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> I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.

You speak as-if they didn't create EVs. It's just that most of the European EV platforms were resounding failures, be it CLAR, CLAR II (BMW), MEA1 & MEA2, (Mercedes), J1 (Porsche), e-tron (Audi), MEB (VW), of these MEB is pretty much the only one that turned around to generate some kind of volume, but that took many years. Sales numbers for all of these are way below predictions, we're not talking about a 50% miss here. I don't know how much a car architecture costs to develop, but I'd wager it is not a cheap endeavor. Between that and the comparatively large number of battery-related EV recalls these projects probably represent double-digit billions of losses for the European car industry. This seems realistic given the widely publicized $20bn Ford EV write-down. So given these enormous sunk costs and yet they're still somewhat investing in EVs doesn't read to me like they're not trying to compete on EVs. If that were the case, they'd just cut their losses, or done so years ago.

That's where all those European battery factories that were announced a couple years ago went: Consumers do not buy EVs anywhere near the expected volume and therefore there is no demand to finance such factories. The handful of batteries needed for the low volumes of EV production are easily sourced from existing factories and the rest is imported from China.

Stellantis/PSA doesn't appear in this story because they never went beyond compliance car EVs (i.e. their "let's stuff a 50 kWh gross battery and the cheapest electric drive we can buy from a supplier into an ICE chassis" approach).

> Consumers do not buy EVs anywhere near the expected volume

OK so the billion Euro question is: why not? Tesla seem to be making adequate sales in Europe. China has passed 50% EVs as new sales. Norway (in Europe, but not the EU) is approaching 100%.

Is it simply price? Of the car, and/or electricity?

The EU was originally proposing to phase out ICE in 2035, which is now less than 10 years away!

> compliance car EVs (i.e. their "let's stuff a 50 kWh gross battery

I had noticed that all the Stellantis EVs have desperately bad range. I guess that's why they're showing up for cheap leasing offers to meet compliance.

But that's what I mean. It's an intentionally half-assed product. Only the recent Renault 5 and VW ID series cars feel like serious market entrants rather than "will this do?"

BYD and Tesla are popular in the UK, but not EU manufacturers. Why? Product? Price?

I think e-tron have some success. As do Renault (and Nissan) despite Gohsn insistence on not building on it (goshn was a very successful manager and finance engineer, but people should understand he destroyed R&D at Nissan, Renault and Alpine, killing any chance at success they had despite their leg up on electric car)

> They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.

“Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand. We need to wait for them to die out to let the stable diffusion guys take over and then we will be number one!”

I know what I said. Engines are an art.

> “Those damn pesky artists still painting by hand.

Long ago hand painters used cadmium yellow. It may be art, but it's also poisonous. Same for Napoleon and his arsenic wallpaper. In the end, same for CO2-emitting engines.

>I know what I said. Engines are an art.

Some engines maybe. Your average 1.5 TFSI is the equivalent of drawing corporate memphis clipart for a paycheck, no one is pouring their passion into that. Maybe not so bad if it gets replaced by an EV/AI.

> Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com"

What is this?

Difficult to find references other than my own memory and this paywalled Economist article: https://www.economist.com/special/1999/09/16/dybcom

Huh. It sounds a bit incoherent and manic, but I think that’s actually what it was, not just the description?

Interesting takeaway is everything on there (smart homes, integrated financial media and trading, etc.) eventually happened, not by GE, except the GE Capital stuff, which wound up a disaster. So the signal to look for in AI is folks deploying levered balance sheets directly to consumers. Which I don’t think we’re directly seeing, outside OpenAI.