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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

> EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter).

It's not every quarter, but it's steady and that spells absolute disaster for US car manufacturers:

https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/q3-2026-ev-sales-report-...

US car companies have been protected and bailed out too many times and are now not only completely uncompetitive on the global market, but set up to be completely demolished as EVs take over.

Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency mean that either investors are going to pay a massive price, or US consumers are going to pay a massive price. If we keep on pushing up consumer costs by propping up bad manufacturers with protectionism and bail outs, the US's entire economy is drug down by that.

There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.

I hadn't followed just how bad US manufacturers were failing at EVs the past two years, what with all the other disasters unfolding, thanks for the wake up call. Two years of wasted time, of the US falling even farther behind... such a massive fail and yet not the most massive.

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It isn't just US manufacturers.

I'd say Koreans are probably the closest to the Chinese, but Japanese manufacturers have fallen behind. Toyota spent too much time with hydrogen. Nissan? Honda? Mazda? None of them have a solid lineup of electric vehicles.

I appreciate Toyota's hybrids, but that is not the future and every model year that they try to delay, they are missing out on developing the technology, experience, internal expertise, and platform refinement.

It's a shame Nissan didn't lean harder into EVs since the Leaf is a great little car, and they were releasing them since 2012.

    > It's a shame __________ didn't lean harder into EVs

That's the story with just about every "legacy" manufacturer because they don't understand the existential nature of the shift; it doesn't feel real while their ICE are still their money maker.

I agree, but I was more pointing out Nissan because they were relatively early with the Leaf which, I thought, was pretty successful.

Nissan has the Ariya (crossover SUV) and Micra (small city car), both of which have been very well received and are popular in Europe.

Nissan seems to be scaling back their EV push in the US, though — but not in Europe, as far as I know.

Nissan is also making EVs for the Chinese market, which are not being exported anywhere else.

Toyota didn't just spend (past tense) too much time with hydrogen, they're still going with it trying to take a "multi-path strategy" that includes hydrogen engine development.

I'm not sure where they think the market for this exists in sustainable numbers.

It's really insane. I live in Japan where you'd think Toyota may have some pull to make their dream come true. My city actually has one (1) hydrogen station, it's only open a day or two a week - it's basically only open by appointment, you have to call ahead if you want to be sure to be able to fill up.

Oh no, how dare a company try and invest R&D into a diversified portfolio of propulsion technologies. I'm sure HN has all the right ideas, just like they had the right idea when Starship was almost sure to beat SLS to orbit and full IOC a decade before Artemis II. I'm sure Morizo is crying after winning his latest gentleman drivers' race and wiping all his tears away with his paper yen.

It is genuinely insane how divorced SV is from actual people and reality.

I'm old enough to remember when people said 'Falcon Heavy is fake', 'SLS' is real. After that they shifted to 'Starship is fake' SLS is real.

And that SLS launched first isn't surprising it started to get 2 billion $ a year funding long before SpaceX had any money to invest in such projects.

And what matters for a rocket isn't 'first to orbit' that's only how idiots compare rockets. What matters is first 10 or even 100 flights.

And as for R&D, fine do R&D, but you still have to produce what actually sells. The simple fact is, hydrogen cars, either fuel cell or ICE are rounding errors. They have been rounding errors for decades and have made essentially no progress despite 50+ years of continuous government funding and R&D.

They are not just doing R&D, they have literally spend marketing money demonizing EVs. They have encouraged and leaned in to all government lead efforts to delay the EV industry. They have lobbied for regressive legislation. To act as if 'all they do is some nice R&D' is pathetic.

Toyota has not done like Tesla and invested in infrastructure, like hydrogen fuel stations. Because they know this is delusional and will never happen. Their hope has always been that government is going to build all the infrastructure for them, and pay for their R&D. They have been grifting government R&D money for literal decades. Even while with just a fraction of that money the EV industry was established. They have been lobbying Japans government for decades and have used that to prevent more beneficial R&D and infrastructure investment.

