When Reuters reported in April that Tesla had scrapped plans for a long-promised, next-generation $25,000 electric vehicle, the automaker’s stock plunged. Chief Executive Elon Musk rushed to respond on X, his social-media network.
“Reuters is lying,” he posted, without elaborating. Tesla’s stock recovered some of its losses.
Six months later, Musk appears to have backed into an admission that Tesla dropped its plans for a human-driven $25,000 car. He said in an Oct. 23 earnings call that building the affordable EV would be "pointless” unless the car was fully autonomous.
Until we tax them ridiculously (50-100%) to keep things “fair” for the american auto makers that refuse to build anything smaller than a chevorlet suburban.
Along with European, Japanese, and South Korean automakers. Nobody is building EVs this cheap because no other country’s government is dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into selling them well below their actual cost.
Those automakers are at least trying to compete by building small cars. I see more ads for electric f150s than i see for compact cars in north america.
The profit margins are insane compared to sedans.
Domestic manufacturers almost entirely phased out small cars long ago before EVs were even significant because they can’t build them as well as companies like Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda. Even those companies have phased out tiny cars because nobody in the US was buying them.
Why don’t you buy a Chevy Bolt, or Nissan Leaf if you want a small, cheap EV?
It isn’t they can’t build them, it is moreso they don’t want to because of profit margins and influences from CAFE standards makes small cars hard to build and big SUVs easier due to some backwards fuel economy regulations.
The same profit margins and CAFE standards that companies like Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda have to abide by too? This makes no sense as these companies were outselling domestic maker’s cars 5 to 1 in the exact same financial and regulatory environment.
Every country subsidized their auto industry, it’s just that all the benefit goes directly to ceos except in china apparently.
Ford received 9 billion in June.
Ford received a loan to use toward building new factories for EV production. In China, Ford would owned by the government and funded with taxpayer dollars directly.
This is why hes suddenly against it, theres no way Chinese EVs are coming stateside, and the US is even leveraging Mexico to keep them out of Mexico too. He doesn’t want to make the smaller profit margin thing everyone wants, because the government is just going to ban what everyone wants instead.