“Left behind” insinuates inaction, the USA has been very active at driving away from electrification.
They tried to destroy it over and over again.
I don’t like Elon Musk but I am glad the attention that Tesla got forced a lot of companies to create electric vehicles.
This quote from Ford’s CEO:
“It’s going to be a vibrant industry, but it’s going to be smaller, way smaller than we thought,” Ford chief executive Jim Farley said at an event on Tuesday.
Combined with the following quote he recently said:
Speaking on the Everything Electric Show podcast, Farley praised the [Xiaomi] electric sedan. “I don’t like talking about the competition so much, but I drive a Xiaomi,” he said. “We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up.”
Really feels like Kodak in the 90’s kinda-sorta investing in digital but not willing to fully transform a majority of business.
I agree, he probably can’t tell the future he’d like and the one that will be. And when the CEO drives a competitor’s car you know there’s something wrong.
I think a big part of it is the nature of the US car market over the past 10 years, where the growth has come from sales of “premium” vehicles. The standard and budget market segments have underperformed and thus most US car companies haven’t invested in them much. Consumer spending is increasingly driven by the wealthiest 10% of the population. Everyone else is struggling and cutting back where ever they can, that means buying used cars and holding on to their current cars as long as they can, if they’re even in a position to own a car. The middle and low end consumer is doing so poorly that they’re not just moving down market, they’re not buying at all.
EVs just aren’t super competitive in the premium market. One of the biggest real selling points of Electric vehicles is their low operating cost. Electricity is cheaper than gas, way less maintenance is needed, and the most expensive and failure prone parts are absent, reducing repair costs. To a wealthy person, none of that is particularly compelling. What can an EV sell on in a premium segment? Acceleration and the “saving the environment” vibes, and that’s just not compelling enough to take significant market share.
So why isn’t what remains of the budget market dominated by EVs? Because there are no Budget EVs on the US market. The cheapest EV on the US market is the Chevy bolt and that’s got an MSRP of around 30,000 dollars. None of the companies are willing to invest the money needed to make a budget EV production line and the required supply chains. They’d rather take their capital and put it in to high margin premium vehicles, and service the anemic budget market with legacy production lines.
Disappointed that the article didn’t touch on supply chains, raw materials, and batteries.