And Toyota is barley even selling these 'diversified portfolios'. Go and actually try to buy a hydrogen ICE or hydrogen fuel cell cars. In literally 99.9% of the world you can't buy them.

Hydrogen is a pipe-dream propped up by government budgets and anybody that believed in its wide deployment in 2000 was a moron, anybody that still believes in it in 2027 is straight up delusional. So if anybody is divorced from reality its you.

I have an insider friend that says they just don’t believe in battery electric and so have never built the supply chain for it. It leaves them searching for the next thing despite what is occurring in the market, they think they’ll prevail as they’re not focused on a (perceived) faulty approach. I’m not privy to all the details they have to reach that investment thesis but it explains a lot we see from the outside.

Toyota is the leader by profit, has been selling cars with batteries and electric motors for 3 decades and simply doesn't want to pile into a crowded space where you effectively have to be dumping your product at cost to have a chance of success.

While most others are wasting money on failed forays into the EV market, Toyota has quietly made their entire fleet (modulo trucks) hybrid.

At this point anyone can design a chassis to accommodate a skateboard battery and some drive motors. The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs. Admittedly this is a biggie, but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.

Yeah, my Toyota BZ is great.

> early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.

the iphone is an outlier imho, and i dont think EV will replicate this.

The manufacturing capacity of batteries in china will continue to be a dominant force, and prevent competition in other countries from really setting up properly.

Not to mention the chinese EV giants have the R&D budget to be the ones to discover new chemistry.

I think this might be more like a TSMC situation where the rest of the world is always behind.

China will have a critical mass of research, scientists, manufacturing, engineers, and the right government buy in to stay ahead because there's so much demand.

Nokia was the leader by profit until they weren't. They even experimented with hydrogen powered phones!

Yeah that's nonsense. Toyota is behind on a number of technologies. They are still making cars, but its the old style of cars in every aspect. They haven't done the integration of technology and the car the way Tesla or China has.

They are surviving because of massive scale but they are losing ground.

> The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs.

So the only thing they need is the hardest part of the supply chain. At Toyota scale building that supply-chain is fucking gigantic. It takes a decade to build that.

All the battery companies already have large multi-year of-take agreements. And they are not building massive new capacity without new demand.

> but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.

We haven't seen new form factors in many decades.

As for chemistry, everybody is working on that. Toyota has burned billions and achieved nothing.

Yes new chemistry are constantly coming in, but the reality is, each new chemistry innovation needs a decade or so to scale. And it mostly builds on existing supply chains and suppliers.

Take a look at things like silicon additives, they have been talked about for a long time, and it has been increasing. And it will continue to increase, but its not a magical pill that makes all existing battery factories obsolete.

Battery companies sell their new state of the art batteries to their long term partners first. And those partners are the first to learn of new innovations.

If you go look at used car prices you'll see that cars that offer dependability have good value retention. This makes the TCO lower than other gas cars. Toyota is basically the king of that space. They're "surviving" because they're synonymous with no-frills transportation. Even today if you drive long distances, don't have anywhere to charge and want something that'll take you to 100k with just oil and tire changes and is still worth something at the end, you can't really beat a basic Corolla or Camry.

Tesla is stuck with a cylindrical battery supply chain because they built that out. Basically their undoing since their cars are crappy enough where they need to compete on price alone. They give away their margin by buying 3p prismatics for their bottom end offerings. So being first can and does burn you badly.

That does beg the question though, if none of the major non-Chinese manufacturers are focused on EVs did they all entirely miss the boat or do they know something the Chinese don't?

Its absolutely possible that they did all miss the boat, but even the stats just in this thread point to a drop in EV sales and economic challenges with regards to price and demand. The Chinese keep prices low with very low labor costs and subsidies from a totalitarian government, our goal isn't and shouldn't be to compete with that on price.

> Chinese keep prices low with .. subsidies from a totalitarian government

Lower labour costs per hour can be balanced against lower cost of living for workers.

