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Perhaps they know something we don’t. The news outlets won’t shut up about EV demand “slipping”. That could be because they don’t like Musk, but it could also b

by ein0p 3y ago

Perhaps they know something we don’t. The news outlets won’t shut up about EV demand “slipping”. That could be because they don’t like Musk, but it could also be real. In a post-truth society there’s no way to know.

green_goober 3y ago
You can always read financial reports like 10-Ks and see what the company says and what their number say. Numbers like that don't really lie. The media has never been a "source of truth" at the best they act as watchdogs, at the worst they are propaganda. You can still find answers for yourself but good information has a time cost.
- ein0p 3y ago
  Demand is a lagging indicator, and worse, they have to plan well ahead for how it changes. Building multiple billion dollars worth of production capacity ahead of a severe recession would be a potentially fatal decision.
  - green_goober 3y ago
    You can always use leading indicators (unemployment, inflation) to estimate future car sales, then extrapolate the EV market share based on current growth numbers. It's not perfect but it's not like large institutions somehow have a crystal ball. They are likely doing the same, just with better models.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      The only leading indicators you need in the car market are days of inventory and recent price actions. Tesla's have deep discounts, suggesting a decline in demand. The end. Inventory is harder because they lack dealerships, but it doesn't seem difficult to find a Model3/ModelY right now at all. ------- For other EVs like Ford Mustang MachE, days of inventory are rising and prices are declining as well as incentives. It's not just Tesla, it's a wide group of EVs that were overproduced. https://caredge.com/guides/fastest-and-slowest-selling-cars-2024 https://caredge.com/guides/fastest-and-slowest-selling-cars-... Go browse some stats yourself.
      - ein0p 3y ago
        You’re considering those metrics as though they’re independent from APR on loans, which could easily double from where they are now in case we enter a recession and rate hikes prove ineffective. Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with an eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again.
        dragontamer 3y ago
        > recession You've got it backwards. Recessions cause rate-drops. > Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again. Rate-hikes cause us to lose demand. Yes. But we can see that Toyota demand remains strong with less than 30-days-of-inventory on the average. So the rate-hikes from the current Fed plan are causing expensive cars (like EVs) to lose demand, while cheaper, more-reliable ICE / Hybrid cars from Toyota are selling like hotcakes. Yes, I'm watching interest rates and am trying to understand how our economy shifts because of them. But at this base level, EVs are doing worse (and the stats prove it), while cheaper cars (namely ICE/Hybrids) are doing far better right now than anyone expected.
        ein0p 3y ago
        Don’t look at recent recessions which happened under almost zero rate regime. Look at the Carter era recession. Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load.
        dragontamer 3y ago
        You've got my wording reversed. I said: recessions cause rate-drops. Which has always been true. Rate-drops don't always cure recessions, but its one of the first moves a central bank will make to try to fix a recession. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS That's 2020, 2007, 2000, 1990, 1981, 1979 where a recession immediately caused a rate-drop. We have to go all the way back to 1974 before we had inflation so high that the central bank kept rates high even during a recession. (Dropping rates causes inflation, so its a balancing act). Even then, interest rates dropped to bring us out of the recession of 1974. After that, we have 1969, 1959, and 1957 recessions, all three of which caused interest rates to drop. So 9/10 times, a recession caused an immediate drop in interest rates. And the last 1 time (1974), the recession _eventually_ caused the bankers to drop rates. > Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load. You've got it backwards. Increases rates destroy money. Lower-rates print money. That's why the central bank lowers rates during recessions, its an indirect way to print money (or perhaps more accurately, expand M2). Raising rates, like what we're doing today, destroys money (or more accurately, contracts M2). We're destroying money today with 5%+ interest rates because we've seemingly made too much in the 2020 recession / COVID19.
    - ein0p 3y ago
