IIf you’re an environmentalist, the cancellation of all of its electric cars probably feels like a betrayal by Honda. It’s the “Earth Dreams” company. Honda was supposed to be the chosen one. I understand that feeling. You’re wrong, but I understand it.
I spent most of yesterday in a room with fellow journalists and auto industry analysts listening to an electric car company, Lucid, talk about its potential future. This was a company that’s gotten billions of dollars in investment, mostly from Saudi Arabia, and its hope was that it would be cash flow positive by the end of the decade. Lucid is, from a vehicle engineering standpoint, the most advanced electric carmaker in the world, and it’s going to need years to just start seeing a return on that investment.
What journalists were saying in the room, and online, was that what happened at Honda was terrible. An awful decision. Also, pretty much everyone agreed, the right decision. Honda wasn’t going to make any money on those cars, and so its $15 billion got added to the other write-downs, which now reaches above $70 billion in EV-related losses.
The Morning Dump today is going to focus on hybrids, EVs, and maybe where this is all going.
EV Registrations Fall In The US As Hybrids Rise
One way to make people healthier, from a diet perspective, would be to get rid of all the Burger Kings and replace them with Erewhons–the fancy and expensive organic grocery stores. That probably won’t work for most people. It doesn’t mean you get rid of organic grocery stores or stop building more, but perhaps there’s something to be gained by just making Burger King a little bit healthier.
This is how I feel about hybrids.
When I say that the 2020s are the “Decade of the Hybrid” I think there’s a tendency by irregular readers to assume I’m anti-EV and I have to first explain that I’m not. I think most people would find an electric vehicle a better commuter option than their current gas or even hybrid car, assuming they have access to home-charging. I also understand that the net-positive impact of more EVs far outweighs any environmental cost of their production over the lifespan of the vehicle.
My most controversial take is that the push for more electric cars is, itself, a kind of giving up on the real answer: higher density development. Simply replacing gas-powered cars with electric ones doesn’t do anything to reduce the number of miles driven. I always come back to this, but Los Angeles is basically twice as dense, population-wise, as Houston. This means that, in Houston, it takes twice as much energy to pick up the trash or deliver pizzas. Replacing pizza delivery vehicles and garbage trucks with EV equivalents is good, but in some ways it’s a half-measure. If we really cared about changing the environment, we as a society would put a lot more effort into fixing density and improving public transportation.
There’s a joke that people from the suburbs love cruises so much because it gives them a taste of what it’s like to live in a walkable city that doesn’t require cars, and that’s basically true. It’s nice! Dense places can be efficient, can promote community, and cities not oriented around cars are places with fewer car-related deaths.
It doesn’t mean that switching cars to electricity is bad. If you look at Europe, a fairly dense place already, as of 2019 about 25% of the continent’s total CO2 emission came from road transportation, and road cars made up 60.6% of emissions of that number. If you look at Norway, the only large country that sells almost entirely electric vehicles, even as of the end of 2024, 68% of the cars on the road were gas-powered. The next closes country is Iceland, at 18%, and then Denmark at 17%. Even in the most pro-EV countries, the transition is painfully slow.
The shortcoming of the pro-EV argument is that it assumes society isn’t going to be motivated enough to change the way it lives slowly and carefully over time, but will just be motivated enough to change its cars immediately.
What the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden Administration proposed was basically a moon shot. A pull-out-the-stops attempt to get industry to switch to electrification. It didn’t work. Even before the new White House and US Congress killed the plan, it was falling apart because the demand wasn’t there.
If the assumption is that people won’t change their habits, then the better option is: Electric cars for some, hybrids for almost everyone else. The math gets complicated, so I’ll approach it from an extreme example. The Ford F-Series, broadly construed, is the most popular vehicle in America and Ford sold more than 800,000 of those last year. These are vehicles that presumably get driven a lot, as many of them are work trucks. The impact of improving the fuel economy average of an F-Series by 1 MPG is going to be way greater than, say, 15,000 Escape Hybrid buyers being pushed into Mach-Es.
Toyota has this ratio its engineers developed, which is that the raw battery material needed to make a single electric car is the equivalent of making six plug-in hybrids or 90 regular hybrids. That’s basically what Honda is doing.
Imagine if at least some of the $70 billion that is being written off to develop EVs had gone to more hybrid development. Would the net environmental impact have been faster and outpaced switching a small percentage of buyers to EVs? The problem with the switch to electric cars is that it requires all of society to move as one, in the same direction, for a long period of time. This is enormously expensive, and the politics of it aren’t great. [Ed Note: Two years ago I Wrote “America Focusing On Electric Cars And Not Plug-In Hybrids Was A Huge Mistake.” I stand by that. -DT]
Hybrids no longer seem to carry that same political charge. They require no change in behavior. They’re not that much more expensive and, in an environment where gas prices might rise a lot, the economics start to make a lot of sense.
