Retreating From EVs Could Be Hazardous For Western Carmakers (economist.com)
- Reference: 0180459597
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/26/158231/retreating-from-evs-could-be-hazardous-for-western-carmakers
- Source link: https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/17/retreating-from-evs-could-be-hazardous-for-western-carmakers
In the U.S., the Trump administration has rolled back incentives and other measures that supported EVs. But Chinese brands controlled 10.7% of the all-electric car market in western Europe in the first ten months of 2025, up a percentage point from a year earlier, despite EU tariffs on Chinese EVs imposed in October 2024. Sales of Chinese hybrids, which aren't subject to those tariffs, have surged. EVs will eventually become the cheaper option as production expands and costs fall, meaning Western carmakers that slow down now risk giving competitors an unassailable lead.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/17/retreating-from-evs-could-be-hazardous-for-western-carmakers
Import of Chinese EV's will be prohibited (Score:5, Interesting)
The current regime and the the US car makers will see to it. They won't let these vehicles be imported. This is because of two things: Pride in things made in America by the current regime, and intense lobbying by the US car manufacturers.
The current regime likes ICE cars because consumers have to buy gasoline for them on a recurring basis. My theory is that they hate electric cars because with some solar panels, you can get the energy for them at a cost which the petroleum industry could never match.
The American car manufacturers have so overpriced their offerings that the average consumer making the median wage can't afford the cost of ownership for a new car. Have you seen all those 10 to 20 year cars with peeling top coats of paint being driven around. This tells you a lot about the state of car affordability in America.
When the rug is pulled out from beneath the US consumer (not a question of IF but WHEN) , there will be few customers who can afford American-built cars. At this point either consumers will retrench using pedal-assisted electric bicycles, or electric scooters, or they will allow Chinese EV's to be imported.
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One of he big attractions in Cuba is all the old cars from the 60s. Tourists find it delightfully quaint.
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> My theory is that they hate electric cars because with some solar panels, you can get the energy for them at a cost which the petroleum industry could never match.
I have always viewed their hate for electric cars as just a knee-jerk reaction to their political opponents supporting them.
Phasing out the wrong thing (Score:3, Interesting)
I always thought that the EU's goal of phasing out all new internal combustion engines was attacking the wrong problem. The problems of climate change have not come from burning hydrocarbons per se, they have come from taking carbon-based fuels from the ground. We should phasing out the use of extracted oil for powering internal combustion engines and demanding that cars use air-to-liquid synthesised fuels instead.
There are currently somewhat over 260 million passenger cars in the EU, of which around 90% use an ICE. Banning the sale of new ICEs won't do anything for these nearly quarter billion existing vehicles (or the other 2 billion around the world). Vehicles are long-lived capital purchases and they aren't going away any time soon.
Spending government time, effort and money on improving the synthesis of fuel from CO2 and water would help all of them. The fundamentals of the process have been understood for 150 years, but the oil companies have never had a strong incentive to commercialise them. The oil companies are rich and politically connected, but they also employ many of the best chemical engineers around. Whether you like them or loath them, pragmatically if you want to solve the problem of burning new carbon pulled from the ground then finding a way to have them as an ally who will benefit from the change, rather than an enemy who will fight you tooth and nail, is going to be more effective and quicker.
Personally I like the torque characteristics of electric motors, the low moving part count of EVs and their quiet interiors, but the fact is that there is a huge installed base of old-fashioned motors and a vast infrastructure in place to support them. If you want to cut the net CO2 going into the atmosphere then you need to cut off the source of the new carbon and force the market to pull the existing CO2 out of the air. Couple that with tight particulate regulation on new engines and the market will move to EVs eventually in due course, but in the meantime you can cut the net emissions of the billions of vehicles out there already.
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> Spending government time, effort and money on improving the synthesis of fuel from CO2 and water would help all of them.
There's a reason this has never been demonstrated at scale though and at the end of the day the process is known but it requires gobs and gobs of energy input, like absurd amounts as you scale up. Maybe we're getting there with renewables but right now a portion of that power would have to come from burning more NG. It's not a chemistry problem as much as a physics one. My feeling is Co2 synthesis is in fact another play by oil companies now that hydrogen has fallen on it's face. Remember all the oil co
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>> Spending government time, effort and money on improving the synthesis of fuel from CO2 and water would help all of them.
> There's a reason this has never been demonstrated at scale though and at the end of the day the process is known but it requires gobs and gobs of energy input, like absurd amounts as you scale up.
