Toyota Chairman and former CEO Akio Toyoda has long been skeptical of electric vehicle hype, a big reason he resigned from the Japanese automaker’s top job earlier this year. Now, he can finally say: “I told you so.” As Elon Musk’s Tesla reported disastrous third-quarter earnings last week, investors realized electric cars weren’t the answer. A panacea for profit. “People are finally seeing reality,” Akio Toyoda explain Wednesday.
Akio Toyoda has long denied that electric vehicles are the only way for the auto industry to achieve carbon neutrality. explain“There are many ways to climb a mountain.” Other major automakers are also slowing the rollout of electric vehicles. wide awake Production slowed down by 30%, while General Motors Delaying the launch of the Chevrolet Silverado electric vehicle by a full year.
President Joe Biden has spent much of his term in office betting aggressively on electric vehicles as part of his ambitious agenda to reduce U.S. carbon emissions and combat climate change. But the EV market is swaying as high interest rates dampen customer demand for EVs and other vehicles. This “dissuades a lot of people from entering the market,” said Jessica Caldwell, Edmunds’ director of insights. wealth.
While electric vehicle sales are still growing, the rate of growth has slowed. In the first half of 2023, electric vehicle sales increased by 49% compared with the previous year, which was slower than last year’s 63% growth rate. wall street journal the report said.
Electric vehicle “growing pains”
“We’re transitioning to a completely new technology. It’s expensive. It requires people to have a different relationship with the vehicle, and that relationship has basically not changed in decades,” Caldwell said. “So it’s a little bit unrealistic to think that everything will unfold smoothly and we follow this good adoption curve.”
Not to mention Musk, Tesla CEO and owner of social media platform richest man in the world–His net worth just dropped by $30 billion. Electric car champion Tesla reported its lowest quarterly earnings per share (EPS) in two years, 10% below already negative analyst forecasts. The stock market also reacted, with Tesla’s stock price immediately falling by more than 17%, and the company’s market value falling by US$138 billion in just two trading days.
“This is going to be a huge speed bump for the automakers, and I’m sure they’ve foreseen this,” Caldwell said.
Toyota’s chairman says he foresees this.Akio Toyoda has long advised the industry Hedging your bets on electric vehicles Continue to invest in hybrids, hydrogen vehicles, and other alternative environmentally friendly vehicles.
Ford has also been slow to put all its eggs into the electric vehicle basket, announcing that it will slow down production of the F-150 Lightning pickup truck. Bill Ford, the great-grandson of the automaker’s founder Henry Ford, described the rhetoric around electric vehicles as “highly political.”
“Blue states say electric vehicles are great and we need to adopt them as quickly as possible for climate reasons,” Ford told reporters. New York Times. “Some red states are saying this is like the vaccine, that the government shoved it into our hands and we don’t want it.”
General Motors also announced it would slow down the production of electric vehicles after making an optimistic commitment to completely phase out gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. The company blamed falling demand for electric vehicles and pressure from car strikes.
But Caldwell said the blip was just “growing pains” for the inevitable dominance of electric vehicles in the auto industry.
“The industry is moving toward electric vehicles — it would probably be unwise to deny that,” Caldwell said. “That’s what this path looks like – it’s just undefined and it leads to more confusion.”
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