I wish it would have adjusted for inflation. One quote: "The average transaction price for a new vehicle sold in the U.S. last month was $48,623, according to Kelley Blue Book, roughly $10,000 higher than in 2019, before the pandemic." However, about 9200 euros of that is due to inflation according to this calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
That's a nitpick though. All in all, an interesting article, which can be summarized as: the EV car market is lacking demand, and car makers definitely don't want to make cheap EVs since it's already so hard.
I took advantage of the IRA solar power and $7500 EV credit, now I have an off grid home all electric appliances and excess power for hot tubs and EV's. The Ford Lightning acts as a generator. This was the greatest most life changing and impactful legistlation ever: I've had $0 (ZERO!) in gasoline, LP, and electric utility bills since installation last year.
I would love a 10-15K BYD. I was told recently desiring a BYD is un-American when I can spend 3 times the price on a Tesla. No thanks! I’ll hold out for something truly cheap. Cars in America are insanely priced.
Money quote:
“As automakers were profit maximizing during the supply chain crisis era, you are going to prioritize the bigger vehicles, the more expensive vehicles with their higher margins,” Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power, told me. “Now we just don’t have” these cheaper models.
It's weird the Chevy Bolt wasn't mentioned. After the $7500 tax credit, you could get a brand new Chevy Bolt for under $20k. If you haven't driven a Bolt, I can't recommend it more. It's about as perfect as car as I could reasonably dream up. It's a hatchback, minimally gimmicky (compared to, e.g, a Tesla, where so many things are "different" for the sake of being different), unnecessarily fast—truly, it's shocking how quick it is, very respectable range of ~270 miles, has Apple CarPlay (or Android's equivalent if you're into that sort of thing), and it's cheap.
I picked up a used 2023 for $14k last month. Hertz is unloading their fleet of EV's, so they're ridiculously cheap if you don't mind driving a former rental car.
I doubt a cheap american electric car is the real withering dream with people not being able to put a roof over their head
After reading some of the comments, the next questions, why are automakers not building plants in Africa? Cheap labor force, cheap land, probably needs education and training. China is courting Africa, is the US?
This is partially a case of not moving the goalposts - if you run an inflation calculator [0] on 25k from 2017-now, it comes in right around 32.5k, and you can definitely order a Tesla for less than that today.
[0]https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25000&year1=20...
WSJ is entitled to their opinions, however they conveniently forgot about the plethora of Herz used EVs onsale right now.
The Chinese are going to clean this market up.
The British made the same mistake back in the day with motorcycles. "Who cares about the market for 125 cc machines?" they said.
The Japanese did, and now they have the market, the British used to have, for luxury and high powered motor cycles. As well as most of the 125cc market
The only EV I'm even interested in is an Aptera. They're building a new class of vehicle that takes advantage of the affordances of full electric. I want a small efficient car that can go long distances and nobody else is building anything like that. Even US capital markets don't understand the appeal of this class of vehicle, but luckily they were able to fill their funding in global capital markets. I'm pretty pessimistic about US EVs, but Aptera gives me a little hope.
I dream of public transport and not having to drive.
There are inexpensive EVs in the US. A local dealer has new Nissan Leafs available for $24.5k (after rebates) all day, every day.
There are also inexpensive cars. A local dealer has new Mitsubishi Mirage Hatchbacks available for $17k all day, every day.
People don't want them.
They're not being tricked, cajoled, strong-armed, forced, pressured, misguided, or hoodwinked.
American consumers WANT and CAN AFFORD gigantic $65k SUVs with heated and cooled seats and wifi and huge screens that take up the entire dashboard.
"Oh but they're prioritizing higher-marg..." yeah no shit Sherlock literally all a consumer has to do is not buy one of those.
But Toyota can slap a limited edition retro paint job on an SUV, mark it up $5k and the dealer can mark it up $10k and people will walk past the cheap cars to sign up for a waiting list to get a chance to earn an opportunity to put down a non-refundable deposit to maybe, potentially, pay $75k for an middling SUV with a limited edition retro paint job.