That’s where most drivers seem to be. In the absence of tax credits, EV sales dropped off in the United States to just 5.1% share of the light vehicle market according to S&P Global Mobility, via Automotive News, down from 8.3% of the market last January.
Sales are now mostly Tesla Model Ys and everyone else, with Cadillac as the #2 brand:
Cadillac, at No. 2 among EV makers, grew its registrations by 8.1 percent in January to 3,189 with its expanded portfolio. The Vistiq three-row crossover had 737 registrations versus none a year earlier. The Lyriq midsize crossover fell 47 percent to 1,040 registrations.
Cadillac’s EV share rose 2.4 percentage points in January from a year earlier, to 5.3 percent, the data showed.
Remember when everyone was going to swap F-150s for Cybertrucks? The Tesla truck only managed to sell 1,458 units, compared to 47,981 F-Series trucks.
Ok, so that’s the United States. What about China, a place where the government has more ability to push the population in a single direction.
Even Chinese Consumers Are Embracing Hybrids
Would you believe that Volkswagen and Toyota, via joint ventures, were the two biggest automakers in China in February? That’s what happened, with Geely coming in third and BYD falling to fourth place.
What’s going on here? I’ll let Reuters explain:
The legacy automakers’ comeback in the market where they have been struggling to catch up with local rivals in EVs comes as purchase tax exemptions on electric cars expire and Beijing scales back subsidies for trading in EVs.
As subsidies fade, hybrid EVs that Toyota specialises in were shown to have steered some consumers away from PHEVs, said Cui Dongshu, secretary-general at CPCA.
Local automakers betting on budget electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles take the biggest hits from the curtailed incentives.
BYD, which unseated VW as the biggest carmaker in China by sales in 2024 and held onto the crown last year, fell to fourth place with 7.1% market share in the January-February period when its overall sales posted the biggest drop since the pandemic.
As CNEVPost points out, retail sales of what China calls NEVs (electric vehicles + hybrids + fuel cell cars) dropped 32% year-over-year. In China, where infrastructure is better and EVs are cheaper, consumers still need support to buy cars.
The Honda Prologue Is Probably Dead, Too
Honda had already let slip, via financial reporting, that it was going to be cutting back on Honda Prologue production. It sort of made sense, given that GM was building the Prologue for the company and Honda had already decided to kill its Acura ZDX sibling.
Now Automotive News thinks the Prologue is just dead, dead:
Honda is expected to pull the plug on its sole electric vehicle in the U.S., the Prologue, after the current production run ends in December.
The automaker isn’t planning a second generation of the midsize crossover, which General Motors builds for Honda on a shared EV platform, according to industry forecaster AutoForecast Solutions.
A Honda spokesperson declined to comment on future product plans but said the Prologue remains in the lineup.
The Prologue will only remain in the lineup because they’re selling so slowly and, therefore, Honda has a bunch of them.
Is This All Very Shortsighted?
The country is at War with Iran in order to pursue unclear objectives. When this ends and where it’s all going is anyone’s guess, but what’s clear is that there’s at least going to be a temporary increase in gasoline prices. As you can see in the graph above from AAA, this is the time of year when gas prices usually go up, though not at this extreme rate.
It does feel like it would be a great time to have a lot of electric cars, right? Or at least more hybrids. The problem for automakers is, historically, a prolonged period of gas swings usually mean that people stop buying cars altogether.
In six past instances of oil crises, auto sales dropped by more than 10% of average sales. Three of those times, they plunged by 40% or more of average sales, according to Anderson Economic Group.
The group notes that it is impossible to predict what might ultimately happen as a result of the war in Iran, but past episodes that involved wars and oil embargoes had significant effects on U.S. auto sales.
“History shows that Americans cut back sharply on buying cars when wars, invasions, and oil embargoes occur,” Patrick Anderson, CEO of Anderson Economic Group, said in a statement. “While we don’t know how long this war will last or what the effects will be, at least six times since the 1970s, an event such as this has caused a sharp drop in auto sales.”
People now have the option to buy a car that’s way more efficient, which wasn’t necessarily true in the past. Maybe that’ll help.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
If there’s an album that feels more like the pre-GFC malaise of the late 2000s than The Postal Service’s “Give Up” I don’t know it. Please fish your iPod out of the basement and put on “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.”
The Big Question
Are you taking a spring holiday? Are you driving? Are you starting to be impacted by fuel prices?
Top graphic image: Acura
“the cancelation of all of it’s electric cars by Honda”
I am not a fan of this phrasing, because that’s only for the US. A story that’s supposed to be as global as a Morning Dump should really make this clear.
Shopping for an EV reminds me too much of buying a smartphone. Those go obsolete every four years, so imagine my reluctance to spend $50k on one.
The veil of green-washing seems to finally start to get pulled back. Peo
I am all for helping mother Earth as much as possible, but some of the eco pushes the last few years are really stupid. I’m not anti-EV but I also have zero delusion that even if we all went EV tomorrow, it’s not going to make our planet an eco paradise.