      Both unemployment and inflation numbers are known to be fake though. They’re specifically designed to make the government look good. One would be a fool to rely on them exclusively.
      - oblio 3y ago
        There are many numbers and government numbers are not fake. They're cherry picked, there's a difference.
      - green_goober 3y ago
        Then I guess nothing is truly measureable and we should never attempt to make predictions.
        riehwvfbk 3y ago
        [flagged]
        ipaddr 3y ago
        If unemployment and inflation rates are politically gamed nothing is truly measurement? Many things can be measured. And unemployment is measuring something but not what it's titled suggests. It's measuring some group of people who qualify as looking for work within a specific timeframe. Someone looking for work for a few years is deemed to employed by this calculation some might question it. Changing the definition of a recession is political. That doesn't mean measurements are incorrect and prediction is impossible.
        green_goober 3y ago
        My comment was sarcasm. OP is being a defeatist to anyone trying to explain that, yes, actually, you can measure these things. You don't need the media to spoonfeed you fake information.
        lmm 3y ago
        By the time a number is getting printed in the newspaper, Goodhart's Law has already taken effect. Anyone who has a good metric is keeping it quiet, the only way to know anything is to get deeper into the details than the average voter.
Lonestar1440 3y ago
I don't like the "post truth" trends in politics either, but I don't think there was ever a time when treating "news outlets" as "truth" was actually a good strategy. They've always had biases, blind spots, and agendas - just like they do now.
cedilla 3y ago
Or maybe they are just fucking up since their CEO is occupied with other things. Or they face an uphill battle against an opponent that is essentially state-backed. Or it's just very hard to scale up a car manufacturer, even if you want to very hard. History shows that no company ever was as superior to its competition as it may seem at their height. Shit's hard yo.
- ein0p 3y ago
  Tesla is the only US EV manufacturer able to meaningfully compete at all. It absolutely dominates its market segment. If that’s “fucking up”, I don’t know what to tell you. Are you sure you’re being rational about this?
thebruce87m 3y ago
There are almost daily reports of demand falling despite sales still going up (just not as fast). The general public are being conditioned by these articles to believe sales are going down. Obviously someone benefits from this narrative as it’s being pushed pretty hard.
roncesvalles 3y ago
If I had to gander a guess, most of people who were going to buy an EV have already bought one, and a certain percentage of the market will always be impenetrable so long as charging a car battery is more inconvenient than filling up a gas tank.
- Tostino 3y ago
  Far from the truth. I have been building PEVs since I was in my teens (ebikes, scooters, a boat). When it came to buy a new car for the first time in my life in 2020, there were no EV options that would do what I needed (large cargo capacity, 6+ seats, not extremely expensive, decent range for road trips). Sorry, I'm not spending 100k on a vehicle. So I ended up getting a Palisade for around 32k, and my wife and I share that, at least until until better (and cheaper) EV options appear. Luckily I can use my ebike for most of my around town travel, and that is way less of a carbon footprint than adding an extra vehicle to the roads.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  That would be a very game guess, given up until last year EV sales look to be rising quadratically or better. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electric-car-sales-2016-2023 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electric-car-... It's more likely EV sales are driven by cost. They have always been more expensive than ICE cars, so they only eaten into the luxury market up until now so the rises you see are increasingly bigger bites out of the luxury market. But the primary cost is batteries, and a blip during COVID aside the cost of batteries has dropped every year. EV are approaching the cost of ICE cars now, if you include a bit of hand waving about maintenance costs. Once they cross cost threshold and drop below the cost of ICE cars, that quadratic curve will go exponential for a while. Chargers will spring up like weeds, because you can make money out of them and they cost far, far less to build and run than a gas station.
