[FirmwareBurner]

Ah yes, the classic "let's blame the customer for not buying our shit products", amirite?! How come they were buying Teslas like crazy in 2014-2020 though, if they "didn't want to buy EVs"? The problem is European makers just didn't want to sell EVs to begin with, it was just an annoyance for them so they were doing the bare minimum for compliance and virtue signaling to the EU regulators, and only making some low volume ugly EVs or ICE platforms that they converted to be crappy EVs. European makers were even giving Tesla money for their CO2 credits lol, that's how much they didn't want to sell EVs. Just let that sink in for a second that European companies would just rather pay off an US car company than sell EVs and somehow nobody in the EU thought this was a problem?! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Also, on the topic of EU EV demand since you brought it up, a lot of Europeans are more urbanized, living in apartment buildings compared to US single family homes, so most don't have chargers at home to justify an EV purchase but still need cars to get to work, so of course that without matching charging infrastructure at home or at work, Europeans couldn't justify the purchase of an EV especially given the lower purchasing power compared to USaians. Not to mention that as a double whammy, EU city dwellers are also more likely to be tenants than owners which again, doesn't incentivize owners to invest in EV infrastructure.

I live in a supposedly rich EU country on paper, and public charging infrastructure is still severely lacking. Only newly built post-2018 apartments have power sockets in the garage so you can install a charger, the rest? God speed. Government action here has been lacking on public EV infrastructure front, they just gave subsidies for EVs which were ultimately just handouts to businesses and rich people who owned their own single family homes with chargers and solar panels, but now that market of house owners is saturated, since they already own EVs so of course sales have tanked, d'uh!

It was just another politically driven short sighted move, and now again, they're looking at fixing just the resulting effect and not the root cause. So in a Kafkaesque way, the huge amount of EU regulation, protectionism and interference had done more harm than good to the EU EV industry versus ripping the band aid during the good economic times and letting free market run its course, so now the industry is stuck with an economic recession to boot waiting for more regulations to save it, which might again, harm it more in the long term instead of making it competitive.

[rsynnott]

This feels vaguely ahistorical; the best-selling manufacturer of EVs in Europe in any given quarter has usually been VW AG (European) for a while now.

> but now that market of house owners is saturated, since they already own EVs so of course sales have tanked, d'uh!

How are you defining tanked? They stalled for about a year but have resumed growth.

> Europeans couldn't justify the purchase of an EV especially given the lower purchasing power compared to USaians.

And yet, somehow, Europe remains a larger market for electric cars than the US (of course, China is far larger than either).

> so now the industry is stuck with an economic recession to boot waiting for more regulations to save it

Again, VW etc seem fairly healthy. Stellantis not so much (though they are somehow still profitable), but their strategy of just owning all the brands that everyone thinks no longer exist and not doing much with them always seemed fairly incoherent.

All in all, this feels like you've come up with a narrative, and are just running with it regardless of reality, tbh.

[FirmwareBurner]

I understand why you'd feel that way but let's remember that Nokia and Blackberry also had their strongest year ever in 2008-2009 years after the iPhone launched so it can be pretty deceiving to decide the future is fine just by looking at a graph of today.

[rsynnott]

What's your thesis here, that BYD et al will totally replace the European car industry or something? This doesn't seem to be particularly plausible, and, as above, pretty much everything you have claimed is dubious or flat-out incorrect.

[FirmwareBurner]

>What's your thesis here, that BYD et al will totally replace the European car industry or something?

You're putting words in my mouth that I never said. I never made such claims. Obviously it will not, since the auto industry gets more government protections than the likes of Nokia or Blackberry did, but a good indicator is to monitor sales in regions that don't have specialized tariffs on Chinese vehicles to protect western ones, like Australia maybe.

>pretty much everything you have claimed is dubious or flat-out incorrect.

YOU think they are incorrect. I don't think everything I said is incorrect, especially the parts about manufacturers outsourcing critical innovation causing them to fall behind, EV infrastructure in my EU country being deficient leading people not to buy EVs, and consumer purchasing power/habits. The only part where I am wrong is about current sales numbers, but spot sales and rarely an indicator of the general industry trend or future.