Good thing that was never the promise.
And that promise was??
Painting cars as the silver bullet against ecological disaster has always been utter bullshit. ALL forms of transportation combined represent less than 1/4 of worldwide CO2 emissions. Of that, cars and light trucks are about 1/3. That means globally car and light trucks represent less than 10% of emissions.
10% is a goddamn joke for how much effort and fanfare and demonizing cars and the industry has gotten. All while leaving some of the biggest issues and industries mostly untouched.
Folks are sick of this green-washing. Told to use nasty paper straws and waste time recycling even though most of those recyclables end up in the same place as regular trash. All this BS while massive corporations have an endless thirst for energy to feed their AI models and oil field fires in the middle east are releasing year’s worth of emissions into the air in just a few days.
Oh, but please switch to EVs to SaVe ThE PlAnEt.
Some relevant reading with rare, objective analysis:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/10/10/20904213/climate-change-steel-cement-industrial-heat-hydrogen-ccs
Great article!! Thanks for linking! And as to Matt’s headline … not sure how many people thought EVs were going to save us.
But in terms of a concrete (sorry) step we little people can actually take, in our own spheres of influence, moving away from burning gasoline for personal transport is relatively easy and does make a real difference as to our own choices on how we use or don’t use carbon. And not driving at all when we can, great too! It is a small bit of world carbon emissions. But where we are, born into a particular society that has developed as it has, making that choice is significant. Maybe equally impactful to deciding to live in a modest sized house and choosing to not redo the kitchen/bath/whatever just for the hell of it. Much more impactful than, say, composting or recycling or volunteering to pick up trash, etc. Which are still great things to do!
For sure, those in positions to make decisions about whether to pour a bunch of new concrete, or use a bunch of new steel, other metals, or glass, or consume a lot of other industrial things generally, can keep much more carbon out of the atmosphere by making intentional and wise choices.
Likewise with many other sources of carbon emissions.
The existence and continued development (no, really. It hasn’t all stopped, just the “Tesla did it and became a meme stock, so now we will too” players are out) of electric vehicles is a good thing. People who can and will serve as early adopters is a good thing as well. It’s part of the natural development of technologies and industries.
With that said, as far as steps the little people can take, I respectfully disagree. Reducing a 6-7% slice of the carbon pie by half is not a goal worth making the second biggest expense of every household – an expense already so high that 90% of the population of the richest nation on earth can only afford to buy used – even bigger. The rest of that household’s lifestyle choices are not “equally impactful”, they are quite literally an order of magnitude more impactful, but reducing consumption does not make the elongated muskrat or any of the other owners of our consumer driven economy richer, so we will continue to be told to buy our way out of carbon guilt.
Roughly 80% of energy-sourced GHG emissions come from stationary sources, requiring no batteries to electrify. Some of them are, as described in that article, difficult to electrify, but the biggest barrier to most is that they require capital expenditures that don’t increase profit, rather than payments from consumers that ARE profit. Even if only half can be decarbonized, that’s still more than an order of magnitude greater benefit than the theoretical maximum returned by replacing every consumer vehicle on the planet (not just new sales, ALL of them) with a BEV at the grid’s current carbon intensity. Make all the electricity carbon-free and you’ve still only saved 7%.
How much money is left for the other 93%?
As to your second paragraph, I think it is very much worth it! Yeah, rich USA, people being people still live their lives on the edge, yeah, not everyone (very much myself included) can or will every buy new cars, cars are expensive – I know! Second biggest expense for many people!
But my whole point is that it is not to save the world, because it is not going to, and truly, no rational person ever thought that it would, again per Matt’s clever headline, “save us.” It is for the same reasons I have solar on my house that cover more than 100% of the electricity that I use: I’ve personally made a small financial sacrifice to know that I’m covering my household’s electricity usage with solar power. Yep, there are a million arguments as to why this is foolish, Quixotic, whatever, and that’s OK.
Same reason I’m moving my own household gas appliances to electric as they fail.
And same reason I will move over to an EV when our cars are used up. It is a choice I can make, and it is better. EVs use less energy to go the same distance, because they waste less energy to heat losses. Everyone’s use case is different but just generally looking at pie charts of average American carbon footprints, the biggest things we have control over are pretty much how we effect transportation, how much stuff we buy, how our electricity is produced, and how much meat we eat.
Big global industry is not something I can control directly, nor are wars or space exploration or or or. But our lives are mere cosmic milliseconds. I will enjoy that tiny blip much more, being a human as I am, if I feel like I’m doing my part, and, based on data, I am taking real action to change what I can about the life that I find myself in.