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    I keep hearing this argument but as someone who has been shopping for a EV for months now I don't see it. EV proponents need to understand one important thing: People like their gas cars because they are actually pretty good these days. The EV needs to overcome that. The car I am benchmarking against is the Mazda CX-5. The natural equivalent is the Model Y. The CX-5 is a fully mature platform and is an excellent example of a solid ICE vehicle. Mazda CX-5 Cost: $29,300 (possible out the door price ~35K) Model Y cost: Demo vehicle out the door price is ~41K My upper bound price is 35K and im seriously exploring used given Mazdas reliability so I can save myself ~10K for a recent model year. I cant do the same on the Model Y because of Tesla's poor quality reputation. Either I am stuck taking a massive risk on a used Model Y or I am priced out of the market. Repair costs on the Model Y are insane. This is not including the fact that the Insurance cost on a Model Y is almost double that of a CX-5 for me. (970$/yr vs 1700$/year) Now I have also considered other EVs but none provide an equivalent to what the CX-5 offers. Theres the used Mach-E market but I have concerns about reliability and given the whole issue with the contactors and how Ford handled it, I don't think this car will last long term. OK, lets ignore that issue, you still get a bad looking car that gives poor value for the price you have to pay (I can only buy used and it is still on the upper bound of what my budget is) There is the Chevy Bolt EUV. Good insurance, easily within my price range but I am giving up everything else. Terrible charging speeds (made worse because I dont have supercharger access), not really a crossover, terrible looks, not as comfortable as CX-5. This is just my anecdote but there has got to be many others who have made the same conclusion as me about EVs. You have to compromise in at least one of the following areas with every EV: Price, looks, comfort, value
TulliusCicero 3y ago
I recently bought an EV and it's obvious that they still have some significant downsides: expensive up front and poor public charging situation, mostly. The ID4 we got is very comfortable to drive around in, but doing a road trip in Winter feels out of the question. Not that it'd be completely impossible, mind, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a pain in the ass. We'd need to stop more frequently than in our CRV, for a longer period of time each time, and the whole situation with electric car chargers are that sometimes they're broken or working worse than expected, or they're all taken (and it takes way long for a spot to be freed up than at a gas station), or there's problems with the software running the charger, etc. It'd also be nice if it charged faster and had more range too; it's not terrible on those metrics, but I wouldn't say it's great. Certainly not comparable at all to gas cars.
- kiba 3y ago
  Most people don't do roadtrip. They just charge at home. If you drive a tesla, a supercharger stall is usually available. No other kind of chargers I found either work, or are compatible with my tesla.
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what we do. But it would be nice to be able to road trip more easily, and 100% this is an important factor in a lot of people's decisions, even if road tripping is something they do only infrequently.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    > Most people don't do roadtrip. They just charge at home. It’s very common for Americans to drive long distances to visit family for holidays.
    - loeg 3y ago
      The median American lives within 18 miles of their mom and 80% within "a couple hours."[0] 55% are within an hour's drive of their extended family.[1] The majority of Americans do not drive long distances for holidays. It's common, but like, most people aren't doing it, which is congruent with GP's statement that "most people don't roadtrip." [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f... [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than-half-of-americans-live-within-an-hour-of-extended-family/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than...
to11mtm 3y ago
At least in the US, Auto demand has slipped a little bit with the changes to financing, some manufacturers are still being hesitant to offer incentives, and some dealers seem insistent on acting like we are still in full-on covid whiplash shortage mode with slimy upcharges. Sprinkle in the various reliability issues that have come up recently (regardless of whether they are better or worse than what happens to ICE vehicles)... Oh, Also, Kinda wondering what's happened to Kia/Hyundai's EV sales due to public perception, I still see probably as many of their EV's as I do GM[0] [0] It's around this order, not counting plug-in hybrids and M-Plates[1]: Tesla, Ford, Hyundai/GM, Rivian, Polestar, BMW/VW [1] M-Plate is a "Manufacturer's" License plate. Not all states have them, but mine does and due to where I run into a lot of them. Since they range between prototypes and 'company car' they don't count in the ranking.

