And the all electrics are not selling as people wake up they are just coal powered death chariots.An Inconvenient Truth For The Global Auto Industry: Electric Cars Are Not Selling In 2019Jim Collins Mar 13, 2019, 10:50am
All electric being fed by coal
As global automakers rush to introduce new battery electric vehicles (BEVs,) an inconvenient truth is emerging: someone has to buy them. With so much focus on the race to secure raw materials to produce lithium-ion batteries and on Tesla's hourly/daily/weekly production rates at its single assembly plant in Fremont, CA, the demand side of the equation seems to have been forgotten. I have been following the auto industry for more than a quarter century and I love new powertrain technology as much as any other gearhead does. My background is as a sell-side analyst, though, and as a stock guy, I know that moving units moves the bottom line.
The biggest hindrance for BEV sales around the globe has been government interference in the markets. Tax credits in the U.S. are based on volume, and with the country's two largest sellers of BEVs--GM and Tesla--already surpassing the 200,000 unit threshold, their BEV models are seeing a net effective price increase. The government in CHina, by far the world's largest market for electric vehicles, will reportedly lower BEV subsidies by a third in 2019 and will phase them out completely in 2020. Europe is somewhat of a mishmash in terms of subsidies. Also, when you read articles on the success of BEV sales in Norway owing to heavy government subsidies, please remember that Norway's population is less than that of New York City.
So, if subsidies have dropped in 2019 for all BEVs in China and for the most popular brand in the U.S.--Tesla--a veteran analyst would have expected a pronounced pull-forward for sales into the final quarter of 2018 and marked drop in sales in 2019. That is exactly what is occurring in the global market for BEVs. Consumers are smart as a general rule, and buyers of autos tend to be extremely price conscious.
Read the depressing rest herehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2019/03/13/an-inconvenient-truth-for-the...