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Originally Posted by CamaroRSOnt

First your equating that 1.5% at the world level of sales for EV's, most Camaro's, Mustangs etc. are sold in North America. NA sales are about 19m vehicles in a typical year. Tesla sold 367k vehicles world wide last year, most of those the Model 3 as the S and X model sales declined dramatically. Tesla lost $862m last year despite all the cross subsidies they see on their cars.

Nobody buys pony cars outside of the US. You're talking a couple thousand more maybe worldwide including canada and mexico.


Tesla is still spending tons of cash _expanding_ ... It's not that they're selling each car at a loss, it's that part of the cost they have to make up is the massive infrastructure growth needed ...which will be recouped since once it's built it doesn't need to be re-built every year.



And tesla isn't the only electric car being built. But just looking at model 3's. They sold more of those than all 3 main pony cars combined.

So however popular you think mustang and camaro and chargers are, tesla's are more popular. They just dont have 20 years of older cars on the road yet to look it.

The big 3 still make money on the Mustangs etc., the EV sellers not so much. The biggest portion of EV sales is actually hybrid vehicles in North America and the EU. Pure EV sales by the big 3 are loss leaders, they lose money on every one of them. Many of those worldwide sales of EV's are also micro cars sold in China, the size of smart cars, made for two people. The reason they sell is that China forces them on folks thru licensing restrictions in major cities as well as subsidizing their purchase.

Reality is if you look back 5 yrs actual EV sales to forecast back then have been extremely disappointing , Obama in 2015 projected twice as many on the road by now. The public just isn't buying. The media distorts the picture on EV sales, sales of EV's sagged last year from 2018 , no one is making any money on them. It isn't going so well but you would never know it with all the hype by the media.

All cars have a depressing outlook in the market. Electric cars still being limited to high density areas where those markets have been hit the hardest in demand (since they're also the places where cars are the least actual necessity due to public transit availability). So I would look at that data as less that people dont want cars...and more that those people who would normally have purchased one, decided not to purchase anything ...or purchased used cars at a much lower cost. It's not like ICE is eating electric's lunch. They're all getting hammered.

Tesla shows an occasional quarterly profit but that is derived by some fancy bookkeeping and ZEV credits. GM, Ford etc. have to pay for ZEV credits to sell their IC cars in certain areas like California. The big 3 are forced to buy those ZEV credits from Tesla , amounts to hundreds of millions of additional subsidies to the EV manufacturer aside from all the other subsidies those cars see when sold. Tesla gets subsidies at all levels of the process yet still has yet to make an annual profit.

Dont talk to me about the viability of GM and Ford and others. It's not like we didn't have to keep GM from going bankrupt and bought in pieces by their competitors in the last decade. Ford managed to avoid the same bailout just barely. They all get subsidized at the local and state level to various degrees by agreeing to exist in a given location. Oil itself gets subsidized.

And out of those various companies, they're all incentivized to draw out selling ICE vehicles as long as they can before switching to electric...and any new company that isn't incentivized to do so finds out just how high of a barrier to entry a car company has by incumbent companies ...especially when you have to operate thru a dealer franchise system that further increases the initial cost to any given company looking to make a start.

You can pretend companies are shoving electric down your throat all you want. The fact is, people dont care if the car is powered by electric or gasoline. The majority of people hate driving. They hate traveling with other people more though. So driving is a necessary evil and whatever is cheapest and the least maintenance having is going to win. And we are not only over the border where that's beginning to be true for electric even without tax writeoffs, but the whole range anxiety is approaching moot as well for the vast majority of drivers.

There is no all powerful electric goblin forcing companies to do it's bidding. If anything, the existing companies want to keep that away from the public as long as they can because it is less profitable in the long run to have things that dont break down as much or require as much service. We're seeing popularity and interest (if not so much the actual buying) because the people want it.

Just like we have a bunch of CUV's and SUV's and trucks dominating current car sales. It's not because companies think they're better or because the right wing demands we all drive trucks for Merica. It's because the people want that garbage despite them not being fun or interesting vehicles for driving on roads.

So the same stupid public that wants and is getting CUV's and SUV's and such is going to result in all vehicles moving to electric for the same reasons. We can only hope that at least some of what's offered tries to be fun because we're not a big enough market to make them change.