges has not made it a great place to invest, unless of course you have state backing and subsidies from, idk, China?
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.
Western countries don’t have a product to sell without protectionism. Look at Australia, a first word country by any measure but without an auto industry to protect has wholly embraced Chinese EVs.
China is creating and making markets where they are allowed to create/make markets. The western auto manufacturers are turtling up via protectionism, and they are no longer aiming to compete on their products.
> 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.
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.
> Exports amount for 50% of german economy and 30%+ of Italian one.
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.
> 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.
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)
I hear your point about subsidies in American and European markets and how regular people are "left with the bill", but that's mostly because regulators and those working in government are incompetent, by and large, not because there aren't actions one can take. China serves as a clear counter example. And then you could also look at other countries and steps they've taken to shore up their domestic industries or otherwise.
They are permitted to do business there. You just have to make a bargain with the devil. 50% of your domestically incorporated branch is Chinese owned. Then you have the requisite technology and IP transfer. Most sensible companies would not accept such a bargain, but you have quite a few investors only interested in the next quarterly profit going up to the right. And they've made that bargain repeatedly.
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.
If Stellantis dies it won’t be because of insufficient EV zeal. It’ll be because they mostly make garbage cars no one wants. Saw this funny video about the top 10 cars with the most still-unsold inventory of their 2024(!) MY:
This is less about carmakers and more about what customers wants and what infrastructure offers. People are just not buying unless EVs are heavily subsidized. And infrastructure is real pain in the butt.
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.
I live on the eastern coast of the US. I travel for work up and down the eastern seaboard. Sometimes I ride with a coworker who drives his Tesla. The experience turned me off of ever buying one.
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.
We can despise Musk as much as we want, but I leased a Tesla Model 3 for three years and it was the best car I've ever owned. I had zero issues, it was always charged, zero maintenance(other than topping off washer fluid), and for long trips, I usually rent a car anyway. I seriously considered buying a Model S once my lease ended, but thanks to Musk’s shenanigans, I’m waiting for a Rivian R2 or R3 instead.
And yes Teslas aren't for passengers but for drivers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A Honda CRV Hybrid for example starts at $35k (Accord Hybrid is 34k) and that's a pretty common vehicle here in Ohio. We could debate the capabilities and such and what you get for your money, but I'm just not in an agreement that $37k is a lot of money for a car.
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.
Well, speaking as someone who is moderately price sensitive, I'm probably going to shop for a used car.
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.
Yea I think we got side-tracked here in discussing what is affordable. But my point was that the big 3 EV makers in the United States: Tesla, Lucid, Rivian are either politically uncompetitive (Tesla) or financially uncompetitive (all three if you are also arguing Tesla is too expensive) and because of that the charging infrastructure isn't relevant if you are already thinking the car itself costs too much.
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.
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.
Since when had Ford, GM, and Chrysler escaped irrelevance? With the exception of parking lot princess pickup trucks, they've been outsold on their own turf by reliable Japanese economy vehicles for decades now.
Volkswagen is on a faster pace to become irrelevance due to dependency on diminishing exports, high energy input costs in Europe, and labor union which wont't let them right size the company. Good luck VW
* 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.
The Western carmakers have been responding rationally to market signals in moving away from EVs, meanwhile Chinese carmakers are responding rationally to government mandates and subsidies.
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."
How is the Western approach more sustainable? Once EVs get bootstrapped, they are better than ICE vehicles in almost every respect. Once your society is built around EVs, there’s barely a reason to use anything else. That feels a lot more sustainable than having a hard dependency on fossil fuels in perpetuity.
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. In fact they'll probably do better as global wealth gap increases.
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.
No way that European car companies give up that easily. I bet you didn't know that VW is currently the #1 EV seller in Europe and #1 car seller in China (with a small but increasing fraction of EVs there, though):
I never said they can't sell in China. My question with this was if they can maintain the same levels of profitability they enjoyed during the ICE glory days, as a lot of EU economies are dependent on the profitability of the auto sector. If profits slump, then so will the lives of a lot of working class Europeans. Keep in mind the auto sector used the be the biggest R&D spender in EU.