Your mileage will certainly vary. One SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch releases roughly as much carbon as I’ll probably churn through in my entire, American, super-carbon-heavy life. It is good to be aware of. Some folks may move their lives to, I don’t know, Nepal, because they think that’s even better and they can do it. Some folks won’t really even think about it because hey, they are just getting by. Some folks may become vegetarians once they get into the weeks on the whole meat thing. Some will make it big in business or politics and have more impact than hundreds of millions of individual choices ever could. I don’t think anyone is wrong, including you! But I do think that perspective is important, we were plopped down here, we’ll be here for a tiny flash, then we’ll be gone. So doing what we can has value, if only to ourselves. As is the case with so much in life.
Forcing us to drive less is the answer. 10% is an enormous chunk and it cannot be ignored; also, vehicle emissions impact differently since they are low to the ground and typically in the vicinity of people. FWIW, I work with buildings and the push to lower greenhouse emissions is just as severe in my field. I do not know what is happening in farming, shipping, manufacturing but hopefully there is a similar push across the board.
So you combined 2 things with which I have a fair amount of experience. You making fast food healthier would be a good thing, and shifting delivery drivers to electric cars would be a good thing.
I’ll start with the food. They tried that. There was a big push in the late 90s and early 2000s to make fast food healthier. Fast food started pushing healthier options. Guess what – they were all a flop. They cost more, and didn’t taste as good. So sales went down. One pizza chain even had to make a big announcement that their food didn’t taste as good as it used to, and they were going to do better. Low fat was the reason it didn’t taste as good. Sales declined. Now in both cases you can make the argument that people eating less fast food might be better for them, but it also put people out of work.
I’m a pizza delivery driver. Why electric cars don’t work as well for both the business and the individual: So the food delivery industry is characterized by random levels of business, and there is definitely a peak time of ordering every day. So when we are at out busiest, we sometimes need 15 drivers. At opening and late at night we only need 1-2. So if the owners start providing electric vehicles for us to drive, then then need 15 to handle the rush, but most of the day 10+ will be sitting around doing nothing. That’s a lot of investment to have sitting around doing nothing, plus you need a bunch of charging stations to keep them charged, or someone has to play car roulette to cycle them through the chargers.
So that’s why most delivery places the driver owns the car – so the owner doesn’t have to invest in a fleet that sits around, he ‘rents’ the car from the driver and pays mileage for it’s use. Drivers tend to be younger people, driving cheap cars. They can’t afford an expensive electric car, and frequently don’t have a place to charge said vehicle. Many deliverers in medium and large cities actually live farther away and commute into the city to work where they make more money. The benefit to the driver is (a) they get some help with paying the expenses of operating a vehicle and (b) they get to drive their own car that they choose to work.
Our owner did force 2 electric vehicles on another store, with plans to expand that to all stores. The expansion never happened, as it didn’t wind up being any cheaper for the owner. The disadvantage to the driver of using one of the electric cars was you didn’t get accustomed to the vehicle (familiarity really helps with speed of delivery, like knowing where your pen is, etc.) you didn’t get the same vehicle every time. They are stripper models (uncomfortable seats, poor radio,) and you are audio and video monitored the entire time you are driving (you probably don’t like being watched continually while you work.) Also you weren’t assured of either getting the vehicle or not, so you still had to have your own car, with the chance of not getting a mileage contribution on random days (they had to force 2 drivers to use the company car every day.)
Also there is a bit of unfairness associated with the electric cars. Runs are dispatched by who has been inside the store the longest. It’s fair, and rewards hustle. Drivers of the company cars, however, basically get a fast pass. If they are in the store, they are always up first. This breeds resentment with the other drivers, and makes it harder to plan your run, as you know at any time a company car driver could come in and upset the routing. I’ll throw in we used to have one ICE car at each store for emergency use (say if your car broke down while at work) but they didn’t affect the routing.
You might ask yourself why don’t you get electric cars for the drivers who work the longest? (the openers and the closers) Because you don’t want to piss them off. They are generally the most reliable workers you have. They have been working there the longest, and already have a delivery vehicle. They don’t want to share a vehicle, again generally a stripper model and lose out on mileage pay. They are pretty good at their jobs, and will have no problem getting a job somewhere else doing the same thing.
So range is also an issue, given that you will work a random amount of time, can’t charge in between deliveries and need to get home at night. Frequently the busiest days are days with bad weather, too. When I bought my first hybrid, I did the math on getting a cheaper electric car (a Bolt to be specific.) I just couldn’t chance the range issue. I could only afford a small size EV, and those had ranges around 200 miles at best. Even at a 250 range, add in cold weather and some battery degradation and I’m not guaranteed to make it home at 3-4am every night. Last thing I want to do is run out of range on a busy snowy night and have to find a place to charge in order to get home – or worse yet have to stop delivering.
Now I initially started with a hybrid, it was totaled in 2024, and I got a PHEV. Truthfully, had it not been for the tax credit I would have just gotten another hybrid. I can see the benefit of a plug in to someone with a different usage pattern than me, but it’s really just a very heavy range extender to me, I’d rather have 2 extra gallons of fuel capacity and a regular hybrid. But the hybrids have significantly lowered my cost of operation compared to a ICE.