by ein0p 3y ago

green_goober 3y ago

You can always read financial reports like 10-Ks and see what the company says and what their number say. Numbers like that don't really lie. The media has never been a "source of truth" at the best they act as watchdogs, at the worst they are propaganda. You can still find answers for yourself but good information has a time cost.

ein0p 3y ago
Demand is a lagging indicator, and worse, they have to plan well ahead for how it changes. Building multiple billion dollars worth of production capacity ahead of a severe recession would be a potentially fatal decision.
- green_goober 3y ago
  You can always use leading indicators (unemployment, inflation) to estimate future car sales, then extrapolate the EV market share based on current growth numbers. It's not perfect but it's not like large institutions somehow have a crystal ball. They are likely doing the same, just with better models.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    The only leading indicators you need in the car market are days of inventory and recent price actions. Tesla's have deep discounts, suggesting a decline in demand. The end. Inventory is harder because they lack dealerships, but it doesn't seem difficult to find a Model3/ModelY right now at all. ------- For other EVs like Ford Mustang MachE, days of inventory are rising and prices are declining as well as incentives. It's not just Tesla, it's a wide group of EVs that were overproduced. https://caredge.com/guides/fastest-and-slowest-selling-cars-2024 https://caredge.com/guides/fastest-and-slowest-selling-cars-... Go browse some stats yourself.
    - ein0p 3y ago
      You’re considering those metrics as though they’re independent from APR on loans, which could easily double from where they are now in case we enter a recession and rate hikes prove ineffective. Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with an eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again.
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        > recession You've got it backwards. Recessions cause rate-drops. > Try to sell an expensive car on a loan with eye watering APR of, say 10-12%. This did actually happen in the past, and could very well happen again. Rate-hikes cause us to lose demand. Yes. But we can see that Toyota demand remains strong with less than 30-days-of-inventory on the average. So the rate-hikes from the current Fed plan are causing expensive cars (like EVs) to lose demand, while cheaper, more-reliable ICE / Hybrid cars from Toyota are selling like hotcakes. Yes, I'm watching interest rates and am trying to understand how our economy shifts because of them. But at this base level, EVs are doing worse (and the stats prove it), while cheaper cars (namely ICE/Hybrids) are doing far better right now than anyone expected.
        ein0p 3y ago
        Don’t look at recent recessions which happened under almost zero rate regime. Look at the Carter era recession. Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load.
        dragontamer 3y ago
        You've got my wording reversed. I said: recessions cause rate-drops. Which has always been true. Rate-drops don't always cure recessions, but its one of the first moves a central bank will make to try to fix a recession. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS That's 2020, 2007, 2000, 1990, 1981, 1979 where a recession immediately caused a rate-drop. We have to go all the way back to 1974 before we had inflation so high that the central bank kept rates high even during a recession. (Dropping rates causes inflation, so its a balancing act). Even then, interest rates dropped to bring us out of the recession of 1974. After that, we have 1969, 1959, and 1957 recessions, all three of which caused interest rates to drop. So 9/10 times, a recession caused an immediate drop in interest rates. And the last 1 time (1974), the recession _eventually_ caused the bankers to drop rates. > Consider as well the cost of “printing money” if the rate reaches double digits, and the cost of refinancing the existing debt load. You've got it backwards. Increases rates destroy money. Lower-rates print money. That's why the central bank lowers rates during recessions, its an indirect way to print money (or perhaps more accurately, expand M2). Raising rates, like what we're doing today, destroys money (or more accurately, contracts M2). We're destroying money today with 5%+ interest rates because we've seemingly made too much in the 2020 recession / COVID19.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    Both unemployment and inflation numbers are known to be fake though. They’re specifically designed to make the government look good. One would be a fool to rely on them exclusively.
    - oblio 3y ago
      There are many numbers and government numbers are not fake. They're cherry picked, there's a difference.
    - green_goober 3y ago
      Then I guess nothing is truly measureable and we should never attempt to make predictions.
      - riehwvfbk 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        If unemployment and inflation rates are politically gamed nothing is truly measurement? Many things can be measured. And unemployment is measuring something but not what it's titled suggests. It's measuring some group of people who qualify as looking for work within a specific timeframe. Someone looking for work for a few years is deemed to employed by this calculation some might question it. Changing the definition of a recession is political. That doesn't mean measurements are incorrect and prediction is impossible.
        green_goober 3y ago
        My comment was sarcasm. OP is being a defeatist to anyone trying to explain that, yes, actually, you can measure these things. You don't need the media to spoonfeed you fake information.
      - lmm 3y ago
        By the time a number is getting printed in the newspaper, Goodhart's Law has already taken effect. Anyone who has a good metric is keeping it quiet, the only way to know anything is to get deeper into the details than the average voter.

Lonestar1440 3y ago

I don't like the "post truth" trends in politics either, but I don't think there was ever a time when treating "news outlets" as "truth" was actually a good strategy. They've always had biases, blind spots, and agendas - just like they do now.

cedilla 3y ago

Or maybe they are just fucking up since their CEO is occupied with other things. Or they face an uphill battle against an opponent that is essentially state-backed. Or it's just very hard to scale up a car manufacturer, even if you want to very hard. History shows that no company ever was as superior to its competition as it may seem at their height. Shit's hard yo.

ein0p 3y ago
Tesla is the only US EV manufacturer able to meaningfully compete at all. It absolutely dominates its market segment. If that’s “fucking up”, I don’t know what to tell you. Are you sure you’re being rational about this?

thebruce87m 3y ago

There are almost daily reports of demand falling despite sales still going up (just not as fast). The general public are being conditioned by these articles to believe sales are going down. Obviously someone benefits from this narrative as it’s being pushed pretty hard.

roncesvalles 3y ago

If I had to gander a guess, most of people who were going to buy an EV have already bought one, and a certain percentage of the market will always be impenetrable so long as charging a car battery is more inconvenient than filling up a gas tank.

