Detroit is hitting 'pause' on electric cars
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
They only latched on to EVs because of the money everyone was making on them -at the time-.
Now, Model 3s are cheap and the US is putting protectionist measures in play.
To your point, automakers have the challenge also of balancing union agreements. Plants tend to be amortized over decades, contracts for many years, and retooling for will lead to closures of at least some plants.
I call it hubris, because both GM and Ford got rid of their PHEVs and Ford has been playing shenanigans with hybrid models on a global level.
Ford CEO last month on their Q2 2024 investor earnings call [1]:
> Overall, the EV journey has been humbling, but it has forced us to get even more fit as a company, including applying it to our ICE business, and that will pay off long run -- in the long run. I am so happy we scaled 2.5 years ago, and we have the option to incorporate those learnings into our next generation of EVs launching in the coming years. I want to double-click on the software technology and services business. Ford, alongside Rivian and Tesla, are really the only non-Chinese OEMs controlling software across all the vehicle domain.
More about what he actually said about EVs:
> We also have learned a lot about the size of the vehicle. We believe smaller, more affordable vehicles are the way to go for EV and volume. Why? Because the math is completely different than ICE. In ICE, the business we've been in for 120 years, the bigger the vehicle, the higher the margin. But it's exactly the opposite for EVs. The larger the vehicle, the bigger the battery, the more pressure on margin because customers will not pay a premium for those larger batteries.
> The second success factor is matching the cost of the Chinese OEMs in Tesla, especially on affordable EVs. Now when people hear about affordability and they think about small and unaffordable, I'd like to address that now. We are designing a super-efficient platform, leveraging innovation across our product development, supply chain, and manufacturing teams. With no engine or drivetrain, a smaller vehicle can have a much roomier package, actually the interior package of a class above with a small silhouette. That's a big advantage for customers versus ICE. And we're focusing on very differentiated vehicles priced under $40,000 or even $30,000.
Further Down:
> And what we found in that trip and subsequent trips to China is that we have a very competitive battery in CATL, but many of the Chinese players in the lower cost have very affordable batteries, but they don't have the most efficient design outside of the battery on the other EV components And our team, the skunkworks team, we might as well call it a big team now because it's no longer skunkworks, we're betting on them as our affordable platform, they have really designed breakthrough EV components with our own design that we think are better and cheaper.
[1] https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/07/24/fo...
I'm sure this will end well given the US policy of bailing out any large cap company that is no longer fit to compete in the market...