Industrial Policy Spending for China’s EV Sector (subsidies) have dropped from $13,800 USD per vehicle in 2018 to $4,700 USD in 2023 and are less today in 2026.

How do these subsidies compare to US subsidies to the fossil fuel oil and gas industry?

You backed up my point though, so thanks? The CCP subsidized EV production heavily, lowering it over time as I assume manufacturing facilities are in place, but they continue to subsidize to keep prices low.

The oil industry is irrelevant here and feels more like a whataboutism deflection. We can debate the oil industry, based on your comment we'd likely agree on much of it, but that's a separate discussion.

BYD subsidies ended this year and Xiaomi was never subsidized.

BYD subsidies have swung up and down over the years. Some years like 2020 it was a very small percentage of revenue and profit. Other years its been much more, 2024 they received just over 10.5 billion yuan accounting for 26% of total income and last year they received 12.5 billion yuan representing 38% of net profit.

The company would not exist as it does today without such funding.

China, for all its flaws, is the undisputed master of innovative automated manufacturing. They can iterate over design revisions quickly. They will build you whatever you want, and, unlike twenty years ago, it will be insanely precise, and everything that can be automated will be. US and EU automakers have to keep their unionized employees happy, which means less automation and less precision and higher prices. Robots and AI don't unionize.

No disagreement on the technical skills today. My point was simply that Chinese EVs are cheap, in part, because the government spends money to make them cheap.

And they do have plenty of flaws to call out, though living in the US today I don't want to throw stones in a glass house...

I hate to see it and I hate to say it, but the last time I was in Europe there were A LOT more giant american vehicles, at least outside of city centers. I really hope this SUV plague doesn't go global.

Are you a time traveller from 2010? SUVs are already the most popular kind of car all over the world. That ship has sailed.

I don't think that's true anywhere in Asia, except for maybe the Middle East.

One state makes up over a third of all EV sold in the country EV’s have a way to go in the United States. Hybrids seem to be doing a lot better in recent times.

California accounts for roughly 35% of all U.S. EV sales, though some estimates put its share near 40%.

That's certainly a way to view the data, but it's a way that ignores the trajectory of the technology and sets up The Big Three for complete failure.

The Big Three have not figured out how to make compelling EVs, without a doubt, but it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the leadership's product choices and failure of implementation.

Meaning that the entire industry will be pushed farther and farther behind in the race, only to be completely disrupted.

This will happen far slower than the transition from Palm to iOS-style phones, because the lifetime of cars is far longer than phones and are far larger investments, but the trend is inevitable. EVs are superior on so many different fronts that there's ~0 chance that gas and diesel engines persist except for a tiny fraction of future market share.

US manufacturers are trying to delay the transition as long as possible, which only ensures their own doom.

It's not just the Big Three, it's a boat anchor of the Big Three + Tier 1/2/3 suppliers. Tesla probably most vertically integrated of any, therefor most likely able to survive a major pivot.

It's not just US manufacturers. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, etc. are also falling behind on the technology, expertise, and platform development.

Koreans look competitive. It's interesting that the later the entrant to the market, the faster they are to adapt.

Vinyl is still doing great, better than CDs actually. Technical supremacy is useless, if the customer base wants nostalgia

Great against CDs because those were obsoleted by streaming. Streaming takes over 80% of the revenue and probably far more of the volume.

Your comment would be like if 85% of the market was EVs and you said that cars with manual transmission are still doing great, better than autos.

Well, there's that one US manufacturer that bucks the trend, so it's not _all_ of them.

California is the world’s fourth largest economy, so this tracks. Whether or not flyover country gets EVs is immaterial to the overall US situation. They can pay forward curve petrol prices if they so choose (“freedom!”), or find a suitable EV if that is a more suitable choice for their needs, unless federal policy returns to assist with purchasing. I am hopeful, concerning recent regime change, that federal EV incentives come back to enable folks to buy affordable EVs (because we should be optimizing for affordable zero emission mobility for all, imho), but only time will tell.

