Just saw the article about Lucid’s earnings/sales/etc and it seems its generally agreed upon that they’re currently floundering big time due to the very high market price and not a ton of buyers. This reminded me of something I was thinking of the other day, which is that the EV car manufacturing sector seems to be replicating in a way that we saw car manufacturing do around their inception in the early and then into the mid 20th century when you had dozens of manufacturers popping up each trying to tap into a relatively specific market. You have a lot of new companies that have somewhat niche vehicles in an already niche market (Lucid for high end luxury, Rivian for trucks, etc) but I’m curious of others opinions as to if this is a good thing or not. Will these more niche brands go the route of previous niche brands and be bought up by the Big 3 or international producers? Or will this completely revolutionize the car market where you have highly specialized brands making their version of the vehicle’s best (the best sports car EV, SUV EV, truck EV, etc) and then general producers like the Big 3 end up eating it because they simply can’t keep up because they’re stretched too broadly?
Perhaps the traditional automakers aren’t interested in buying our EV brands as they can’t see a way to integrate them into their own future product lineups and manufacturing processes.
Toyota could buy Rivian, for example, but Toyota is developing its own EV platform for release in 2026, making the Rivian platform superfluous to Toyota’s requirements.