Gee, really? Because I thought going all-in on tackling those 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions (the ones that come from passenger cars) would really do the trick in saving the environment.
I don’t hate electric cars at all (I’d jump at the opportunity to convert my Renault 4 if it was affordable). But we were sold an electric transition that was nothing but greenwashing of some of the most environmentally harmful industries on Earth. If curbing emissions from ICE engines was really the point, we would’ve started decades ago with diesel-electric semi-trucks with a pantograph, and a catenary above the slowest lane in all highways, so semis could run on electric power for long stretches of road, and use the ICE only to overtake and outside highways. We’re talking of technology we’ve been perfecting since the late 19th century for trains and trams. There have been some pilot programs in Germany where this is used to charge batteries, but we could have been using this for actual propulsion for decades.
So yeah, I’m all for electric cars for those who want/can afford them. But I’m 100% against phasing out ICEs in passanger cars before we address other sources of emissions.
ah ! someone who THINKS !
I’m not surprised “everybody go all EV at once” didn’t work. I am a bit surprised there are still as many new ICE models that are not enthusiast cars. Like, I know the push was EVs over PHEVs for a while (and I did and still do agree with David’s attitude on that), but it was also obvious PZEVs weren’t going anywhere. Even without the Toyota ratio, I did expect a natural transition to “default mode is hybrid” across the board to be further by now.
Here we DD the EVs to keep cash in our wallets, then we do serious work and play with the ICE car and truck. Gas prices spiked here and we didn’t notice because it doesn’t affect the bulk of what we do every day. To each their own!
I’m sorry but for the majority of people EVs are not practical yet. Tax incentives were basically propping up an entire industry built on vaporware and had the disastrous side effect of making Elon the richest man in the world. The stock market, in its infinite wisdom, made it untenable for automakers NOT to have massive electrification plans whether it made sense or not in the long run. All that matters is winning the next quarter right? Now imagine an alternate future where we have consumers tax credits for hybrids that got 50+ mpg. We’d lower emissions and oil dependence without tricking people into over-priced rolling “self driving” computers that lose 70% of their value in 5 years.
Hybrids and EVs are both transitional technology. The real answer lies elsewhere, and will probably include public transportation of some sort, and denser living. My guess is climate change force Americans to change long before the price of gas or the government does.
Hybrids are by definition a transitional technology. I really don’t understand why the Autopian keeps beating the “hybrids are the answer” drum. It’s just wrong, or at least short sighted. I’m no EV stan. Don’t own one, and don’t foresee owning one any time soon. But as an engineer, it’s pretty clear EVs are the next step. Not the destination, per se (who knows where that ultimately ends up), but ICE has a foot in the grave. This pause for idiocracy is temporary.
I’m fully on board that every new ICE should really be a hybrid by now. If you think about it, a conventional hybrid is simply the most efficient way to transfer ICE power into forward momentum. Electric planetary gearboxes are proven technology, and the best ‘transmission’ an ICE car can have.
That out of the way, I agree with you. This website’s obsession with EREVs in particular is baffling. While they will find a niche with wealthy lifestyle buyers, I can’t wait for the $100,000 Ram and Scout EREVs to be dead on arrival. I guarantee the future of propulsion won’t be ultra-expensive vehicles with fully redundant ICE AND battery-powered drivetrains.
Ultimately this website is co-founded by the guy who owns the Galpin Motors dealer group, so it shouldn’t be a surprise editorial ultimately falls in line to support the status quo.
The roll out of the next generation of battery tech feels slow, but it is coming. We are probably only another model cycle away from next generation tech. Even cynical, conservative Toyota has started to take EVs seriously, having rolled out a convincing lineup of sub, compact and medium sized electric crossovers, well into the second Trump presidency.
Honda is playing themselves by not putting some effort into their own ground-up, mainstream EV, through its possible they may have wasted their chance by rebranding GM products through the Biden admin. Toyota bit the bullet with their mediocre BZ4X, now they are in a good spot with legitimately compelling second-generation products.
I am also not an EV fanatic, I live rural Ontario and drive a gas pickup truck. My next car will be an EV though. It’s not that hard to see what is happening in the world and get a glimpse of where things are headed.
I know it’s been said before, but gonna yell at the clouds anyway. Commercial vehicles converted to electric still provide the same user experience – buses, garbage trucks, etc. But almost all of my personal vehicle EV choice options require some absurd combination of electric door handles, powered glove boxes, massively different UIs for basic car functions, and other user experience requirements that are unnecessary for the sake of being different. If the employees of our waste management and public transportation services had to hit six buttons that are three layers deep on their dashboard tablet to compact the trash or open the bus door, we’d all be standing in the streets for days waiting for a ride in the midst of piles of rotting garbage. Personal EVs should be evolutionary, not revolutionary. The latter was tried and now the industry is soured, unfortunately.
