Surprisingly, at earnings this week, several auto execs pulled back on EV targets. Dealers have been warning of slowing EV demand for months.
Auto industry executives admitted lately that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term, there are signs of growing inventory and slowing sales these days.
It is now common to hear auto experts voice fresh unease about the electric car market’s growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk.
GM announced with its quarterly results that it’s abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of next year.
For GM, maybe it will never hit those targets.
The Detroit car company is not alone in this new view of the EV future. Tesla’s Elon Musk warned on a recent earnings call that economic concerns would lead to waning vehicle demand, even for the long-time EV market leader.
On the other side, Mercedes-Benz — which is having to discount its EVs by several thousand dollars just to get them in customers’ hands — is also voicing some complaints.
CFO Harald Wilhelm said on an analyst call: “I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody.”
These electric cars are taking dealers longer to sell compared with their gas counterparts as the next wave of buyers focus on cost, infrastructure challenges, and other things.
Just a few months after dealers have started coming forward to warn of slowing EV demand, manufacturers appear to be catching up to that reality. Ford was the first to fold, after dealers started turning away Mach-E allocations. In July, the company extended its self-imposed deadline to hit annual electric vehicle production of 600,000 by a year, and abandoned a 2026 target to build 2 million EVs.
In scrapping plans with GM to co-develop sub-$30,000 EVs, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe made the following statement:
“After studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV.”
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