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.
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.
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.
A standard wall socket doesn't provide enough amperage to charge an EV at reasonable rate if you use your car more than once or twice a week. Maybe this is less of a problem in the EU where people generally have shorter commutes, but I could definitely still see it being an issue.
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.
Don't forget that in the EU household circuits tend to support higher loads than US household circuits.
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.
Most homes in the EU have a three phase connection and can support 22kW wall 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!)
> Europe is going to ban the sale of ICE cars from 2035 so
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.
You could alternatively just rent a car or truck when you need one, and not one a car at all?
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
Show the math.. only about 12% of buyers buy new cars. Economical, efficient EVs can be had for $20k. Renting a big truck occasionally can be as little as $20, but even at $5000 for a truck rental... most people are buying trucks that cost $10, $20, $30K more than an enconomy car.
> no one is willing to admit the EV tech isn't just there yet
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.
> It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.
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 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.
from the impacts of the straight of hormuz closing, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine - electrification and removing dependence on oil and gas is a major defense cost.
any spending on EV adoption should be considered part of the NATO commitment
Per my calculations, EVs are cheaper over the whole vehicle lifetime. I included construction costs and usage costs, in terms of money, environmental impact, and health impacts.
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.
In 2024[1]:
- 37.2% in Sweeden
- 51.6% in Denmark
- 30.4% in Finland
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.
They just have to replace most use cases. There will come a point, not too far away, where battery progress makes them cheaper to purchase than petrol cars (for many use cases the point may already have come where TCO is lower, and Trump’s oil crisis will only speed the arrival of that point for more use cases.)
That's a strange statement considering that 20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. And that's not just China propping up the numbers: 20% of new vehicles sold in the EU are EVs as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
People have been trying hydrogen. It’s generally a bit of a disaster.
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).
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 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.
Sounds Bad in the north. In the south I have a charger max 10 min away in every direction. And 300kw charger are also the norm for long distance charging. I was surprised to see that even some Aral gas stations removed some of their pumps and replaced them with high speed chargers around here.
Seams to be a non issue in the south, I can charge near my house, everywhere I have to do something and at work.
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.
> poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
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.
Does the random reboot affect the motor, lights, defogger, signals, anything else absolutely essential to driving?
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
American safety standards require that the car be more-or-less entirely functional without the infotainment system.
It’s just the Android bit that reboots, so maps and music.
The rest of the car drives fine.
It depends where you are. I live in a somewhat rural area in Northern Germany. There are some chargers, but many of them are out of service like the one next door. I've never stumbled upon a free charger though.
I work all over Europe and I’m not super impressed with the state of charging infrastructure in general and it seems particularly bad in German.
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.
> why the fuck do I need some shitty app to use your charger?
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.
It doesn't have to be an app to handle small transactions - different countries already have mechanisms in place to handle that - e.g. any credit card purchase under $5 gets a $1 surcharge, to avoid the surcharge you can tap with a debit card (with much lower transaction costs).
Public AC charging in Germany isn't great, but DC/Fast charging is quite good. I traverse the entire country with a Kia Nero EV, and that's not really a problem using either EnBW, Tesla or Ionity chargers. Besides these networks there are enough others with mostly nation-wide coverage (but not as cheap as these).
(EnBW and Ionity for 39ct/kwh, tesla for a bit more or less, depending on time and location)
Inversely I leased a Fiat 500e for a year in Detroit Michigan and had no issues with range ~130 miles. I would plug it in nightly as I had a level 2 charger installed at my house. The experiment was quite successful. I just didn’t like front wheel drive on somedays with heavy snow. I used it for commuting to work, buying groceries and visiting friends nearby. It met my needs and I feel a slightly bigger car with 4 doors and 200-250 mile range should be sufficient for most of the people (assuming it is affordable)
I like the form factor of the 500e, but boy do I not trust Fiat.
Sadly, I don't own a wall box. So I'm dependent on public infrastructure. If I could charge at home I'd be even happier with my car.
Sadly I think it's kind of accepted by this point that overnight charging is a prerequisite to a good experience with an EV.
