Hacker News Reader

Comment by iknowstuff | Hacker News Reader

Dumbass "journalists" with the usual clickbait.

Explicitly MORE people are buying EVs:

> Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric

The only thing they're seeing is "but the pace of adoption has markedly slowed" -- no shit, have you seen the interest rates and price diffs?

And which manufacturer grew the most? Oh that's right the only all-EV one. Just so happens Tesla dropped prices to keep monthly payments roughly the same.

View on HN

Correct. Tesla just closed another record quarter. And BYD just surpassed them as the largest EV producer in the world. Both of those things are true because the overall market keeps on growing very rapidly. Which means Tesla can break it's own records and yet not be the largest anymore because another company is growing even faster.

We're in a major economic down turn because of things like global pandemics and other macro economic events like the conflict in the Ukraine. Yet, this has barely impacted the growth of the EV market.

The article is rehashing the myth spread by traditional car manufacturers that the reason they are selling so few EVs is that nobody wants EVs. Which is patently false. More people bought EVs last year than any year before. Just not from them.

The actual reason they are producing so few EVs is that they are struggling to produce them cost effectively. There is no demand problem if they price them right. But if they do that, they actually loose money on the few EVs that they do produce. The reasons for all this are complicated and relate to their outdated manufacturing and supply lines that are optimized for their now obsolete ICE vehicles. They can build EVs but they just aren't very good at it yet. Too many parts. Too many suppliers. Too slow to assemble them. Lots of supply chain issues to source batteries, chips. Lots of issues with software. Etc. They are basically about 5-8 years behind technically.

Tesla, BYD, and others don't have these issues because they built their EV manufacturing from scratch and have been optimizing how that works for the last ten years. Tesla became profitable about six years ago (and ridiculously so). BYD has been growing in China and started expanding internationally only recently. Both are profitable and rapidly growing market share. And they are now able to produce vehicles much more cheaply and are waging a price war that pushes prices down for everyone else too.

And its about to get worse as they are getting ready to mass produce cheap (<~25K$) EVs by the millions. All the signs are that 1) this is actually happening in the next 2-3 years 2) there are exactly zero signs of demand challenges whatsoever for any of those vehicles 3) this will start decimating the market for traditional ICE vehicles and 4) This will continue relentlessly beyond 2026 until there's nothing left of that market; probably by the mid to late 2030s or so.

So, yes the article, and the site it's on are not great. To put it mildly.

Finally, some sense. Thanks for taking the time to summarize this.

Fun side note... 90% of the DoorDash delivery drivers I see are driving a Prius, because the cost of ownership is lower.

That $25k Tesla is going to eat Toyota's lunch and every one of these delivery drivers is going to be financing one.

That's very anecdotal evidence you are using. In my area that number is nowhere near 90%, maybe not even 20%

Food delivery drivers in our area are from what I've noticed mostly using scooters. Because in traffic they can get one where in half the time; not to mention costing less to own and operate then even a Prius.

That said when my partner and I see a Prius it's synonymous with Uber i.e. that Uber just cut me up.

I have noticed that the MG5 is making in roads though as the electric taxi of choice.

>Tesla, BYD, and others don't have these issues because they built their EV manufacturing from scratch and have been optimizing how that works for the last ten years.

The fact that Tesla and BYD don't have large, entrenched, auto unions to deal with is the biggest factor in keeping costs low.

Where can I learn more about this?

Try Google. Refer to quarterly reports by mentioned companies. There's also some fun comments from the likes of CEOs of VW and other companies commenting on the undisputed lead in manufacturing that Tesla has over them. VW actually used this as a reason to motivate some recent layoff rounds. There are lots of other reports.

I Googled and didn't find any references making a correlation/causation between auto unions and Tesla/BYD.

That's a poster's opinion, would love to see sources for basing that opinion.

It's a fact that the large automaker unions like UAW are not present in Tesla operations. It's also a fact that BYD has no North American operations and obviously UAW doesn't operate in China.

Do you think the presence of UAW makes a car manufacturer more or less cost efficient?

You’re describing correlation, not causation.

The parent asked for a correlation.

Yes, they are facts but I'd like to see something with more substance than just an opinion based on implications.

From Wikipedia - Tesla is paying below-industry salaries.

>Despite allegations of high injury rates, long hours, and below-industry pay, efforts to unionize the workforce have been largely unsuccessful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_and_unions

Analysis of recent UAW strike.

>This is all "a potential nightmare situation for GM and Ford," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to clients this month. Any threat to supply would also inevitably diminish year-end production and inventory, chipping away at holiday season deals.

>Tesla, which does not use union labor, is situated to benefit from any work stoppage at competitors, especially at a time when the industry is pushing harder into electric vehicles, Ives said.