Wyoming‘s population of 600k people is less than one percent of total US population, for example. Californians buy about half that number of EVs per year (~300k-400k).

Flyover country has several times the population of California. It’s vital to the success of American manufacturers that their products sell well there too.

Nah. You go where the purchasing power is, and that is not poor rural America that is evaporating [1]. K Shaped economy. That’s related, but distinct from the fact that American auto makers are already dead. They collectively wrote off $50B in EV investment to turn away from EVs, and GM just created a $20B multi year stock buyback plan while not investing more in electrification. That is an active choice to allocate that capital to profits instead of investment to build EVs.

The future is affordable, well built Chinese EVs. They already have the capacity to build 50M EVs per year, more than half of global total light vehicle demand. They are currently exporting ~12M/year, and constrained only by there not being enough marine car carriers available to ship more. They are building more car carriers to ramp exports to the world. How long would it take the US to learn how to build 10-20M EVs per year? A decade, probably more, on current trajectories, during which Chinese automakers will continue to ramp. “Build the machine that builds the machine.”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586250

(the US sold out its future in this context for globalization and shareholder returns, unfortunately)

There are plenty of well-off people in poor rural areas, and there are plenty of wealthy urban areas in flyover country. California is an important market but it's not so important that the rest can be ignored.

Please provide geographic economic citations of where.

Here’s mine:

Interactive: Visualizing Median Income For All 3,000+ U.S. Counties - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-median-income-u... (blue is better, red is worse)

(assume 45k-$50k new vehicle price in the US, back out to the income needed to support a payment at current interest rates on a 5-7 year term, which is roughly $500-$1000/month, which is why auto loans are currently defaulting at record highs)

/r/dataisbeautiful: USA auto loan delinquency rate from 2000 to 2025 - https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ueked2/oc...

Los Alamos, in New Mexico :)

Seriously though, everywhere I've lived there have been at least some doctors, dentists, college professors, business owners and suchlike; even Mississippi has hospitals, or so I'm told.

Sure, I know and admit these people exist. I did extensive market research on the US EV TAM before being a late private early public investor in Tesla (~<$20/share), riding in the first Roadster to evaluate the product, etc, and even with updated models to account for socioeconomic strata that continues to bifurcate, I believe my thesis holds around who and who cannot to afford to buy new vehicles at current price levels (it’s definitely gotten worse than 15 years ago, for gestures broadly at everything reasons). I’m saying, broadly speaking, all of the purchasing power is mostly in urban areas, although there are some exceptions in the middle of nowhere as you commented. This does not mean we should leave Rural America out in the cold.

Fundamentally, if we expect Rural America to buy affordable EVs (which, imho, they will need to do, and we should crank on policy to achieve), someone will have to force them to be affordable. Allow cheap, high quality Chinese imports, or nationalize an automaker as they approach failure. But right now, Rural America is captive to a parasite US auto industry profitmaxxing by minimizing production and maxing their profits, protected by tariffs. You cannot compel them to make affordable cars currently, but if you don’t, Rural America is fucked.

“You can just do things.”

(no current TSLA exposure, out long ago around “420 funding secured,” but still own a handful of Teslas out of sentimental reasons)

We absolutely should not go down the road of nationalizing companies and means of production. The government already has too much influence and control over our lives, we don't need them taking even more by using their power to gobble up failing companies.

We should watch how poorly its going trying to have NYC own something as simple as a few grocery stores. If the government is stepping in to make things cheaper they're destroying competition in the entire industry. They either inadvertently end up owning the entire industry by driving out all privately owned companies, or they subsidize those private companies so they can compete with the state owned ones.

This is an opinion. Many people have opinions. Test it in the current sociopolitical forward curve. Obama nationalized GM, to great success, and he was a centrist (very mid in my opinion, but a statesmen with tacit, so respect where due). 100+ Democratic Socialists were elected in midterm elections. Therefore, I think forward looking, the appetite for this goes up overtime. Shareholder rights and cap tables are simply shared delusions. The shared delusion can change, when needed.