The existing processes are inefficient for sure (most e-fuel systems have about 45% efficiency minus a a few percent more for the CO2 capture) but the efficiencies have been improving over the last 10 to 15 years with a bunch of new catalysts and if this was a market priority then I expect that we would see even more.
> My feeling is Co2 synthesis is in fact another play by oil companies now that hydrogen has fallen on it's face. Remember all the oil companies saying they were gonna be hydrogen companies? What happened there?
I suspect that what happened is that people found hydrogen difficult to store, move and handle and it didn't fit will with the huge installed base of infrastructure, so the market rejected it.
> Synthesis processes are one of the reasons I have always supported nuclear power expansion since that's the type of thing you can do by having a grid filled with a glut of power on it, you can start pushing it towards lossy processes like fuel synthesis and desalination. Since there's no real movement on that front as of yet I don't think it'll be something we can rely on short term, long term it's got prospects
T
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There is also the issue of EVs in difficult-to-reach places. Oil based products also have a very high amount of stored energy per kg so transporting them is economically feasible. So your point about banning the wrong thing makes sense to me.
The real issue to me is that EU car companies only lobbied for the end of the fuel ban because they want to make short/medium term profits for shareholders. Long term the companies will have to change tack anyway, just at a larger cost and behind all the rest. I think e
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Remote places is a straw-man argument nobody is really making though, it's a rhetorical distraction that going to EVs has to be all-the-things-all-the-time-all-at-once, we're at like not even 10% of global vehicles yet? There's massive markets that would be greatly served by EVs before you have to worry about the remote places since 90% of the worlds population lives in like the same 10% of the Earth, they can keep gas for awhile because they are a vast minority.
We all know you make your big easy gains fir
Not this again (Score:2)
"demanding that cars use air-to-liquid synthesised fuels instead. "
I suggest you go take a look at the energy required. There's a reason nothing has yet supplanted fossil fuels - its because they're so energy dense. Unless you can magic up a 3-4x increase in grid power while will be entirely used up generating this stuff then its for the birds.
In a similar vein see: green hydrogen production.
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>We should phasing out the use of extracted oil for powering internal combustion engines and demanding that cars use air-to-liquid synthesised fuels instead.
It is absolutely not feasible, technologically or economically, to produce enough synthetic fuel to meet current demand.
Even if the processes actually worked at industrial scales and could be rolled out quickly and widely enough to even make a dent in fossil fuel usage, you would need to to also build out the zero-carbon energy sources to run those
choice (Score:1)
Does the government choose what transportation a person uses, or does the individual chose ? The CCP has chosen EV/trains as the mode of civilian transportation. That decision matches their political agenda. In the USA individuals choose ( except those in claustrophobic big-cities ) what/where/when/how they transport. Killing an electrical grid-point means nothing to the driver of a 1968 Tr-6 or Chevy Impala ... but given EV would allow government to control entrance/exit to parts of
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How much did they pay you for this propaganda piece?
1) Mention of big cities and calling them claustrophibic? Most people prefer them - and the bigger the better. And we choose what what/where/when/how we transport in these big cities - we just have MORE choices than those poor slobs in the hinterlands.
2) Killing an electical grid-point? Wow, did AI come up with unrelated and unexplained propaganda? Or is it a mistranslation from Russian/Chinese?
3) EV has nothing in it that allows government control.
Suicide (Score:3)
Retreating from electric cars will ultimately be suicide for US car makers. Electric cars are better in almost every way. In ten years, most people will come to understand this. Unfortunately, this understanding will come from people dying and not people changing their minds.
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> this understanding will come from people dying and not people changing their minds.
Except that dead people are not a great market demographic for car sales. The best vehicle for the "non dead" happens to be something like a raised F350. Sorry about your Prius.
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> Retreating from electric cars will ultimately be suicide for US car makers. Electric cars are better in almost every way. In ten years, most people will come to understand this. Unfortunately, this understanding will come from people dying and not people changing their minds.
Toyoda said BEV could satisfy the needs of maybe 30% of drivers. The rest are satisfied by hybrids and ICE. Toyota was criticized but they have been selling hybrids as fast as they can make them and their ICE sales are just fine. People buy vehicles that meet their needs best at a price they can afford.
Wrong (Score:2)
If you think Gen-Z are big into EVs think again. They're quite happy with 2nd and 3rd hand ICE vehicles. If only 20-30% of the new car buying market wants EVs then someone has to supply the 70-80% ICE powered ones and it won't be the chinese.