It's not a prerequisite: I see lots of people plugging their cars at public chargers in my residential area; I assume they charge once a week while doing groceries or dining out.
You're making me very happy with my decision in 2021 to resist the appealing design of the Honda and buy an id3 with a reasonably sized battery.
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.
The temps don’t affect your range that much, it’s mostly the tires.
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.
> are you running the heater constantly?
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.
Running a heater is easier the less efficient your engine is, because there's more waste heat to work with. ICEs have the clear advantage there
If the energy is used for something intended (e.g. hot air) than it is not inefficient.
That's not really the context of the comment though. The point is just that an EV turns ~80% of its fuel energy into motion (with the rest as heat) and an ICE turns about ~30% of its fuel energy into motion (with the rest as heat).
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 second factor is your battery needs heat. So you may be forced to generate excess heat even if you aren't using it in the cabin.
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.
> Also your in winter are you running the heater constantly?
Nope. But last winter it got really cold (< -10°C). Also the Honda was aggressively heating the battery
Might I suggest choosing an EV that has more range?
The Mini Cooper E, the one adapted from the i3 platform from 2013 but without the nice parts of the i3 such as the light carbon fiber monocoque, the aluminium frame, and the rear wheel engine and rear wheel drive?
Probably the J01 SE, an electric model not available in the US due to tariffs, but available everywhere else.
Oh I see. It sells extremely poorly in Norway. Looking at the specs, I could guess why.
yes!
One of the interesting trends in my life (I am 47 now) is the slow collapse of the "in Germany, things WORK!" concept.
It used to be actually true in the 1990s, but right now, I definitely expect better public services in Poland than in DE.
Basically there's an adoption curve. "Western carmakers retreat" is showing they pushed ahead of the curve and got bitten so they're correcting.
THIS is where public subsidies makes the difference, finding and spending the way out of the pain points to make the adoption curve steeper.
I hate to say it, but doesn't a lot of this have to do with your poor choice of vehicles? You bought a 35kW battery-equipped EV and replaced it with an EV with a 32.6kW battery. What did you expect?
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.
I agree. Though I replaced it with a car with a capacity of 40 kW and better overall efficiency. You're right, however, that I could have bought a used VW ID.3 or similar. But I can't stand how these cars look or feel. I'm also not complaining. I really like my car. I just wanted to share my experience :)
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...
I could see a future integrated feature among cars brands doing this with their cameras. Teslas in your area on the road are already monitoring everything, then flag available street parking spots so autopilot cars looking for parking are dispatched to the nearest one. No need for drones if you already have a sufficiently large fleet of cars on the road.
Why wouldn't we just wire up all the parking spaces with sensors and then have a city wide parking app just for this? That seems far more efficient and safer over having a fleet of parking scout drones randomly flying throughout the city.
The correct answer seems to be: because our economic model requires that new junk be constantly invented in order that we have something to buy. Alas.
Because the car owner has an incentive to spend a couple thousand extra for a scout drone, but cities have very little incentive to spend many millions on a major infrastructure project that achieves the same. Despite that being cheaper than everyone getting a drone port in their car
It feels intuitive that cities would have the same incentive to maximize use of parking spots as they do having them in the first place. Cities want commerce to flow.
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.
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.
Make the drone carry a couple of orange cones (or just look like an orange cone itself) and you can even have it save the spot it finds until you get there.
Basically the Larry David periscope car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQRm1cg8T8I
His idea was like a back up camera, but front-facing and elevated (retractable).
> 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.
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.
A lot of modern SUVs have "360° backup camera" features which work similarly - the car uses footage from cameras mounted around the vehicle to synthesize a top-down view. It's great for backing out of tight parking spaces, and I can only imagine it's even more useful on a bus.
Get a deposit down on the Xpeng AeroHT! https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/xpeng-land-aircr...
This is both really cool and also fucking insanity - the lengths we’ll go just to avoid building better train service.
To be clear, China has no issues improving train service at the same time.
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?
> Sooo... where's the retreat?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gqyyly9v8o
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/13/honda-flags-first-annual-los... From Google, first page.> and high restructuring costs from the shift to electric vehicles.