Something has to disconnect here. Everyone complains that everything costs so much, but the average Americans' paycheck is not rising the same way, so they can try all they want to sell $95k electric vehicles because of thin margins for cheaper products, but if purchasing power doesn't rise with inflation, then that market that "sucks" is going to be the only real market one day...
I would love to see some analysis on the average car production cost invoice cost. The current numbers being shown focus too much on MSRP or final sale cost, which include vehicle options or markup. It would be very useful to look at these trends.
If we wanted a cheap American electric car, the way to do it would be to allow Chinese EV manufacturers to sell to the American public!
Of course, that is not allowed, because it would benefit the American people and hurt the American car cartel.
I expected more from this article. Sure they are boring but in the new market Kona EV, ID.4, Leaf, and as mentioned Bolt EV/EUV are all very good deals, and the only compromise is infrequent road-tripping, and this is totally ignoring Tesla.
Why isn't there more focus on plain old Hybrids? Not PHEV's... Aren't they a best of both worlds approach? What am I missing.
> The cheapest car Tesla currently sells in the U.S. starts at around $43,000—or $35,500 with a federal tax credit of $7,500.
Curious if anyone knows — do people actually drive off the lot with a Tesla for $35,500?
"There’s not a lot of movies made about the heroes who got 20% of the cost out of a car, but let me tell you, there should be.”
Of course. You start by designing a car to be cheap, not slimming down an expensive one.
Consider who builds American EVs:
1) a SV/Texas "tech" company, which, by its very identity, must yield insane returns to shareholders 2) Legacy auto companies who must yield insane returns to both shareholders and, to a lesser extent, retired employees. In their defense, the second group actually did work
Compare this to Chinese EV makers who are dumpi - I mean, willing to take less return on their sale in order to establish market dominance globally.
Yeah, no wonder American EVs are expensive.
People who can afford to buy brand new, does it matter if there is a 25k EV?
People that buy used, can get a cheap electric car like a 2023 Tesla M3 with approx. 50k miles going for 20-24k on Hertz Rental Car sales site.
If you want a better price, just wait until 2026, when the 250k leases come due. There will be a flood of used electric cars on the market.
> “I think having a regular $25,000 model is pointless,” Musk said a few weeks ago. “It would be silly.”
ROTFLMAO!
Says the richest person in existence. What an entitled nasty person.
It's the Wall Street Journal.
Electric cars will not "save the environment".
Their purpose is to "save the US automotive industry".
The idea that billionaires and car manufacturers would be motivated by anything else is laughable.
Support public transportation.
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the only manufacturer that does this right is Aptera, the rest is a bunch of gimmicks / subsidy fraud that doesn't solve any actual problem with cars
Anyone interested in this should look into BorgWarner, the company that produces most of the EV power trains in the US. They charge a several x markup and hold a virtual monopoly.
I can't believe that the average price of a car in the U.S. is almost $50k. For rapidly depreciating assets.
Here I am working out TCO costs for a range of mid-sized cars for my next purchase, and trying to decide if the extra $2k for a Prius Prime over a Prius will beat the differential in fuel costs for my driving situation. I feel like a chump, but I know it's the smarter thing to do with my money.
I coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck that is planned to spend less than 5% of the time doing anything other than commuting him back and forth to work. It doesn't fit in any of the parking garages around here, or in his garage -- he has to park it at the other side of a surface lot because it doesn't fit in the normal spots. It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.
Americans won't buy cheap cars, they won't buy upmarket small cars, but they'll burn their children's college fund into the ground for a 2 second gain on 0-60 and bad ergonomics.
I can afford the fancy car, but I'd rather turn $100k into $200k in my index funds and buy an entire apartment in Spain overlooking the Mediterranean with the gains.
We can have nice things, but this is why we can't have affordable things.