Audi puts big EV push on the back burner
electrek.co
electrek.co
Electric cars are so dumbed down, it's really simple. If people would read the article to know why: taking pressure off supplies, and likely dropping demand.
There has been a big crash in electric car demand this year, you can see this everywhere, from lithium prices to Tesla having to drop it's prices multiple times.
It hurts my eyes to see people in HN saying that it's really important to invest in R&D, those companies have been always investing in R&D. But creating a new electric car model is literally day-to-day business.
EVs are the future, particularly in Europe. Chinese companies (subsidized by the government) seem to be working through the scale and knowledge improvements needed to win that market. European makers are behind, and seem determined not to catch up.
That being said I don’t understand the doom and gloom around EVs. The spike in gas prices with the attacks on ships in the Red Sea has reinforced the importance of EVs even further if any reinforcement was indeed needed after the Russian war.
The industry isn’t growing as massively as expected. But the entire concept has been completely proven at this point.
The future is Chinese. The Chinese are absolutely destroying every other country in EVs.
It seems to me the Western automakers’s response is to ostrich up and hope their governments protect them.
I even saw a snarky Reddit comment last week about how Tesla is doomed as they “only do like 1.5M a year vs Ford’s 4.2M year”. It’s like these people were born yesterday, they have no historical understanding or sense of progression. They live in a perpetual present, unable to see the bolder coming until it hits them.
So many shorts have already be wrecked, and now a whole new generation is about to get to the “find out” stage.
More competition in the market is always good for consumers. We need more manufacturers doing more R&D and building competitive products. We shouldn’t applaud giving up or pulling out of the EV market.
>>So many shorts have already been wrecked
>being giddy about Telsa competition getting “wrecked”
If you're a capital allocator and you allocate capital badly, you're going to have a bad time. You had one job...
I have slightly more sympathy for the automakers, but ultimately they're also sleeping in a bed of their own making. They dragged their feet (and/or actively fought electrification, a highly immoral choice given the impending climate chaos) for literally decades, and this is the entirely predictable outcome.
On second thought, I changed my mind. I have zero sympathy for the (as historical experience has now revealed) lying lazy legacy automakers. Time for that "creative destruction" we're always hearing about.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/kxj0or/twitter_s...