Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working

[kevinUsa]

HOMEPAGE

HOME TRANSPORTATION

Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working

Alexa St. John and Nora Naughton Oct 26, 2023, 12:43 PM ET

Download the app

General Motors CEO

General Motors CEO Mary Barra. Nic Antaya / Stringer / Getty Images

At earnings this week, several auto execs pulled back on EV targets.

Dealers have been warning of slowing EV demand for months.

"This is a pretty brutal space," Mercedes-Benz's CFO said this week.

Sign up to get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in markets, tech, and business — delivered daily. Read preview

 

Email address

 

By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as well as other partner offers and accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term.

 

Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk.

 

Among those hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles. GM has been an early-mover in the electric car market, selling the Chevrolet Bolt for seven years and making bold claims about a fully electric future for the company long before its competitors got on board.

 

But this week on GM's third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it's abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024. GM doesn't know when it will hit those targets.

 

"As we get further into the transformation to EV, it's a bit bumpy," she said.

 

While GM's about-face was somewhat of a surprise to investors, the Detroit car company is not alone in this new view of the EV future. Even Tesla's Elon Musk warned on a recent earnings call that economic concerns would lead to waning vehicle demand, even for the long-time EV market leader.

 

Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz — which is having to discount its EVs by several thousand dollars just to get them in customers' hands — isn't mincing words about the state of the EV market.

 

"This is a pretty brutal space," CFO Harald Wilhelm said on an analyst call. "I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody."

 

EVs are getting harder to sell

But Mercedes isn't the only one; almost all current EV product is going for under sticker price these days, and on top of that, some EVs are seeing manufacturer's incentives of nearly 10%.

 

That's as inventory builds up at dealerships, much to the chagrin of dealers. While car buyers are in luck if they're looking for a deal on a plug-in vehicle, executives are finding even significant markdowns and discounts aren't enough. These cars are taking dealers longer to sell compared with their gas counterparts as the next wave of buyers focus on cost, infrastructure challenges, and lifestyle barriers to adopting.

 

Just a few months after dealers started coming forward to warn of slowing EV demand, manufacturers appear to be catching up to that reality. Ford was the first to fold, after dealers started turning away Mach-E allocations. In July, the company extended its self-imposed deadline to hit annual electric vehicle production of 600,000 by a year, and abandoned a 2026 target to build 2 million EVs.

 

In scrapping plans with GM to co-develop sub-$30,000 EVs, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe said the shifting EV environment was difficult to gauge.

 

"After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV," Mibe said in an interview with Bloomberg this week.

 

For some, this pullback is no surprise.

 

"People are finally seeing reality," Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda said at the Japan Mobility Show, the Wall Street Journal reported. Toyoda has long been skeptical of his peers' pure-electric blueprints

[nenu_meeku_telusa]

Toyota was always against EVs. They think hydrogen is future. GM tried and didn’t succeed. No wonder these statements come from them. Anyone who claims EVs are for greener future isn’t true. Oil is limited resource. Electricity isn’t. The more oil we pull the more earth moves causing quakes and other natural calamities. EVs also same if you don’t reuse materials as much as possible. 

[veerigadu]

34 minutes ago, nenu_meeku_telusa said:

Toyota was always against EVs. They think hydrogen is future. GM tried and didn’t succeed. No wonder these statements come from them. Anyone who claims EVs are for greener future isn’t true. Oil is limited resource. Electricity isn’t. The more oil we pull the more earth moves causing quakes and other natural calamities. EVs also same if you don’t reuse materials as much as possible. 

Green ane mata sollu....80% of electricity from fossil fuels or nuclear plant even today. How can we say its clean?

[nenu_meeku_telusa]

28 minutes ago, veerigadu said:

Green ane mata sollu....80% of electricity from fossil fuels or nuclear plant even today. How can we say its clean?

That’s what I said. EVs are not green. They are most sustainable due to unlimited power. Oil is limited. Solar power isn’t. 

[The_Captain]

EVs tho peekindhi em leedu,  western mafia galla edupu rus-sia n middle east oil strength meeda kodithe inka world motham control loki thechukovachu ani 

[summer27]

1 hour ago, nenu_meeku_telusa said:

Toyota was always against EVs. They think hydrogen is future. GM tried and didn’t succeed. No wonder these statements come from them. Anyone who claims EVs are for greener future isn’t true. Oil is limited resource. Electricity isn’t. The more oil we pull the more earth moves causing quakes and other natural calamities. EVs also same if you don’t reuse materials as much as possible. 

But Toyota is the one that came with almost full EV first with Prius kada??

[kevinUsa]

A car company which sells 10 mn cars  is against EV means there is something Toyota knows and others don't ante

[kevinUsa]

Just now, summer27 said:

But Toyota is the one that came with almost full EV first with Prius kada??

It's not ev hybrid car with electric and gas...

To reduce gas consumption 

[summer27]

1 hour ago, nenu_meeku_telusa said:

Toyota was always against EVs. They think hydrogen is future. GM tried and didn’t succeed. No wonder these statements come from them. Anyone who claims EVs are for greener future isn’t true. Oil is limited resource. Electricity isn’t. The more oil we pull the more earth moves causing quakes and other natural calamities. EVs also same if you don’t reuse materials as much as possible. 

How does Hydrogen work bayya? I took my kid to some science fair and there was a plice SUV (Ford) on display , they claimed its hydrogen powered.  Never did research on this. Does Hydrogen power require water resources? 

[summer27]

1 minute ago, kevinUsa said:

It's not ev hybrid car with electric and gas...

To reduce gas consumption 

Toyota came with their first Plug-in model in 2012, They had hybrid in 2007/8 itself.

[Telugodura456]

it is working in china. villaki chetha kaavatle.

[TacoTuesday]

ev sucks.. toyota rocks

[shaktimaan]

28 minutes ago, summer27 said:

How does Hydrogen work bayya? I took my kid to some science fair and there was a plice SUV (Ford) on display , they claimed its hydrogen powered.  Never did research on this. Does Hydrogen power require water resources? 

No water but hydrogen refueling. A bit complicated to explain here, many good resources online. CA lo already unnayi Toyota and Honda vi

[shaktimaan]

16 minutes ago, Telugodura456 said:

it is working in china. villaki chetha kaavatle.

china ev quality ikkada work kaadu

[nenu_meeku_telusa]

58 minutes ago, summer27 said:

But Toyota is the one that came with almost full EV first with Prius kada??

Yep. But they didn’t do necessary R&D and didn’t have good charging network.