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”.
That's not a retreat from EVs.
Article seems to be gibberish, carmakers don't seem to be retreating from EVs.
You are free to believe what you want, I'm just presenting the data.
> You are free to believe what you want, I'm just presenting the data.
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.
I went to a car show in Australia last year. VAG was out in full force displaying all the models you mention... but so were the Chinese manufacturers, who were 25-50% cheaper across the board, for all models and all price points.
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?
Per that link, the BYD Dolphin is €30,000 and the VW ID.3 is €36,000. That’s a 20% premium.
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...
> Sooo... where's the retreat?
As the article says; "In the US"
> In the US
American car marques are nearly completely irrelevant outside the US.
Ive seen plenty of fords in Europe but they have evs
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.
> the Kuga has sold subpar.
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).
Ford of Europe has succeeded because its direction and leadership are completely different to its American outfit, and has released models targeting European sensibilities. You will probably not find Mondeos or Focuses in the North American market. Nor will you (easily) find an F-150 in Europe. A Ranger, perhaps, but not the F-150.
You could definitely buy the Focus in the US.
Same name, mostly same internal components, different chassis (mostly bigger) afaik. Same for Fiesta's except for some models (e.g. ST). I know for the Fiesta since the electronics are the same but the dash components are made for a bigger chassis (to make it fit you have to dremel quite a bit).
The Focus is about the only European-designed Ford which really made it to the US in significant numbers (albeit somewhat late) at all, AIUI.
Even the Fiesta was sold in the US and Canada off and on.
You've shown your words to be meaningless. You said the U.S. car brands were "completely irrelevant" outside the U.S., here you admit that's wrong. You move the goalpost and change your assertion to something entirely different. But there is no reason to think this statement has any factual basis either. You're just talking out of your &ss.
They said “nearly”. Ford is the only American brand selling numbers in Europe, maybe nect to Tesla.
GM sells a whole bunch of stuff they just don't put a bowtie on the grill in Europe or Asia because they have other brands they use there.
Ford of Europe is arguably a European car brand which happens to be owned by a US company (in much the same way as Chrysler/Jeep etc are clearly American car brands, despite being owned by a European company).
Right, but Ford Europe is, and always had been, a different beast to Ford America.
Fords in Europe are made a little to the north-east of London, or near Cologne.
They have (almost) nothing to do with North American Ford vehicles.
Why talk about “western” then, not about “US”? Because clickbait?
https://imgur.com/a/XCQQ3cD
And this is what it looks like for me: https://i.k8r.eu/CzluFg.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
I noticed that it happens a lot "western media" etc, it's usually used at touchy topics
Also europe.
Renault Mégane and Scenic EVs are also great.
Porsche... Eye roll
Porsche isn't so much into the car business as it is into the genital enlargement business...
It's a tiny market, but, I promise, it has growth potential.
If money wasn't an object, I'd buy one EV: the Taycan Turbo S.
Though, shitty software and no one pedal driving because Porsche drivers pilot with two pedals.
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).
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.
"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.."
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:
https://youtu.be/W96a8svXo14
It will help update your knowledge on this topic.
Cheers
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.
It gets tricky once the utility company has to hydrovac an upgraded supply line to your house. They've estimated $30-40k for me.
How long ago was that? Things have changed in the economy recently
5,000$ dollars! Do you mean to tell me that most people do not have any spare space on their electric panel for an extra 220v plug? I didn’t but that’s because my house was owned by cheapstakes who saved 100$ by installing a slightly smaller panel that few electricians I talked to had ever seen. That can’t be most people?!
Sadly it's fairly common in the Northeast as far as I could tell while househunting in the 2010s and 2020s
Places with natural gas heating/stove are more likely to run into the issue because the builders never planned for any of the 'important' appliances to need 240V plugs. My new (old) house had exactly that problem once I started looking at replacing some older gas appliances.
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.
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.
It's priced for extreme growth cause that's the way the CEO and board want it to be. They don't want to make cars and sell them to consumers for a small profit cause that's not an extreme growth opportunity so the focus is elsewhere.