Retreating from BEVs. But what about HEVs & PH (Score:2)
In the US, year over year sales of hybrid EVs (HEVs) are up 44%, sales of plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs) are up 16.5%, and battery EVs (BEVs) are up 15.4%. While the expectation from industry analysts is that BEV sales will rise at a much slower pace in 2026 and '27, HEV and PHEV sales are expected to keep accelerating. So it isn't as if electrification is in complete retreat in the US.
Also, some advances with BEVs are trickling down to new HEVs and PHEVs, especially with Korean, Japanese, and European brands
Selfish and short term thinking bad ?! (Score:1)
So you're telling me that blowing the planet's future by cashing in on oil to bump up the economy just long enough to win votes in the next election is a BAD thing ?!
Whodathunkit ?!
Subsidies (Score:5, Informative)
Are we going to complain about China and their EV market subsidies? [1]https://subsidytracker.goodjob... [goodjobsfirst.org]
[1] https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?major_industry_sum=motor+vehicles&order=subsidy&sort=desc&page=1
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The US subsides all kinds of things, esp. corn an beef which by itself probably contributes to negative environmental and health consequences that surpass even wide-spread use of ICE vehicles.
Re:Subsidies (Score:5, Informative)
Are we going to complain about US subsidies of the oil industry? In 2025, U.S. federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, which primarily benefit oil and gas, are estimated to be at least $34.8 billion annually in direct support. This figure rose significantly in 2025 following the passage of new legislation, such as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which added approximately $4 billion per year in new handouts. Estimates of the total value of these subsidies vary widely depending on whether only direct financial support is counted or if "implicit" costs are included. Direct vs. Implicit Subsidies Direct Subsidies (~$35 Billion): These consist of immediate tax breaks, direct spending, and cheap access to drilling on public lands. Implicit Subsidies (~$750+ Billion): These represent societal costs not paid by the industry, such as health impacts from air pollution, climate change damages (externalities), and military expenditures to protect global supply lines (estimated at $81 billion alone). The IMF estimated total U.S. fossil fuel subsidies at $757 billion in 2022 when including these costs. Key Oil Industry Tax Breaks Most direct federal support occurs through the tax code: Intangible Drilling Costs (IDCs): Allows companies to deduct most of the costs of drilling new wells in the year they are incurred rather than over time. This is expected to save the industry $1.7 billion in 2025. Percentage Depletion Allowance: A centuries-old tax break that allows independent producers to deduct 15% of their gross income from taxable income to account for declining reserves. Carbon Capture Credits (45Q): Expanded in 2025, this provides significant credits for capturing CO. Critically, new rules allow the same credit for carbon used in "enhanced oil recovery" (using CO to pump more oil) as for permanent underground storage. 2025 Legislative Changes The 2025 "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" introduced several industry-specific benefits: Reduced Royalties: Lowered the fees companies pay for extracting oil and gas from federal lands to levels on par with the 1920s. Minimum Tax Exemptions: Allows oil and gas companies to deduct drilling costs from the 15% corporate alternative minimum tax, effectively wiping out the tax for many large firms. Methane Fee Deferral: Delayed the implementation of fees on methane emissions, previously set by the Inflation Reduction Act, until 2034.
Re:Subsidies (Score:5, Interesting)
What's to complain about? They're no secret, nor is their purpose. A government subsides a developing technology to offset the initial investment required for companies to undertake development, drive market adoption once they have a product, and establish a high market share and, ideally, market dominance for your preferred - e.g. domestic - manufacturers. Once that happens, a government will generally try to recoup those subsidies through taxation of sales revenue, and - in some cases - on domestic users of the product (e.g. the UK's plans for a per-mile tax on EVs). The size of the subsidy generally reflects their confidence in the size/importance of the potential market, and therefore their ability to recoup their investment. EVs are not the first market this game has been played with, and it surely won't be the last.
A government pulling those subsidies, while their competitors maintain theirs, is simply them saying they don't feel this market is going to yield a return on their investment because reasons, or that they feel the money is better invested in other markets with a larger potential for return. The governments that maintain their subsidies are simply placing a contrary bet. No, it's not a "free market" move. There never has been a "free market", so stop kidding yourself about it - capitalism and free markets have always been about protectionalism of corparate and national interests first and foremost, and always will be.
The real question here is which technology you feel will be the long term winner, ICE, EV, or maybe even something else entirely? Given that, which goverments are playing their hand correctly should be QED.