Mamdani has a ~70% approval rating, and a long list of wins, New York City is doing phenomenal. There is strong evidence this was a contributing factor in more democratic socialist being elected across the country (“Mamdani Effect”), including the mayor of LA. If you think it isn’t, well, you’re ignoring reality. That’s a choice. Do so at your own peril.

In this specific context around auto manufacturing, it is clear there is no competition, and US tariff policy is keeping competition out to benefit legacy auto management and their shareholders. We could flip the switch on tariff policy, and they would immediately have competition, but they can’t handle it. The evidence is clear they are already doing poorly for the US consumer, and they have no intentions to change.

https://newrepublic.com/post/217572/dsa-candidates-won-elect...

Old people, fond of capitalism, keep dying every day, and young people who believe in socialism keep entering the electorate. Only time will tell, but rough trajectory is clear. The time to prepare for the next election cycle has already begun.

Obama didn't nationalize GM as a long term plan though, at least my reason the earlier comment was a long term plan but that's my bad if I read it wrong.

Mamdani's approval rating is beside my point. My point was simply that we have a current example of a government in the US attempting to nationalize (well its in a city but I don't know what that form of the term would be) a portion of an industry and it already ran aground. The publicly owned version can be run not for profit, meaning it beats a competition in price. Either the competition all leave or the state ends up having to subsidize their entire profit margin so they can compete.

People can approve of Mamdani and the city as a whole can be doing very well under his leadership. That doesn't change the outcome of the grocery store program of the topic.

I do agree though, time will tell if this fresh round of socialism fairs better than past attempts. History shows it fails miserably every time it is attempted, if the US were to make it work they would be the first.

Let’s not pretend capitalism is any better. Better for some, but not the majority. Top 10% of US households hold 90%+ of US equities. Majority of Americans cannot afford basic needs on their incomes, and most of their jobs are low quality.

Typically, the people who complain about socialism and communism are the ones looking for a right to exploit others under an economic system for their own economic gain, as socialism and communism would cram down what these exploiters would be able to achieve while achieving a more solid floor under the poorest and most disadvantaged. A tale as old as time.

If capitalism is so good, why is everyone so unhappy and suffering while a select few get and stay wealthy, mostly out of luck and/or inheritance?

If we can agree that the US isn't capitalist today, I'd definitely agree that what we have today is no better than socialism.

Exploitation is always a challenge. As you said, those today often yelling for capitalism are actually wanting to exploit those not paying attention or small enough to he steamrolled. In socialism, its those at the top that end up exploiting the rest of the country.

It makes no sense to respond to this with a chart of median income. That tells you nothing about how many well-off people there are beyond limiting it to less than 50%, presuming the median is below whatever threshold you consider.

Here's a table of states with median, top 20%, and top 5% figures: https://beforeview.com/income-percentile/state

Mississippi, the lowest one on the list, has a top 5% at over $200,000/year. That's ~150,000 people in households who can comfortably afford a nice new EV, in just one small, poor state.

The states defined by the Census Bureau as being in "the midwest" (a subset of "flyover states") contain about 70 million people. The top 5% would be 3.5 million people who can afford a nice new EV. And this is conservative: someone in the top 6% can probably afford one too, but I'm not counting them, and there's plenty of "flyover state" territory beyond the midwest.

California is big enough and rich enough to have a huge amount of market power. But it's not so big and rich that it makes 100+ million Americans in the middle of the country completely irrelevant and ignorable.

That’s just what we need: more subsidies to Elon Musk via federal EV tax credits.

Limit subsidies to vehicles that are no more expensive than $25k after subsidies. Make them build cars like BYD, with sub 4% margins. No subsidies for Tesla, they had their chance. He can find a new grift. It’s time to focus on people who actually build, not those who use theatrics to inflate silly capital market numbers for power and status.

To be fair an absolute amount already does that. $6k less is nice for a Mercedes CLA (~$55k), but there's a reason you can't buy a Hyundai Inster ($20k) and get it within a year.