It's on the way to be merged with SpaceX.
It is a great business to be in, they just aren't run by a sane person who is good at business. If it weren't for massive conflicts of interest their CEO would have been fired years ago.
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.
Nissan at least seems to be somewhat leaning into EVs. The Ariya was released to little fanfare but has seen sales pick up over time (though it’s on pause in the US for 2026 due to tariffs), and they just released a freshly redesigned proper modern EV version of the Leaf at a surprisingly affordable pricepoint. They’re also working with Mitsubishi to sell a Leaf rebadge (which I’d speculate will come at a lower price point with a more stripped down feature set).
In Japan Nissan also had a pure electric kei car they sell.
Tesla is a hype company more than a car company. Also, me personally, I consider them all rolling coffins.
They’re some of the safest cars ever made, unless you drive them into a tree at 110mph.
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.
The third-biggest BEV maker is VW AG, a legacy car brand. Likely soon the second, given their hefty (33% last year) growth vs Tesla’s modest shrinkage; unless something changes they’ll overtake in a year or so.
I feel that Renault is also standing out as a company that's going in the opposite direction.
I thought Totyota is still one of the EV leaders. Alongside Kia and Hyundai?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They were late to the game but are definitely investing more now.
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.
Toyota’s leadership is staunchly anti-EV
Toyota sells EVs. They sell the bZ3, bZ4, bZ5, bZ7, bZ3X, bZ Woodland, C-HR+, Lexus RZ, Lexus ES, and soon the Hilux EV.
The Lexus ES: https://electrek.co/2026/03/19/lexus-launches-es-ev-with-300...
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.
Hormuz might change their mind
Not at all, they were a hybrid leader long time ago but they never had a good pure EV and are only starting last few years.
The “retreat” framing is too US-centric. I’m in Sweden and European OEMs aren’t retreating — BMW Neue Klasse just launched, Renault 5 is a hit, Skoda Enyaq/Elroq are everywhere. These are competitive new platforms shipping right now.
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.
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.
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.
EVs are more expensive in total.
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.
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.
I'd love to see that math
https://cmurphycode.com/electricity
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)
Oh please, it hit two euros a liter thanks to the orange turd
I see arguments in the comments about 'I had a disappointing experience a few years ago' where the entire point is that China has been betting on the future and putting the work in to get there. They had disappointing experiences too, but they learned and improved. We just give up. The whole point of this article and the rise of china in general is that the west keeps looking at just the now and 5 years ago and saying 'meh' while china looks at 5+ years from now and figures out how to build for that. Charging speed is slow? Start investing now in megawatt infrastructure at all levels expecting it to be the norm. Range worries? Invest in better batteries. Etc etc. Get people using the tech and the rough spots will work out more quickly. Instead we have governments retreating from subsidies in EVs while fossil fuels continue to get massive ones that keep growing in cost each year. (war is a subsidy. pollution is a subsidy. cheap/free drilling leases are a subsidy. etc etc) Fossil fuels are dead. EVs are the now. The only reason we still see fossil fuel vehicles on the roads and still in production is because we have no vision and the wrong incentives.
Isn't it over and China owns this market anyway? How can any other country possibly compete?
By limiting imports and offering alternatives in home. Also, the myths about reliability ads a lot.
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.
Western governments should have been intervening like China does.
Leaves a very large open question of whether China would be getting anywhere without Chinese government intervention...
We have learned from China. And?
The implementation details of government intervention in the economy is critically important for success and I don’t really think there is consensus as to how it should be done. Seems like the major tariffs on Chinese EVs are mostly about buying time, but western manufacturers see the writing on the wall and are leaving the market.
So now what?
Correct. When billions of eur involved, nothing moves without support from gov.
> 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.
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.
The only embargo is from the US.
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.
> 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-...
Even more of a reason to detach from the dollar economy and New York centered digital transactions asap.
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.
Peugeot is the biggest foreign car brand in Cuba.
But it has to be said: the entire car market in Cuba is few thousands cars per year.
An embargo is an externally imposed limit on imports.
