https://insideevs.com/news/693887/tesla-ford-gm-ev-downturn/
"If you went into 2023 thinking this year would mark the permanent rise of
electric vehicles along some perfect, up-and-to-the-right growth curve, a
gloomy tide of recent news may have you wondered how and when, exactly, you
ended up in the Twilight Zone.
In just the past few weeks, General Motors had a disastrous Q3 earnings call
where it abandoned its goal of building 400,000 EVs by mid-2024, announced a
delay of more electric models and even hit pause on a new battery plant.
Similarly, Ford’s Q3 saw an even bigger loss on EVs than in Q2, perhaps as much
as $36,000 per vehicle; this, after it already tweaked its strategy to focus
more on hybrids than full EVs amid high costs and slowing sales. Both
automakers have struggled to get new EV models out the door at affordable
prices while keeping costs and quality problems in check.
Meanwhile, even Elon Musk, of all people, recently warned of production
headaches ahead and seemed noncommittal on plans for a Mexican factory thanks
to high interest rates. This isn’t what investors want to hear, especially in
America, where quarterly profits are upheld as sacrosanct above almost
everything else.
Is the EV revolution dead on arrival before it ever really started? That’s the
undertone you find in a lot of news stories lately, complete with the “I told
you so” quotes from current and former auto execs who would rather do the same
thing they’ve always done than transform their businesses. You can be forgiven
for reading those stories and wondering: was this all a mistake?
The problem is that this line of thinking is wrong. What we’re seeing right now
isn’t the premature death of the EV transition. Instead, it’s an injection of
reality – and perhaps a badly needed one. It turns out that transforming an
industry that spent a century making internal combustion engines and has a
giant supplier network in support of that goal into a business that specializes
in software and batteries is – wait for it – hard. Harder than expected.
But this transformation is still inevitable and necessary. The current moment
is proof that EV adoption isn’t going to be a permanent upward growth curve,
but one with a lot of ups and downs and winners and losers. And for these
automakers, it is a question of fortitude and survival – not one of electric
vehicle technology as a concept."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-women-rights-france-ntds-africa-bears-europe/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
