[andrewtbham]

In the near term (1-3 years), no role in a traditional oems has incentives to make evs.

dealers make money from maintenance. evs have less maintence.

car salesmen are trained to negotiate, not educate consumers about evs.

factory workers/unions: evs require less factory workers.

many engineers have the wrong skills for evs.

executives also have the wrong skills. they are trained to negotiate with suppliers and focus on core competency. core competency changes from manufacturing engines to battery and electric drive train. innovation may require insourcing if suppliers fail.

investors want dividends and not to speculate on evs.

imho, it makes more sense for startups and tech companies to make evs.

[mschild]

There's no need to speculate on the EV market. Especially in most western countries. EVs are here and people want them.

VW alone had a backlog of 300.000 cars in 2022.

Companies care about making a profit and even the stoic Germans that where mostly wishy-washy for a long time on their strategy, have finally started to mass-producing them.

https://insideevs.com/news/584419/volkswagen-evs-sold-out-eu...

[TheLoafOfBread]

Well that's a year old article, news are that VW is actually slashing production (and Tesla is slashing prices) because they can't sell them

https://thedriven.io/2023/07/06/customer-resistance-volkswag...

[mschild]

True.

However, registration of new cars is up quite a bit in Germany. EVs actually outpaced Diesel in Germany. [0]

A lot of those sales are from purchases from 2022 though as companies couldn't produce enough then because of chip shortage.

VW, and EVs, in Germany are dropping a bit but that's not necessarily because people don't want EVs on principal. Last year was the energy crisis and some people are now stuck with contracts paying 50Cents/kWh. Inflation is still high and Germany is in a recession. Some analyst argue that car sales will have slump this year, not just EVs, because of this.

Volkswagen, and the rest of the German manufacturers in particular, also have no cheap EV cars. The cheapest EV car VW has is the e-up which is a miniature city car and that starts at 30k. The gas version starts at 14k. It's no wonder, even with subsidies, that they have issues selling them.

[0] https://www.marklines.com/en/statistics/flash_sales/automoti...

[andrewtbham]

I agree... the speculation is becoming less on the market and more on whether these companies can execute. Everyione knows it's in their long term interest to make EVs.