They are simply following the market.
Hybrids have become increasingly popular as the charging infrastructure is still lacklustre in many parts of the world. And that's not a problem that can be solved overnight.
Hybrids have become increasingly popular as the charging infrastructure is still lacklustre in many parts of the world. And that's not a problem that can be solved overnight.
At least we have BYD and Tesla, just gotta scale up faster. Global light vehicle TAM is 90M units/year. 20% of all vehicles sold globally last year were BEVs or PHEVs, onward and upward.
https://fortune.com/2024/06/19/elon-musk-tesla-china-carmake... (“Bank of America tells Detroit’s Big 3 they can’t make money in China and should just leave the hypercompetitive car market ‘as soon as they possibly can’”)
Honestly same goes for EVs, though the BYD stuff is starting to fill that niche quite nicely. And compact + decent range is sort of at odds with itself.
This is badly misinformed. They make the market. When you buy a car, do you have it custom made, or do you select one that actually exists?
That's exactly what happened with SUVs. SUVs didn't happen because people were begging car companies to make them something big, dangerous, and wasteful. They happened because car companies in the US found a legal loophole where they could cut costs by skirting safety and emissions regulations, while simultaneously marking up the product as a premium one. Then they ran ads to tell people SUVs were super safe [for the passengers]. So when people started buying SUVs en masse, that wasn't organic demand, it was the result of a successful national misinformation campaign (because modern SUVs and other "light trucks" are so large you're more likely to just drive over your own child without seeing them than even get in a crash).
I am thinking about getting a third car for the farm if I could get an inexpensive low range EV. If I am only driving to work with it or to go shopping or see a sports game at my Uni I can just it when I get home. If I need to go see a game in a distant city, well, I’ll take one of the gas cars so my son will take the EV and not the Buick to work one morning.
So is global warming. This excuse rang hollow 30 years ago and it still rings hollow today.