Tariffs, torn-up US emissions regs, and being uncompetitive in China are all to blame.
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Facing heavy losses, Honda cancels its three US-made electric vehicles
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There are plenty of examples of good to excellent EVs that were built on platforms shared with ICE counterparts or clearly derived from them (BMW having a fair number of these, most notably). Can't speak to profitability, but it's clear something doesn't need to be a clean sheet, designed only as an EV vehicle to be a good EV.
Also FWIW the GM vehicles that share a name with their ICE counterparts don't really share much else beyond being roughly the same size and shape.
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I bought an EV because I got fed up with the maintenance for a gas engine, transmission, coolant, etc. . Hybrids are just ICE cars with better gas mileage. Extended range EV's still have gas engine maintenance, they're basically hybrids. I "fill up'" at home overnight for pennies. A side benefit is I can move the car a short distance without being concerned about a short cold start causing unnecessary wear on the engine.
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These are issues for all of the traditional carmakers. The German conglomerates are also taking it in the shorts: https://www.autoblog.com/news/porsche-profits-collapse-92-as-automaker-plans-more-job-cuts
And that's before the seemingly inevitable energy crunch from the Iran war really hits home - not just in terms of fuel prices, but also in across-the-board increases in manufacturing and transportation costs.
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Japan has absolutely fumbled their EV development and would be a truly world-class embarrassment if the Americans weren’t so astronomically incompetent and impotent.
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Car companies are hardware companies, they're not (and probably never will be) software people. The culture is hardwired. Same for Apple, it's essentially a software company that makes closely integrated hardware for it's software. As a car company Apple would have really sucked. Everyone should stay in their lane or experience a head on crash.
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The problem is that GM hasn't figured out how to make any money selling any of their EVs yet. They might have a "large lineup of surprisingly efficient and practical EV crossovers", but if they loose money on every EV sold, that obviously isn't a sustainable long term business model.
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You are completely ignoring two decades of real world data that shows hybrids from Honda or Toyota are extremely reliable.
https://www.topspeed.com/why-this-5-year-old-hybrid-beats-most-brand-new-cars-reliability/
In fact, Consumer Reports found that hybrids have fewer problems than ICE or EVs:
https://meincmagazine.com/cars/2023/1...problems-than-gas-cars-says-consumer-reports/
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Yup, I got the Honda Prologue which is a improved Chevy Blazer. It has Car Play and Android Auto which the Chevy Blazer doesn't. But you can get a subscription for the Blazer !
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Pushing for EVs was the obvious best option. The forces that oppose EVs also oppose single-digit percentage increases in fuel economy standards, so why bother negotiating with then?
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Across major economies, single-family home ownership rates negatively correlate with EV adoption rates.
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I'm sorry but the zero series look so ugly. Why do automakers insist that EVs don't look like a car and instead have to look like some alien probe pod?
The biggest irony in all of this is that Honda will still be selling an EV made for them by GM as their only EV in the north american market. And in my opinion that GM made EV looks better because it you know, looks like a car!
The biggest irony in all of this is that Honda will still be selling an EV made for them by GM as their only EV in the north american market. And in my opinion that GM made EV looks better because it you know, looks like a car!
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So they've fully adopted western McMansion style feature bloat. It's like insisting "we need a home theater room with shitty pleather recliners" because the frenemy family has one despite the fact that neither family will ever use that room. An arms race of useless selling points because to be seen without that bullet point on your object will make you seem less influential or well off as a consumer
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The West, including Japan/Korea, has three real choices:
1. Start producing BEVs that are cost competitive with China (good luck!)
2. Tariff Chinese vehicles or subsidize domestic ones to retain domestic industry
3. Watch the domestics vanish.
That's across the board. The production cost difference is too vast for any other capitalistic outcome. Subsidies are the "nice" way to do it. Shrug! I'd like to not have to buy a Chinese spybot car, but if it comes down to $50k for the Western model or $25k for the Chinese one, I'll probably figure out how to jailbreak the Chinese one.
Right now the US is trying to do it by refusing entry/making them illegal, but that never lasts.
1. Start producing BEVs that are cost competitive with China (good luck!)
2. Tariff Chinese vehicles or subsidize domestic ones to retain domestic industry
3. Watch the domestics vanish.
That's across the board. The production cost difference is too vast for any other capitalistic outcome. Subsidies are the "nice" way to do it. Shrug! I'd like to not have to buy a Chinese spybot car, but if it comes down to $50k for the Western model or $25k for the Chinese one, I'll probably figure out how to jailbreak the Chinese one.
Right now the US is trying to do it by refusing entry/making them illegal, but that never lasts.