I think it made sense to use idiotic and pointless but new-looking tech when companies were chasing early adopters – don’t know why the manufacturers still think is the way to go.
PHEVs were always the best way to reduce gas consumption given the average number of miles people drive each day.I love the idea of an EV but I drive from MA to the Northeast Kingdom of VT on the regular and don’t want to deal with the hassle of charging along the way… the route north doesn’t have good charging options. But if I had a PHEV, I would be all electric most days, except for when I drive north. I imagine that the majority of drivers are like me…
(Full disclosure I have 2 fulls EVs and 1 PHEV)
The government flubbed the EV push just like they did 30 years ago when CARB mandated EVs because GM was being innovative and actually built one that could get nearly 100 miles. This time around Tesla showed they could get over 200 miles and GM built the Volt so they did it again, settings mandates that by 2035 some states will ban gas cars, making it political. Just like hybrids 20 years ago when celebrities and the government were pushing them and getting ridiculed by South Park.
The sad thing is other incentives were working, emission credits(and Paypal/SpaceX money) basically built Tesla, high priced competitors to Tesla like Porsche/Jaguar/Rivian were coming along, but due to mandates and incentives everybody made crappy compliance EVs. The Nissan Leaf is a poster child for failing batteries, public garages actually posted signs saying you couldn’t park your Bolt EV there as they could catch fire, these did not help things.
Part of the issue, to the point about density, is America is constantly in a race with Europe of all places. The combined size of the European Union and UK, the Jones’s we keep trying to keep up with, is half the size of the US, with more people, so twice as dense, with much better public transit systems, and mandated charging infrastructure being built out, not just Tesla, they are so far ahead of us in charging. Germany alone has nearly 50,000 dc fast charging stations, all of the US only 65k, as of last year and 18k of those were added last year due to the IRA. Also Europe is at $8 a gallon gas prices. So for them, small commuter EVs as a last mile solution works so much better.
The politicians in the US go “oh, we should do that too!” But without adding any infrastructure, without a lot of mass transit, and where we do have mass transit there isn’t a lot of, if any, public or at home charging. Also electricity prices in places like California make EV charging rival gas prices, for the efficient ones at home! Never mind fast charging your F150 lightning, that will cost more than just filling up a regular F150!
So everybody stepping back in the US from EVs makes sense, the infrastructure is building out, and with individual incentives going away the truly good, profitable EVs should float to the top.
Although, the used market is gonna have a field day the next few years with the Prologues and 1st gen Solterras and ID.4s and what not, so that will probably open some people’s eyes as they get affordable and the less hardcore skeptics start considering them.
Also a note on the Iran conflict, with fracking/shale oil, once oil prices hit a certain point that becomes profitable and fires up, so that seems to cap the max we pay for gas, it may spike in the short term but don’t think we’ll see the $8 a gallon that Europe sees, and Europe will probably see a much bigger spike, increasing their EV adoption even more.
Honestly such a well written comment I hardly have words.
You brought in more context and answered more question than the article did and somehow did it in less words.
Thanks, what frustrates me about it is, growing up in the 80s I’ve always thought futuristic vehicles were cool, Tron lightcycles and flying Deloreons and Wraiths and what not. I’m still hoping things turn around and we start getting the cool designs we’ve been shown, the Hyundai Vision N 74, Mazda Iconic SPs, instead of the Dodge Chargers that can’t do burnouts or Cybertrucks that glued on panels fall off of that we’ve seen so far. It’s crazy that we started with the EV1 and Tesla Roadster, sporty little coupes, and most EVs are so far from anything close to those now, and those are what got everyone excited.
Every time someone posts about a long-winded comment about EV adoption that forgets just how much oil and gas is subsidized, I just like to remind them that the true price of a gallon on gas should be around $15-$18 a gallon (https://triplepundit.com/2011/increasing-gas-prices-despite-subsidies/). If you multiply that by the ~300 billion gallons of gas that the US alone consumes, that means that all of subsides cost us, the American taxpayers ~4-5 TRILLION dollars.
The problem is the public doesn’t see that and politicians don’t want them to see that as they’re walking around with $3k in their purses for some strange reason.
But for comparable benefit we should be reducing the cost of electricity, I’d love to see a belt of solar panels that spanned the US below the snow line, literally 14-20 hours of fusion powered free electricity every day from FL to CA, subsidize it and regulate how much people are charged for it, I’ll probably never see it in my lifetime but would be nice.
I never seem to hear anyone talk about just how fundamentally American the US approach to EVs has been. Like some kind of environmental absolution, through marketing, that allows us to make bigger, badger, faster, and crab-walkier machines than we really need and feel okay with it.
AKA Greenwashing. Honestly the more you think about the more trapped you get. I gave up and just try to be a good person, there’s really only so much you can do. Eventually you come to the depressing conclusion that negative population growth is the only answer. Enjoy life, be kind, do good things. We have a short time.
