EV sales continue to rise, but the last year of headlines falsely stating otherwise would leave you thinking they haven’t. After about full year of these lies, it would be nice for journalists to stop pushing this false narrative that they could find the truth behind by simply looking up a single number for once.
Here’s what’s actually happening: Over the course of the last year or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage growth rates than they had in previous years.
This alone is not particularly remarkable – it is inevitable that any growing product or category will show slower percentage growth rates as sales rise, particularly one that has been growing at such a fast rate for so long.
In some recent years, we’ve even seen year-over-year doublings in EV market share (though one of those was 2020->2021, which was anomalous). To expect improvement at that level perpetually would be close to impossible – after 3 years of doubling market share from 2023’s 18% number, EVs would account for more than 100% of the global automotive market, which cannot happen.
Instead of the perpetual 50% CAGR that had been optimistically expected, we are seeing growth rates this year of ~10% in advanced economies, and higher in economies with lower EV penetration (+40% in “rest of world” beyond US/EU/China). Notably, this ~10% growth rate is higher than the above Norway example, which nobody would consider a “slump” at 94% market share.
It’s also clear that EV sales growth rates are being held back in the short term by Tesla, which has heretofore been the global leader in EV sales. Tesla actually has seen a year-over-year reduction in sales in recent quarters – likely at least partially due to chaotic leadership at the wayward EV leader – as buyers have been drawn to other brands, while most of which have seen significant increases in EV sales.
Thank you this royally pisses me off whenever I hear it from Ford or Chevy. They could be selling like hotcakes but they much rather go back to their cash cows and the oil industry to milk.
They could be selling like hotcakes but they much rather go back to their cash cows and the oil industry to milk.
Have we seen that Ford and Chevy are able to manufacture EVs at a profit? Chevy Bolt reportdely lost $9k per vehicle sold. Ford has reported they’ve lost as much as $40k per vehicle sold on Mach e.
It is absolutely possible to create profitable EVs, but so far Ford and Chevy don’t seem to be able to.
It’s not that they can’t manufacture for a price that can be profitable, it’s that they haven’t yet sold enough to make back their development costs. Most of that “loss” is simply not scaling enough. Every car model has a huge upfront cost of development and manufacturing costs that need to be made back. However if you allocate that over a small number of vehicles, of course it will never happen. They b need to get serious about selling them
It’s not that they can’t manufacture for a price that can be profitable, it’s that they haven’t yet sold enough to make back their development costs.
Thats one possibility, but not the only one. Its possible that the design of the vehicles are too labor intensive so irrespective of scale they will always be unprofitable. We have good indications this may exist for Mach E. It was designed and built very quickly as a “skunkworks” style product to respond to Model Y market dominance (and giant profit margins). Ford used almost exclusively off-the-shelf parts to get it out the door quickly. The consequence to this is lots and lots of labor to use parts designed for another application in a different one. Its all doable and it works to build a product, but potentially at the cost of profitability. At product launch the Mach E was an MSRP of $54,700. Today that same vehicle MSRP is $43,995. Thats a huge amount of margin to give back that would eat up many small production improvements since launch.
When was the last time Ford or Chevy had a car that sold like hotcakes, EV or otherwise? Ford hasn’t even made a car in several years and focuses solely on SUVs/CUVs and trucks. Their only bread and butter is their passenger trucks, which aren’t even being threatened by EVs.
Well until a few years ago when they decided to stop making cars (except the Mustang), they made the best selling vehicle in the world, the F150 and the best selling car, the Ford Focus. That’s why I didn’t understand why they made that decision. The same decision pretty much killed Isuzu in the US. Must not have made them much money, I guess.