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Don't forget the Muskrat said Tesla is now an Ai company. How does Ai get you physically from place to place? Muskrat seems to have a relatively short attention span as he seems to have forgot about colonizing Mars but now the moon where there's NASA money. Or he knows he was just scamming people and the scam has run it's course. Colonizing Mars was a delusion for Musk and his fan boi. They made some pretty graphics though.
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They didn't "decide to kill it a few months in" they announced it as a limited time product from the get go. So far all they've done is say "this is the plan" and then do the plan. While certainly frustrating for those of us cheering on the return of the Bolt it's not indicative of any giving up or reversal of direction. It's very clear they made the new Bolt to appease some demand but also not as a heavy investment given the high ammount of reuse from the old Bolt and minimal changes to adapt in Ultium components. I wouldn't be surprised if a much more thoroughly clean sheet Trax EV comes out in a couple years to replace the Bolt and align naming better with the rest of the ICE to EV lineup
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I still firmly believe that one of the big reasons EVs aren't a big sell in the US is American car culture. We LOVE the idea of hitting the open road. You make a quick pit stop to fill up, grab snacks and GO again. Few of us ever actually do it, but it's nice to have it be an option.
With an EV, gotta charge up a little to get you to the next charging station to charge up a little, etc. When recharging to full(ish) capacity is as quick as filling a gas tank... I think EVs will really, finally do well in the US.
Also: Why can't automakers stick to normal looking EVs based on their gas models?
With an EV, gotta charge up a little to get you to the next charging station to charge up a little, etc. When recharging to full(ish) capacity is as quick as filling a gas tank... I think EVs will really, finally do well in the US.
Also: Why can't automakers stick to normal looking EVs based on their gas models?
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That's a strange claim given their sales figures. They took nearly a near 2B USD loss, and their sales tanked in Q4, and will continue to crash through 2026.
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Funnily enough Chevrolet/GM seem to have cracked that code with simply affixing EV to their ICE model names for the most part and while giving them different styling there's nothing that screams "futuristic EV" on them, just the typical aggressively styled modern car.
I think short to medium term the upcoming range extended EVs/very strong hybrids are going to fill that road trip gap. If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions those vehicles succeed massively if the only time they actually burn gas is on the rare long road trip or when towing if it's a truck. At that point nitpicking over the presence of the gas engine at all is letting perfect be the enemy of good, because no matter what you're picking your poising for that range, be it a gas engine for fallback/generator duty or with a massively oversized battery pack
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That "loss" was on future supplier contracts being canceled because they expect growth to be slower, you know because of a certain orange man and his rage baby tantrums. And everyone was down in Q4 because of the rush to buy before the rage baby's tantrum took away the tax credits
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Yes, cancelling EVs just as people in USA are receiving a big "gas price jolt" to remind them why we should all be moving away from vehicles that use fossil fuels.
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EVs are fine for roadtrips today, they'll just get better over time.
As far as 'normal' looking EVs based on gas models, because they make relatively poor EVs. They end up heavier, less efficient, and in most cases more expensive than a clean sheet design. It turns out engineering a skateboard and putting a low Cd cabin on it is way better and more efficient from a resource, manufacturing, and efficiency perspective than trying to cram EV components into an ICE platform.
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Not right now they couldn't.
VW Group, especially Porsche, took huge hits to its profits, as are Mercedes and BMW. Hyundai just discontinued the Ioniq6 in this country after two years on sale. This is an industry-wide phenomenon. When the regulatory environment sets hard limits on ICE sales on short timelines, car companies are going to invest heavily in EVs. When that regulatory environment pulls an uno reverse because it's being run by incompetent reactionaries and those short timelines get extended, those investments are going to become losses.
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You can make a ground up design and still make it look like a normal car. OP wasn't saying just convert an existing design into an EV, they were saying style your ground up EV to look like a car and not some obnoxious futurism. See the GM ultium EVs under the Chevrolet brand for an example of what we mean. Those cars don't share a chassis or frame with their ICE counterparts, they don't even have the same styling, but they do look like cars, at a glance nothing screams "THIS IS AN EV" in a big obnoxous in your face way
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That MIT report is from 2019, so its data is from 2017 and earlier. Manufacturing emissions are higher than current, as are grid emissions.
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Exactly! I got the Honda Prologue because it looked like any other SUV, not some "Look at me" EV. The only give away is no giant grill on the front and a little "e" badge on the tailgate.
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The issue is all the western companies rely on exporting to other countries as well and they can't stop China exporting to them.
Honda is a Japanese company but Japan is less than 20% of their yearly sales they need exports which require free trade to work.
