EV sales continue to rise, but the last year of headlines falsely stating otherwise would leave you thinking they haven’t. After about full year of these lies, it would be nice for journalists to stop pushing this false narrative that they could find the truth behind by simply looking up a single number for once.
Here’s what’s actually happening: Over the course of the last year or so, sales of battery electric vehicles, while continuing to grow, have posted lower year-over-year percentage growth rates than they had in previous years.
This alone is not particularly remarkable – it is inevitable that any growing product or category will show slower percentage growth rates as sales rise, particularly one that has been growing at such a fast rate for so long.
In some recent years, we’ve even seen year-over-year doublings in EV market share (though one of those was 2020->2021, which was anomalous). To expect improvement at that level perpetually would be close to impossible – after 3 years of doubling market share from 2023’s 18% number, EVs would account for more than 100% of the global automotive market, which cannot happen.
Instead of the perpetual 50% CAGR that had been optimistically expected, we are seeing growth rates this year of ~10% in advanced economies, and higher in economies with lower EV penetration (+40% in “rest of world” beyond US/EU/China). Notably, this ~10% growth rate is higher than the above Norway example, which nobody would consider a “slump” at 94% market share.
It’s also clear that EV sales growth rates are being held back in the short term by Tesla, which has heretofore been the global leader in EV sales. Tesla actually has seen a year-over-year reduction in sales in recent quarters – likely at least partially due to chaotic leadership at the wayward EV leader – as buyers have been drawn to other brands, while most of which have seen significant increases in EV sales.
Thats one possibility, but not the only one. Its possible that the design of the vehicles are too labor intensive so irrespective of scale they will always be unprofitable. We have good indications this may exist for Mach E. It was designed and built very quickly as a “skunkworks” style product to respond to Model Y market dominance (and giant profit margins). Ford used almost exclusively off-the-shelf parts to get it out the door quickly. The consequence to this is lots and lots of labor to use parts designed for another application in a different one. Its all doable and it works to build a product, but potentially at the cost of profitability. At product launch the Mach E was an MSRP of $54,700. Today that same vehicle MSRP is $43,995. Thats a huge amount of margin to give back that would eat up many small production improvements since launch.
Ford was certainly one of the companies claiming they can out-mass-produce Tesla, that they already knew how to build cars at scale with a profit and quality. Was that all FUD?
That makes sense but assumes you stop there. Why would you? They have a vehicle they can sell and it’s been out four years: they need to be well on the way to redesigning it and its factory, rather than pushing back on selling it
Only if it can be profitable now, or if its built into the plan to lose money on EV sales to learn the market and refine the product.
It sounds like Ford is focusing on the short term, and they’re not able to make a profitable EV.