May I point out to all the people trying to say hey gas prices are going up to almost half to what they were under Biden but I don’t care I drive an EV, that electricity prices are going up quicker than gas prices?
Gas averaged $3.46 per gallon for the 4 years Biden was president. The absolute maximum was $5.11 after Russia invaded Ukraine.
My EV costs me 3 cents per mile to fuel.
My gas car costs me 15 cents per mile to fuel.
Needless to say we take the EV for most trips. Cheaper and a better driving experience.
I still haven’t understood why no car sites have recognized the fact that EVs aren’t any better for the environment than ICE, and depending on your electricity source worst. Just building them with the toxicity of metals etc destroying the environment more than driving one will cure. The end of life of an EV is only slightly better than the storing of spent nuclear fuel rods if that. Honda isn’t the only auto manufacturer moving away from EVs every car manufacturer is unless it’s production is only EVs. Remember building cars is hard.
The car sites haven’t recognized the “fact” because those aren’t facts. That’s all the same, tired Big Oil propaganda that have been disproven again and again. That doesn’t stop the president’s state-run media mouthpiece from echoing it ad nauseam, though.
The only problem with EV’s is also a big problem with all cars. They are so filled with tech junk that they have become less reliable. And all the sensors make a car more likely to be totaled in an small accident.
Your bit on end of life is very wrong, as there are already companies recycling used lithium batteries that recover about 90% of the material to be reused in making new batteries. Admittedly there are not many EV batteries that have been recycled yet since according to a study done last year only 2.5% of EVs built have had their battery replaced despite the myths that they don’t last more than a few years.
Yes but much like recycling of wind turbines and many other more common and easier to recycle material they are only recycling a small percentage of what is available andit costs more than it returns and their is no market for it in higher numbers
Used wind turbines don’t have any useful materials after they are tossed since they are just hunks of composite plastic, so those are a different story. Battery materials are expensive and very much worth recycling, they just are not at a point yet where it can be very profitable because there is not enough material to process at large scale. Once there are more old EVs out there that need batteries or get scrapped, there will be enough recyclable batteries to make profit.
Oh my EV is saving me from having to directly worry about rising gas prices at the pump.
Short-sighted people everywhere.
Yes today’s gas prices are about 75 cents a gallon over last year and $1 less than two years ago.
Where do you live that electricity prices are not going up twice as fast?
In my neck of the woods (which has the highest electricity prices in the country), everyone with EVs also has solar panels that more than cover their usage. Those solar panels weren’t free, but they do mean electricity price fluctuations matter less day to day.
Where do you live that electricity prices are able to fluctuate like gas prices? Most municipalities are only allowed to update pricing once per year, while gas prices have risen over 30% in less than 2 weeks. My electricity prices have risen 0% since the war in Iran was started.
I love The Postal Service. This is kinda weird, since I’m not a Death Cab For Cutie fan and I generally don’t enjoy electronic music. But there’s just something about the combination of those two elements that keeps me coming back. “This Place Is A Prison” is my favorite track.
Our only car at the moment is a Mach E, so we’re mostly insulated from all the shenanigans going on at the moment. However, my glasses aren’t rose-colored, and I just know this crap will trickle down to my charging expenses somehow. It’s the American Way.
Until it makes financial sense to make more or all EVs, it won’t happen. It’s not about what people want or think they want, but about what companies can do and want to make (profit margins and sales growth as the main focus). All the “muh gas” and “muh green” discussions are, in my opinion, irrelevant.
Never is a very long time. I guarantee that at some point in the future there will be no ICE vehicles. Don’t know if people will outlast them or not.
Anyway, the demand is there, but the supply wasn’t. People who are inclined to buy EVs aren’t looking for gigantic expensive vehicles. If Chinese EVs were on sale here they would sell like hotcakes, or at least like moo shu pancakes. The Fiat EV didn’t sell very well but neither did the gas Fiats.
I agree that a hybrid that has an EV only range of 60 or so miles would be the sweet spot. With $15 gas people would probably plug it in.
What I don’t understand is why EVs are so complicated and overloaded with features. The safety requirements are about the same as for ICE vehicles, but there is a huge swath of complexity that could just go away.
I realize that most of the unit cost of a lot of software features is close to zero, but the reliability and perceived cost of something you don’t actually want is high.
“What I don’t understand is why EVs are so complicated and overloaded with features. The safety requirements are about the same as for ICE vehicles, but there is a huge swath of complexity that could just go away.”
Tesla dood it.
Tesla cool. Everyone said so. Car press. Regular press. Govermint. Big stars. Little stars. Norway.
Tesla cool.
They make cool future kar with big screen, cool hide door handles like Star Trek shizzle and no buttonz.
Cool inside with no stuff but screen. No key fob. Cool. Ton o’ tech.