Doing it to to yourself is a special sort of stupid.
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.
That may be the goal. It is rarely the result. We have plenty of historical evidence on the downsides of protectionism.
I really struggle with this model of protectionism.
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.
It has worked plenty. The US built its entire industrial base behind tariff walls in the 1800s. Japan protected Toyota and Sony until they could compete globally. South Korea did the same with Samsung. And China itself got there through decades of protectionism and subsidies.
That's the same thing I said.
Protectionism can help when you want to develop an industry.
But it never works for mature ones.
Correct, so that’s why it needs to be employed to help develop the Western EV industries so that they can compete with that of China.
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.
EV cars is not a mature industry.
> 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?
> 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 a money bleed globally is hard to believe.
The ev and chip market may indeed be insurmountable to their subsidy model, but it has worked on so many other sectors that now only exist in China. They do have troubles discontinuing subsidies to sectors that capture government. But mostly the subsidize to bootstrap has worked wonderfully for them. Tariffs are one counter. But subsidizing your own existing sector to counter it is necessary as well and tariffs have the down side of making your industries uncompetitive globally. Argentina demonstrated this for us. An evenhanded subsidybthat doesn't pick winners is also necessary. China broke capitalism the same way VC does. Come in with a big enough bank roll and it doesn't matter if you are better if you can keep spending until the competition folds. The open question is if China's demographic issues will outpace productivity gains.
> That's an opinion, not a fact.
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.
There are plenty of countries that lack domestic automotive production that are very OK using Chinese EVs. Nepal for example, is all in in Chinese EVs now since it’s people couldn’t afford much gas or ICEs before, and with some hydro investments (also aided by China), they can now better afford to buy (cheap Chinese EVs) and drive cars (cheap hydro). There are a hundred nepals out there that the western and Japanese countries aren’t going after.
There's nothing wrong with Chinese EVs (or any EVs) going to Nepal or something. China is closer, it's a tough country to get to, makes sense that China (or India perhaps) would be their primary supplier.
Logistics through Tibet wasn’t really a thing until recently, China had to invest there. But it’s not just Nepal, it’s most of Africa, southeast asia, as well as Australia/NZ. China is literally creating markets for its products that simply didn’t exist at all before.
Sure, though I'm not positive that's a good economic strategy outside of perhaps SE Asia. Market size in places like Africa, along with general instability presenting challenges has not made it a great place to invest, unless of course you have state backing and subsidies from, idk, China?
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.
Western countries don’t have a product to sell without protectionism. Look at Australia, a first word country by any measure but without an auto industry to protect has wholly embraced Chinese EVs.
Could you summarize your larger point? I'm starting to get lost in what exactly we're talking about - my fault.
China is creating and making markets where they are allowed to create/make markets. The western auto manufacturers are turtling up via protectionism, and they are no longer aiming to compete on their products.
> 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.
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.
> Exports amount for 50% of german economy and 30%+ of Italian one.
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.
> 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.
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:
I hear your point about subsidies in American and European markets and how regular people are "left with the bill", but that's mostly because regulators and those working in government are incompetent, by and large, not because there aren't actions one can take. China serves as a clear counter example. And then you could also look at other countries and steps they've taken to shore up their domestic industries or otherwise.It seems like you're ignoring real-life things that happened to fit your world model.
The same way Chinese tech companies “compete” with Western ones: By not permitting them to do business in China.
They are permitted to do business there. You just have to make a bargain with the devil. 50% of your domestically incorporated branch is Chinese owned. Then you have the requisite technology and IP transfer. Most sensible companies would not accept such a bargain, but you have quite a few investors only interested in the next quarterly profit going up to the right. And they've made that bargain repeatedly.
Tarrifs mostly
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.
If Stellantis dies it won’t be because of insufficient EV zeal. It’ll be because they mostly make garbage cars no one wants. Saw this funny video about the top 10 cars with the most still-unsold inventory of their 2024(!) MY:
https://youtu.be/R20QEyrQ2FE?si=cou6HgknYQOc8zbt
Stellantis, the company which owns all the brands which make you go “wait, they still exist?!” when you see one.