Tostino 3y ago
Far from the truth. I have been building PEVs since I was in my teens (ebikes, scooters, a boat). When it came to buy a new car for the first time in my life in 2020, there were no EV options that would do what I needed (large cargo capacity, 6+ seats, not extremely expensive, decent range for road trips). Sorry, I'm not spending 100k on a vehicle. So I ended up getting a Palisade for around 32k, and my wife and I share that, at least until until better (and cheaper) EV options appear. Luckily I can use my ebike for most of my around town travel, and that is way less of a carbon footprint than adding an extra vehicle to the roads.
rstuart4133 3y ago
That would be a very game guess, given up until last year EV sales look to be rising quadratically or better. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electric-car-sales-2016-2023 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electric-car-... It's more likely EV sales are driven by cost. They have always been more expensive than ICE cars, so they only eaten into the luxury market up until now so the rises you see are increasingly bigger bites out of the luxury market. But the primary cost is batteries, and a blip during COVID aside the cost of batteries has dropped every year. EV are approaching the cost of ICE cars now, if you include a bit of hand waving about maintenance costs. Once they cross cost threshold and drop below the cost of ICE cars, that quadratic curve will go exponential for a while. Chargers will spring up like weeds, because you can make money out of them and they cost far, far less to build and run than a gas station.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  I keep hearing this argument but as someone who has been shopping for a EV for months now I don't see it. EV proponents need to understand one important thing: People like their gas cars because they are actually pretty good these days. The EV needs to overcome that. The car I am benchmarking against is the Mazda CX-5. The natural equivalent is the Model Y. The CX-5 is a fully mature platform and is an excellent example of a solid ICE vehicle. Mazda CX-5 Cost: $29,300 (possible out the door price ~35K) Model Y cost: Demo vehicle out the door price is ~41K My upper bound price is 35K and im seriously exploring used given Mazdas reliability so I can save myself ~10K for a recent model year. I cant do the same on the Model Y because of Tesla's poor quality reputation. Either I am stuck taking a massive risk on a used Model Y or I am priced out of the market. Repair costs on the Model Y are insane. This is not including the fact that the Insurance cost on a Model Y is almost double that of a CX-5 for me. (970$/yr vs 1700$/year) Now I have also considered other EVs but none provide an equivalent to what the CX-5 offers. Theres the used Mach-E market but I have concerns about reliability and given the whole issue with the contactors and how Ford handled it, I don't think this car will last long term. OK, lets ignore that issue, you still get a bad looking car that gives poor value for the price you have to pay (I can only buy used and it is still on the upper bound of what my budget is) There is the Chevy Bolt EUV. Good insurance, easily within my price range but I am giving up everything else. Terrible charging speeds (made worse because I dont have supercharger access), not really a crossover, terrible looks, not as comfortable as CX-5. This is just my anecdote but there has got to be many others who have made the same conclusion as me about EVs. You have to compromise in at least one of the following areas with every EV: Price, looks, comfort, value

TulliusCicero 3y ago

I recently bought an EV and it's obvious that they still have some significant downsides: expensive up front and poor public charging situation, mostly. The ID4 we got is very comfortable to drive around in, but doing a road trip in Winter feels out of the question. Not that it'd be completely impossible, mind, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a pain in the ass. We'd need to stop more frequently than in our CRV, for a longer period of time each time, and the whole situation with electric car chargers are that sometimes they're broken or working worse than expected, or they're all taken (and it takes way long for a spot to be freed up than at a gas station), or there's problems with the software running the charger, etc. It'd also be nice if it charged faster and had more range too; it's not terrible on those metrics, but I wouldn't say it's great. Certainly not comparable at all to gas cars.

kiba 3y ago
Most people don't do roadtrip. They just charge at home. If you drive a tesla, a supercharger stall is usually available. No other kind of chargers I found either work, or are compatible with my tesla.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  Yes, this is exactly what we do. But it would be nice to be able to road trip more easily, and 100% this is an important factor in a lot of people's decisions, even if road tripping is something they do only infrequently.
- rayiner 3y ago
  > Most people don't do roadtrip. They just charge at home. It’s very common for Americans to drive long distances to visit family for holidays.
  - loeg 3y ago
    The median American lives within 18 miles of their mom and 80% within "a couple hours."[0] 55% are within an hour's drive of their extended family.[1] The majority of Americans do not drive long distances for holidays. It's common, but like, most people aren't doing it, which is congruent with GP's statement that "most people don't roadtrip." [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f... [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than-half-of-americans-live-within-an-hour-of-extended-family/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/18/more-than...

to11mtm 3y ago

At least in the US, Auto demand has slipped a little bit with the changes to financing, some manufacturers are still being hesitant to offer incentives, and some dealers seem insistent on acting like we are still in full-on covid whiplash shortage mode with slimy upcharges. Sprinkle in the various reliability issues that have come up recently (regardless of whether they are better or worse than what happens to ICE vehicles)... Oh, Also, Kinda wondering what's happened to Kia/Hyundai's EV sales due to public perception, I still see probably as many of their EV's as I do GM[0] [0] It's around this order, not counting plug-in hybrids and M-Plates[1]: Tesla, Ford, Hyundai/GM, Rivian, Polestar, BMW/VW [1] M-Plate is a "Manufacturer's" License plate. Not all states have them, but mine does and due to where I run into a lot of them. Since they range between prototypes and 'company car' they don't count in the ranking.