>"Tesla does not face similar issues which speaks to the complexity both GM and Ford face going up against the EV leader Tesla, while trying to satisfy rising union demands," Ives said. "If a strike happens then ultimately production and the EV roadmap could be pushed out into 2024 and delays would be on the horizon at this crucial period for GM, Ford, and Stellantis."

https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-gm-ford-nightmare...

Sure, if you don't care about your fellow man, everything can be cheap. That's how we got Nike, H&M, C&A, etc.

GM produced the first modern EV, then recalled and scrapped them all. Nissan was far ahead of Tesla (on sales) with the Leaf.

Both could have easily won the race if they had tried, with the massive financial instruments they had availability, compared to tiny Tesla. Instead, they kept them as compliance cars because they 'had' to and continued to push for larger gas guzzling models with more profit.

I'm not pro-union, but that's the dumbest thing I've heard this year.

I guess the financial analysts saying similar things are also dumb?

>Tesla, which does not use union labor, is situated to benefit from any work stoppage at competitors, especially at a time when the industry is pushing harder into electric vehicles, Ives said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-gm-ford-nightmare...

We're not in a major economic downturn.

IDK who's downvoting you. We've been in "Schrodinger's recession" for the last 3 years. Everybody has been accurately predicting the other shoe falling every single day while SPY is breaking records and the outlook on inflation looks like a successful soft landing.

lose*

Business Insider is blogspam. Pretty much anyone can sign up to write, and their primary goal is to get clicks not win Pulitzers. And they are immensely successful at it considering how consistently they show up on places like HN despite having no content of value. Forbes is in the same bucket.

Business Insider and Forbes are in my Google search results blocklist for that reason. There is no quality content on those websites.

This article is uniquely terrible.

"When automakers pivoted to EVs, they focused on the kinds of cars that were already popular — which meant a flood of big electrified SUVs and trucks. But massive-bodied EVs don't make much sense. Larger EVs require bigger batteries, which require more raw materials to manufacture, which requires producers to beef up their environmentally destructive mining operations. While bigger batteries allow drivers to travel farther between charges, they also make the cars heavier, more dangerous, more expensive, and worse for the planet."

WTF does the author think the ICE alternative is going to do better instead? Just as dangerous, even worse for the planet. You want to put in a paragraph in your EV article about how people are arms-race and status-seeking into bigger cars, fine, blame people for that. Don't blame EV's when this is what people want from autos anyway and of course it's easier for a new market entrant to get its foot in the door with the higher margin products. Every Model Y that isn't sold is a RAV4 guzzling 10,000 gallons of gasoline over its life.

Niedermeyer is a pathetic member/leader of “TSLAQ”, a group of people that think all of Tesla sales are fake, that Tesla is a large scale financial fraud like Madoff, and other completely insane theories. He has made it his full time job (literally) to disparage Tesla and other EV manufacturers.

Running the headline "Fewer people are buying electric cars" and then conceding that EV sales are rising at the start of the 3rd paragraph is embarrassing for the author Paris Marx and I hope he feels ashamed.

He’s probably just looking at his royalty cheque.

Am I reading too much into the article criticizing large EV's right after a certain large EV becomes available?

The point of the article is that rising EV sales, even at 87% in Norway (which yields only 20% EVs on the road), is not enough to fix the environmental problems of car driving. TFA talks about the need to end the car-size arms-race and the need for viable alternatives to car transportation as necessary for actually addressing the issues EV tax incentives are meant to tackle.

Agreed the title is useless, but I found the analysis insightful.

That observation is completely pointless. Yes, even at 100% adoption it will take a long time to replace the whole fleet of cars, does that mean we shouldn't be doing it? Just the fact they bring this up shows they have an agenda.

Tesla is also recognizing this fact and it's one reason they're pushing for robotaxis, because robotaxis can increase utilization by 5x, the same as selling 5x as many cars.

It is not a useless observation. Of course there is an "agenda" (strange word choice for "thesis" or "point"). Like I said, the point in the article is that there needs to be alternatives to car ownership and car-centric development to achieve environmental goals, and subsidizing purchases of EVs is not going to do that.

Taxis might help a bit, but I would want to see data or modeling on impacts for that.

It's strange you start out with "this observation is pointless" and then follow up with an example of a company making big investments and strategic changes based on "this fact". Perhaps it's not pointless after all?

lol, I was just about to read the article to see if they were lying. Thanks for saving me the time.

Growth in 2022 was wildly high. Model launches this year have been slow. Growth shockingly fit with product launches.

But instead we get weird headlines.

Dumb or bought by corporate interests?

In the EU we are constantly being fed this kind of drivel by journalists that echo the Volkswagen group's usual arguments almost verbatim, I don't think it's just chance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com