Many of those models with unsold 2024 inventory are EVs.
This is less about carmakers and more about what customers wants and what infrastructure offers. People are just not buying unless EVs are heavily subsidized. And infrastructure is real pain in the butt.
No one buys mechanical watches anymore it’s quartz or nothing
America clearly has an EV industry (Tesla, Rivian) but its adoption is pretty limited by infrastructure.
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.
I live on the eastern coast of the US. I travel for work up and down the eastern seaboard. Sometimes I ride with a coworker who drives his Tesla. The experience turned me off of ever buying one.
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.
We can despise Musk as much as we want, but I leased a Tesla Model 3 for three years and it was the best car I've ever owned. I had zero issues, it was always charged, zero maintenance(other than topping off washer fluid), and for long trips, I usually rent a car anyway. I seriously considered buying a Model S once my lease ended, but thanks to Musk’s shenanigans, I’m waiting for a Rivian R2 or R3 instead.
And yes Teslas aren't for passengers but for drivers.
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
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.
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.
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.
But Tesla is priced high for anyone that is even moderately price sensitive. Even the base model of their cheapest car.
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.
> Sure if $37k is a lot for a car
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.
A Honda CRV Hybrid for example starts at $35k (Accord Hybrid is 34k) and that's a pretty common vehicle here in Ohio. We could debate the capabilities and such and what you get for your money, but I'm just not in an agreement that $37k is a lot of money for a car.
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.
Well, speaking as someone who is moderately price sensitive, I'm probably going to shop for a used car.
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.
Yea I think we got side-tracked here in discussing what is affordable. But my point was that the big 3 EV makers in the United States: Tesla, Lucid, Rivian are either politically uncompetitive (Tesla) or financially uncompetitive (all three if you are also arguing Tesla is too expensive) and because of that the charging infrastructure isn't relevant if you are already thinking the car itself costs too much.
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.
The average new car transaction price in the US is about $50k.
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.
AlSo by goverment lobby, tHe mosT equal branch of modern USA
ASHT?
Since when had Ford, GM, and Chrysler escaped irrelevance? With the exception of parking lot princess pickup trucks, they've been outsold on their own turf by reliable Japanese economy vehicles for decades now.
Volkswagen is on a faster pace to become irrelevance due to dependency on diminishing exports, high energy input costs in Europe, and labor union which wont't let them right size the company. Good luck VW
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.
* 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.The Western carmakers have been responding rationally to market signals in moving away from EVs, meanwhile Chinese carmakers are responding rationally to government mandates and subsidies.
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."
How is the Western approach more sustainable? Once EVs get bootstrapped, they are better than ICE vehicles in almost every respect. Once your society is built around EVs, there’s barely a reason to use anything else. That feels a lot more sustainable than having a hard dependency on fossil fuels in perpetuity.
Somehow having freedom to choose is bad?
Yes it's bad when you're set to pick big overconfident losers. See also: 1929
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. In fact they'll probably do better as global wealth gap increases.
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.
No way that European car companies give up that easily. I bet you didn't know that VW is currently the #1 EV seller in Europe and #1 car seller in China (with a small but increasing fraction of EVs there, though):
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
Same VW models in China cost about 50% less than in EU.
Which should in itself tell you that VW can compete on price if it has to.
VW is too slow and bureaucratic to compete with China
FUD
I never said they can't sell in China. My question with this was if they can maintain the same levels of profitability they enjoyed during the ICE glory days, as a lot of EU economies are dependent on the profitability of the auto sector. If profits slump, then so will the lives of a lot of working class Europeans. Keep in mind the auto sector used the be the biggest R&D spender in EU.
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.
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.
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.
Their homes don't have electricity?
Many people live in apartments and they do not have a garage.
You cannot connect a cable from your home at the 10th floor to a car that may be hundreds of m away.
There are companies selling streetlight replacements with chargers. They may get a lot of business in the next decade.
A standard wall socket doesn't provide enough amperage to charge an EV at reasonable rate if you use your car more than once or twice a week. Maybe this is less of a problem in the EU where people generally have shorter commutes, but I could definitely still see it being an issue.