>because we should be optimizing for affordable zero emission mobility for all, imho

Cool, build rail and solar.

> Two years of wasted time

Try two generations. I think it was obvious since the oil shocks that fossil fuels were not a good bedrock of the economy.

It's interesting to try to work out what the civ-style "dependency tree" of viable electric cars has been. It requires at the bare minimum high energy density light batteries, which were a spinoff of the cellphone revolution. As well as high efficiency digital power control, which while not impossible in 1970 would have been larger and heavier without modern SiC semiconductors.

Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.

>Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.

But they aren't really. In terms of efficiency, a 2x increase is a lot yes but the thing that has finally made them really viable is simply the cost dropping like a rock.

I don't care if I have to buy 2x as many solar panels when they cost as much as a fence post.

That cost reduction was entirely investment into production capacity. None of that couldn't have been accomplished decades ago.

That's the saddest part. If we had been adults in the 70s, we could already be done the green revolution basically. We could have seriously prevented global warming.

But a bunch of idiots rejected that and instead voted for people who doubled down on fucking up the middle east and burning liquids.

I interpreted the "1% improvements" to be exactly that effect of cost dropping like a rock (economic efficiency), not about the energy conversion efficiency.

PV entrepreneurs are the real heroes of the climate movement, IMHO. They figured out markets that would have enough demand to push forward with developing the tech. Germany's government is a major hero too, they pushed the tech forward so far at a crucial time. Then China took up the mantle.

Both supply and demand need to build together for the industry to grow. Government subsidies played a huge role in accelerating this, and will have paid for themselves so many times over. We're going to live in a world of super-cheap technology thanks to the modest tax-cut-based investments of governments the world over.

It does suck that so many powerful people were against the obvious-in-retrospect good idea of solar PV, but I'd love to focus on all the heroes that pushed through anyway and made it happen. They deserve a lot of thanks!

The real heroes are still the boots on the ground climate/green/anti-nuclear movements of multiple decades that enabled the parties to be voted into power, that set up the subsidies which gave entrepreneurs an actual market, initial funding, public research to use and planning security.

As you said, subsidies played a huge role. Look at the timeline when Germany and then Spain set up their subsidies and the following ramp up in PV production.

Sure, it was an idea at the right time, but the right time needed decades of political groundwork.

While the entrepreneurs deserve some credit, they generally got cash. The movements got massive backlash by conservatives and some got terrorism charges for protesting non-violently.

Well, perhaps, but the time for the followers in the field to push on EV manufacturing capability has been the past 5-10 years. And the US majors are all followers, not leaders. About two years ago they all put out press releases saying "we are not seeing EV sales so we are pulling back on manufacturing" meaning "we couldn't figure it out and are scared so we are abandoning our future."

With the strangle hold that these industries have on getting the government to bail them out, we are in a really bad position on the national level. We have let bad politics and weak management override good economic decision making.

Full disclosure: I have been driving an EV for almost a decade. I use an e-bike too. Electric commuting is brilliant. I'm glad for the sake of air quality that EVs and e-bikes exist and are increasingly popular.

That said — let's be realistic and dispassionate.

> There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.

Inflicting job losses at that scale is not going to happen. US protectionism (a euphemism for ahem current federal initiatives) is alive and well. The legacy US auto makers have a huge domestic market and their survival is a primary motive for the US trade/tariff war. (Does the thoroughly corrupt administration face any comeuppance? That is a different discussion.)

The lack of EVs has not been a pivotal concern of voters. US voters want cheap fuel. Affordability was a fundamental concern for voters. The mid-term election result is not about loftier environmental goals.

> Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency

Yes, "an American vehicle" is known for grotesque size and high cost of maintenance. And now after two years of a despicable administration, "an American vehicle" is also a Trump-Miller-Hegseth-Bessent-Lutnick-Musk-*.arsehole symbol.

Even so, Tesla sales success is real, domestic and abroad. People who can afford them buy them.

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