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nomel

As with all but a few EV manufactures [1], they were losing money each sale ( >$30k)[2].

[1] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/03/only-four-ev-brands-are-pr...

[2] https://www.theautopian.com/ford-lost-36000-for-every-electr...

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The only two car companies to make any meaningful profit on EVs were founded as EV companies first?

That’s not that surprising. It’s very hard to make elephants dance.

If that remains true it means all these auto companies will be dead in 25 years, or eternally strung along on government support.

If there were no tariffs or other market barriers I get the impression that BYD would bulldoze the entire world and there would be one car maker with >80% of the market.

100% on BYD ... no one can match their current technology and pricing power. And it's possible they still will do that bulldozing, but much more slowly. Even now I'm seeing strong swapping out of Tesla's for BYD's in London.

This video here describes why BYD is so competitive: They have done a splendid job vertically integrating as much as they can to get the price down. This $11,500 EV is an excellent example of how other companies should start to shift their thinking.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg

How much does it sell for in Europe? Does it meet US safety requirements?

Seems like it is sold for around 18,000 Euros. It obviously passed European safety standards, no point in getting homologation certification for the US if it remains tariffed to high hell but if they wanted to I'd assume they can pass US standards as well.

Yeah, the problem is that the tariffs are letting our carmakers just become unproductive, uncompetitive leeches on the American consumer. They're getting lapped by China/BYD.

Once BYD bulldozes the rest of the world, our domestic manufacturers are guaranteed to fail.

They were not losing money on each sale, that's silly. Your article is counting the entire EV R&D budget and extrapolating. For every Lightning they sold, the margins improved. They just did not sell enough of them to make the overall venture profitable.

Well sure, but that's the only possible way to lose money: costs are more than profit from sales. See "profit margin". R&D is a cost that can't be avoided. In this case, that cost was so much more that they're cancelling the program.

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