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.
Don't forget that in the EU household circuits tend to support higher loads than US household circuits.
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.
Most homes in the EU have a three phase connection and can support 22kW wall 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 homes in the EU have a three phase connection and can support 22kW wall charging.
Most Europeans don't live in single family homes for this to be relevant.
> Europe is going to ban the sale of ICE cars from 2035 so
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.
Zonda is a model from Pagani Automobili.
no one is willing to admit the EV tech isn't just there yet to fully replace gas powered cars?
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.
I’m not affluent enough to buy one car for my daily life and rent another for whenever I have to leave the city.
You could alternatively just rent a car or truck when you need one, and not one a car at all?
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
How often do you leave the city for more than 200km?
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%.
Show the math.. only about 12% of buyers buy new cars. Economical, efficient EVs can be had for $20k. Renting a big truck occasionally can be as little as $20, but even at $5000 for a truck rental... most people are buying trucks that cost $10, $20, $30K more than an enconomy car.
Look at a hybrid.
> Fully
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.
> no one is willing to admit the EV tech isn't just there yet
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.
98% of new car sales in Norway are EV at this point. How do you admit something that is not true?
Yes. Five million of them does not require many cars. 180k in 2025. Compare that to 2.4 million in Germany.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Edit: You nailed it, it’s a political problem in the US.
> It’s going to be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade electrical transmission, distribution, and premises distribution.
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.
If they could find the power for the data centers, why can’t we find it for EVs?
But they didn’t find power for data centres. That’s one of their problems.
Norway is hardly alone. More and more countries are increasing EV purchases and decreasing ice purchases. We are clearly headed in that direction
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.
We have the wealth fund precisely because we don't discretionally spend oil royalties.
Remove the EV subsidies and ICE taxes, and what would that number switch to?
97% perhaps. EVs are nicer and more convenient there. And cheaper.
Entirely because of taxes. Norway and Denmark are special cases because they already had extremely high taxes on ICE vehicles.
> And cheaper.
You sound like a broken record.
> Remove the EV subsidies and ICE taxes.
Should I include the cost of the current wars?
Or bulk of NATO's defense costs, which Europeans refuse to contribute to
from the impacts of the straight of hormuz closing, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine - electrification and removing dependence on oil and gas is a major defense cost.
any spending on EV adoption should be considered part of the NATO commitment
Go on then.
Per my calculations, EVs are cheaper over the whole vehicle lifetime. I included construction costs and usage costs, in terms of money, environmental impact, and health impacts.
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.
We could all go back to caves, too.
I think 80 or 90% of new cars in northern Europe are electric.
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.
In 2024[1]: - 37.2% in Sweeden - 51.6% in Denmark - 30.4% in Finland
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...
I only hear people in certain countries say this. Meanwhile many countries with rough terrain and long roads are already all in on EVs.
Which ones?
Gas powered cars can't fully replace EVs either.
After three years and 50k miles with a Model X, the idea of buying a non-EV seems ridiculous.
The EV tech seems to be good enough already in China
Heavily subsidized by China to undercut the international competition
They just have to replace most use cases. There will come a point, not too far away, where battery progress makes them cheaper to purchase than petrol cars (for many use cases the point may already have come where TCO is lower, and Trump’s oil crisis will only speed the arrival of that point for more use cases.)
That's a strange statement considering that 20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. And that's not just China propping up the numbers: 20% of new vehicles sold in the EU are EVs as well.
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.
Strawman, basically no one argues "fully". Yet.
perhaps super efficient hybrids that blend the best of both worlds are really the future?
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.
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.
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.
It’s invariably made from fossil fuels.
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.
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...
It's also really hard to store. The tanks need to be made of exotic materials and withstand incredible pressures.
People have been trying hydrogen. It’s generally a bit of a disaster.
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).
In my personal experience, range anxiety is much stronger with hydrogen because hydrogen stations are very rare and unreliable.
Also, a hydrogen car needs a battery anyway. Just make a bigger battery and skip the hydrogen part. Cheaper, simpler, lighter,…