Over 17M EVs sold in 2024 – Record Year | Hacker News Reader

Over 17M EVs sold in 2024 – Record Year

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12 pointstoomuchtodo10 comments

It's late stage of early adoption and BYD and China are doing the heavy lifting. It's safe to say the big 3 are building a bridge to nowhere.

11 million in China, 6.1 million in the rest of the world.

wonder how the cybertruck is doing. I don't think it met their expectations.

Most numbers seem to show that they started strong, but once the initial demand was satisfied and all the pre-orders were cleared, sales have dropped off precipitously. Still seems to be the best selling EV pickup in the US 2024, for what that's worth.

Pre orders were claimed as 1 million or even 2. Sales last year were 40,000 and you can buy one without a wait so most pre-orders were "cleared" by not purchasing the truck. In fact, with a preorder deposit of $250 that would be a payback of nearly a quarter billion.

My deposit was only $100.

Looks like they increased it to 250 in 2024 which is after the 1 or 2 million reservations had been made before delivery started, at the original 100 dollar price.

And yet of course the narrative in most news articles in the past year was that the industry was in crisis and demand was collapsing.

Several things can be true at the same time, depending on what part you look at. In Europe for example EV sales are actually down according to the article, and I think it's fair to say that European car makers and in a bit of crisis.

US car makers will probably be temporarily insulated from the worst shocks thanks to their strong domestic market and lack of competition from Chinese brands. The big question for US EV makers is first what effects will the tariffs have on their supply chain, and if the EV subsides will be rolled back, what effect that will have on the US EV market. The future of US EVs might not be in a crisis, but it is uncertain.

The one thing no one is denying and that the article clearly shows is the Chinese EV makers are going from strength to strength. Not only are they dominating their rapidly growing domestic markets, a market that makes up the majority of global EV sales and most of the growth we are seeing, they are making massive inroads to basically every market other than the US.

So basically if "the industry" is in a crisis or not depends entirely on exactly which industry you are talking about

And it's a feedback loop, because higher EV sales means more demand for batteries, more efficient production of batteries, cheaper EVs and around you go.

Our failure to get on this carousel with domestic battery production infrastructure is going to go down as one of the biggest industrial policy makes of all time.

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