Govermint must love all Tesla cool cuz they never said nuthin about it being bad. Or dangerous.
Tesla Cool.
All cool kidz drive Tesla.
And all kar makerz want be cool kidz too. Make copycat Tesla type kar.
Coolness abounded.
Oh, people die cuz so much cool they can’t get door open in fire?
Small price to pay for mega cool.
Tesla sales have supposedly dropped (I personally seen any sales totals because I haven’t looked), but some consumers started to boycott Tesla after Elon Musk “sided” with President Trump in the whole DOGE situation. Many of the more Liberal people are quite ticked off about it. I heard today on the radio that none other than Sean Hannity told his listeners that HE bought a new Model S Plaid, in reaction to the Libs “abandoning” Tesla (another reason for the Left to stop buying Musk’s products?)
More liberal people? Don’t you mean the crazy people?
Tesla’s US sales:
2024: 634K
2025: 589K
The drop in Europe was bigger
2024: 326K
2025: 235K
Think first keeping a decent well maintained ICE car on the road is better for the environment than scrapping it and building a new EV.
It depends on how much you drive.
If I have the room to park it, a beater truck to do truck stuff, and a high efficiency car to do car stuff. Plus toys, but they are not about transportation. Last I had a truck I filled it about once a year. Of course that was a Cummins engine ram with a 30 gallon tank.
Buying a used EV or a used ICE is what I’d personally be doing when I need to replace the 16 year old Prius I have now.
The scraping a useable car argument isn’t really a thing. Most get sold over and over , eventually ending up somewhere in Africa or the Mideast.
Well I drive cars until they are underivable, or at least unsellable at which point I give them away to people less picky than I am.
The Fiat 500E also sold poorly because it was a 2 door. Look at all the Uber drivers with Bolts and Leafs.
Look at all the cars with only the driver. I see six lanes of traffic at about 20mph and the 2 or more HOV lanes almost empty at 80mph every day. I think most people don’t know what a Fiat is, and the people inclined to buy a Fiat didn’t want to go to a Dodge dealer.
I don’t think what taxi drivers buy has a lot of relevance.
This. We need more articles on the supply of EVs in the U.S. How many are compelling to consumers and competitive in the market?
This is visible from a mile away and I think it’s a mix of upselling and trying to look tech forward (another form of selling wow). There is no real innovation in motorizing the air vents but they still do it. I think an EV with “locked” software meaning it runs for ever without any obsolescence, plus robust electronics, and the sweet, real advanced hardware they already developed would be a strong seller. But they still seem to think complexity (and LEDs) are desirable and profitable so we may have to wait.
“There is no real innovation in motorizing the air vents but they still do it”
Do it cuz cool!
Do it cuz Tesla Foochure kar do it!
All Foochure kar must be cool!
I can understand the pivot to hybrids vs. EVs for owners accustomed to refueling ICE vehicles. An underrated aspect of the reluctance for laggards to consider EVs is the required change in refueling behavior. A hybrid requires only fewer trips to the gas station, but there’s the psychological pressure to treat EVs like cell phones and always think about and taking the actions to charge them which over time may become an exhausting ritual, even when primary done inside of one’s garage.
Also, over the course of a month, the difference in time between the typically 2-4 predictable trips to a gas station which is often on one’s route versus L1 or L2 charging an EV multiple times per week or even per day is negligible; or at least, any time savings from a single EV plug in/plug out action is eclipsed by an “inconvenience of repetition” for some folks.
Basically, the barrier to convenient and pleasant EV ownership is real estate, and that’s a high barrier. At apartment complexes with chargers, the chargers are often farther from the entrance, or there aren’t enough chargers to guarantee you’ll continue to have a spot. If there are 2 chargers, only 2 of your neighbors need to buy an EV before you have to start playing musical chairs with those spots.
I’m happy to recommend an EV to anyone who has a garage and isn’t addicted to shifting gears
It seems to me, incentives for roof solar would do the most good. The more access to cheap electricity, the more the demand will be to utilize it.
Roof solar and a battery so the power company doesn’t complain about having to buy your excess power when you aren’t home.
They don’t complain, they just pay you pennies on the dollar for the power you do generate.
They used to pay you pennies on the dollar for the power you do generate. Now it’s fractions of pennies, and they tripled the fees for being connected to the grid at all, but also lobbied for it to be illegal to not be connected to the grid of course it is illegal to not be connected to the grid. So it’s nearly impossible to have a $0 bill even if your solar more than covers your usage. NEM 3 is rough.
I regret getting solar on my house. Even with the fat $4,500 rebate. It’s going to take at least 10 years for it to pay for itself, and here I am 2 years in, with two dead panels already.
Sorry to hear that. Any warranty?
I don’t believe there are any major panel manufacturers that don’t have 25-ish year warranties on them.
I’m guessing the warranty doesn’t cover installation of the new panels, only the panel itself.
Rooftop installation when quoted to me labor was half the cost.