For electric cars to become even more accepted the battery range has to be a lot greater and the charging infrastructure has to be much more vast. Charging times have to come down to the same as pumping a gas car. But I think one of the biggest hurdles is mentally, what happens when the battery life ends? How much is it going to cost to replace? It might cost the same as buying another iced car for people have hesitation on different points. And it looks like it costs a lot more to repair and to ensure electric cars.
I agree with Elon. I don’t see any sense in hybrids when EVs get 300+ miles of range. Add in the charging infrastructure getting much better and hybrids just don’t make sense.
Basically right now i think the logical choices are an EV or an ICE. I don’t think any in-betweens make sense, in the US at least.
Also, I think we don’t talk enough about how much cleaner the air in cities would be if EVs were more common. If we would stop being stupid and build a shitload of nuclear power plants we’d be way better off in terms of air quality.
Other than the serious comments here my snarkiness needs to take over: Even if Elon wanted to make a hybrid he damn well can’t because if Tesla can make an electric car a fucking shitbox God knows how badly they’d fuck up developing an ICE engine, let alone an entire hybrid system. I’d actually bet their ICE engines would be somehow worse than Stellantis 🥴
People are realizing that a hybrid has incredibly longer/easier range than an EV. Doesn’t mean they aren’t a “phase” still.
Now they’re a ‘smoking-hot market’ as EV demand chills
I really cannot find any data whatsoever that suggests EV demand is slowing down, as it just reached a sales record in the most recent quarter with a 49.8% growth YoY: https://caredge.com/guides/electric-vehicle-market-share-and-sales#Q3_2023_Electric_Vehicle_Market_Share_and_Sales_US
What’s up with these low quality clickbait articles that twist facts and mislead readers? Fortune, Forbes, Business Insider etc have been churning them out nonstop for this past month.
I really cannot find any data whatsoever that suggests EV demand is slowing down
This horse has been beaten to the bone. YoY growth is still positive, but it is rapidly dropping off as 2022 had 65% YoY growth and 2021 had 89%. That’s not what you want to see when EV’s are only holding a single digit market share and just barely broke 1 million vehicles sold.
Combined with the fact that they are piling up at dealers, it tells you that supply has totally outpaced demand. We can’t hit 100% EV sales by 203X if it’s only growing 50% YoY at 7% market share with a downwards growth trend. Meanwhile, Toyota is hitting record profits partly with increased Hybrid sales (https://www.carscoops.com/2023/11/toyota-sales-profits-and-production-hit-record-levels/).
All this really means is that things are slow for whatever reason, and you probably shouldn’t pay a markup for an EV. The manufacturers are postponing production expansion until it makes sense.
This horse has been beaten to the bone
Yet I’m here arguing the same thing for the Nth time.
It is absolutely expected for the growth to slow down over time, that is true for any new products past the very early adopter phase.
And even discard math, we are just now normalizing from the crazy 2021-2022 market into a more normal market with much higher interest rate. The overall EV growth still far out paces overall market growth, and outpaces hybrid growth.
Meanwhile, Toyota is hitting record profits partly with increased Hybrid sales
From your article, Toyota’s hybrids sale increased by 27%, which is far less than the market growth for EVs. And btw a lot of their increased profit was from them reporting lower cost due to Yen’s value crashing over the past year.
It didn’t seem like any manufacturers really anticipated it to slow down. I expected EV’s to rocket to maybe 20% market share before slowing, but that’s also why I question if this is a real downturn or just a temporary dip.
As for Hybrids, I think it’s notable because of how many get sold. Crunching the math in the article, Toyota alone sold about 1.5 Million hybrids, but that shouldn’t be a big surprise. I think the real takeaway here is that manufacturers should be making some hybrids rather than allocating so many batteries to half-baked or overpriced EVs. Making an EV just to say you have an EV is probably not worth it at this point.
They’re certainly a phase. But they might be a phase for like 25 more years.
Toyota hybrids are a great in between, and we need more plug-in hybrids in their lineup IMO but for people who aren’t quite ready to go the whole way with an EV they are a phenomenal option. My son has a Volvo plug-in hybrid and his fuel consumption went from four tanks a month to one tank a month if he’s just going back-and-forth to work. that’s a savings of about $250 a month.
I had a 2019 RAV4 hybrid and it really is a completely seamless experience.