Honda may be able to get special treatment if they have a car factory in a country but they can't have a car factory in every country.
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I commented earlier about my Honda Prologue looks like any other SUV. When I seriously started looking for an EV, I was appalled by the Lexus EV front styling.
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A Hummer EV is about as efficient well-to-wheel as a Prius. Just about every EV improves from there.
I also downvoted you because, in classic engineer fashion, you're "doing math" because first principles or some self-serving bullshit like that rather than looking up one of the dozens of research papers, white papers, and DOE analyses that have been done on this question for the past 20 years - all of which show that EVs are more efficient from battery or tank to wheel, emit less criteria air pollutants and fewer tons of carbon on average US grid mix, and
And let me guess, because everything is engineering, you understand everything.
Jesus fucking Christ. MPGe already factors that in, you absolute brickbat. 33kWh stored is 33kWh stored. An EV is 85-90% efficient at turning stored electricity into motive power. A good ICE hybrid might hit 40%.
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You're right, but I was speaking to the larger issue that the West has an automotive industry that evolved to compete with Detroit, not something that operates on economics that are 25% the cost of Detroit (and shrinking - China has the lead in robotics and cheap labor). It's adapt or die time, and it doesn't matter what specific national quirks exist - every single manufacturer from Volkswagen to Ford to Bugatti has a similar set of problems and they revolve around the 3 options I noted.
Individual countries can choose to tariff or subsidize (angering their taxpayers to the benefit of local producers of vehicles), or they can invest in becoming competitive, or they can watch their automotive industries die. I sure don't think any of the auto-dinosaurs are going to adapt on their own. All this twaddle about "Wull Japan wanted to go fuel cell" is a perfect example of why. The governments and their companies had the luxury of prioritizing shit like politics over efficiency.
Nor will Tesla. It too evolved to eat Detroit and Musk just wants to make robots and chatbots now anyway.
I bet they're all gonna get eaten by the small mammals.
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jm_leviathan
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I mean, you can do this with even a standard Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive vehicle too. There is an "EV mode" button that will generally suffice to move the vehicle a short distance, as in the case of exiting a driveway to park on the kerb or something.
Granted it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes the dash will flash that EV mode is unavailable as the battery SoC is too low. But even when the vehicle doesn't allow entering EV mode specifically, one can usually move the car at least a few metres before the engine kicks in.
I would assume that other "strong hybrid" implementations perform similarly.
Of course PHEVs (including EREVs) are effectively EVs for this purpose, without the above limitations and caveats.
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This is a problem, but we're pretty far from exhausting the people in the first group. Something like 65% of US households own the home they live in. Now obviously not 100% of those people will be able to charge at home, but I bet a large percentage of them could manage at least L1 charging. Yet EVs are only about 8% of new car sales here. Things are a bit better here in California (~25% in 2024, ~23% in 2025) due to a combination of state level incentives, a more robust charging network and cold-weather performance concerns not really being an issue, but there are still a lot of people that could be buying a new EV that are buying a new ICE car instead.
FWIW, while price discovery is hidden in apps, generally L3 charging stations support paying by card already
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That's not really a near-term problem. Even under good circumstances, it would be decades before people living in multi-unit buildings (14% of the US population) will be a bottleneck for EV adoption. We are at 3% EV adoption now. With 300M cars in the US and 15M sold a year. Even if every car in the US sold in 2026 was an EV, it would take almost two decades (17 years) to to the point that the last 15% of US would be remaining to transition to EV. In reality, it will be like 40 years for now (given that EVs in the US are no where near 100% marketshare). In the meantime, the 64% of Americans that own their own home (~80% of which are single family homes with garage/carport according to US census bureau) need lower cost EV (which for 75% of American means used EVs) to access.
That's out of date thinking by a decade or two... do you still decide on where to eat based on the price of the burgers?
It's pretty inefficient to choose you charging price from the like 2-3 EV charging station you happen to see in the 10-20 minutes to need to charger. It would be like only filling up on gas station on big road intersections (which are always like 10% more expensive that less visible ones).
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If you want to be accurate it's actually a $6 billion write down on EVs: https://meincmagazine.com/cars/2026/0...-gm-6-billion-even-as-its-chinese-sales-boom/
Fact remains, GM sold 170,000 here last year, more than anyone that isn't Tesla, and it will almost certainly end 2026 as the US' #2 EV maker again.
There is a difference between having a robust EV portfolio and it being profitable. You ought not to conflate them.
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Until you learn how to perform Lifecycle Assessment and read actual reports from people with an actual clue how to account for GHG emissions and how to calculate the carbon footprint of various types of vehicles, maybe try to be more humble and careful about your “maths” and claims.
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