▲ 101 points
back
188 comments
The US auto industry under its pro-oil policy incentives is in for a disastrous long-term outlook in exchange for short-term prosperity.
At best, it’ll be a situation where the US market is segregated from the rest of the world: US auto consumers will be buying inferior vehicles from the rest of world that are more expensive to buy and own, since they will only be viable in the US market and will only be built in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
At worst, the US is setting itself for horrendous energy policy issues moving forward. Sure, the US produces a lot of gas and oil and will for a long time, but any sort of price shock will be leaving the US and its car-dependent economy destabilized while Europe and Asia power forward with an ever-decreasing dependence on oil and gas. The US’ endless energy wars will continue to serve as incredibly expensive endeavors that other countries don’t even need to engage in.
Just look at the number of nuclear power plant projects in progress in China. Comparatively few people in China depend on oil to get to work and travel long distances, and the amount that do is plummeting.
It is remarkable that a US company had an enormous lead in BEVs for a decade. Then they just kinda stopped innovating, and slid backwards.
At least in Europe, they were only the top seller for about 18 months (overtaking Nissan, then being overtaken by VW AG). Don’t think they were ever in the lead in Asia. That they had an ‘enormous lead’ in the US was more down to the paucity of options there than anything else.
Let’s not overstate Tesla’s lead.
BYD were breathing down their neck after a few years.
> At best, it’ll be a situation where the US market is segregated from the rest of the world: US auto consumers will be buying inferior vehicles from the rest of world that are more expensive to buy and own.
That's where we are now. Here's BYD's main model lineup.[1] Ford's CEO brought a few into the US, paying the insane tariffs, and has his executives driving them to see what the rest of the world is doing.
And Canadians will soon stop buying the inferior US vehicles (and Mexico already has), because Chinese EVs are now allowed in at only 6% tariff.
BYD are taking over.
US automakers are already unable to compete globally even within the ever shrinking ICE share.
Protectionism makes industries weak and uncompetitive, ultimately hurting the economy of the nation doing the protectionism. The proper strategy to become competitive is to provide a small amount of protectionism so that the industry does not die, but to ruthlessly cull underperforming companies so that only the strongest survive. The continual bailouts of companies, keeping old and incompetent executives at the helm, has destroyed the US car industry.
Capitalism requires killing the underperforming companies. Until we let that happen, or at a minimum cull leadership and boards, nothing will get better. The rot is at the top.
In what way are US vehicles inferior? I've been told from many in the country that Americans make the hardiest, most rugged vehicles in the world, and everybody is clambering to get them.
Nothing you wrote there makes sense, there is just no chain of causality in it.
Nearly 50% of vehicles sold in Australia in the last quarter were EVs or plug-in hybrids: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-02/electric-vehicle-ev-s...
A record for EV sales in Norway was set in 2025: 95.9 percent of all new passenger cars sold were fully electric, up from 88.9 percent in 2024.
Sweet free free sunshine down here.
BEV - battery electric vehicle
(P)HEV - (plugin) hybrid electric vehicle
ICEV - internal combustion engine vehicle
how many none battery electric vehicles are out there that we could confuse EV with that the B is required in that name....
I need to replace a 20 yr old Prius. I’d be a natural Tesla customer if not for Elon. All the BEV cars I like have been cancelled by their manufacturers. I want value and I keep my cars a long time. What should have been a slam dunk purchase has become disappointment. I’ll be buying another hybrid.
I'm trading in my 2018 Tesla Model 3 soon to buy a Rivian R2. It seems like the only real Tesla competitor actually coming to market.
The industry has managed a transition. Some European brands have partnered with chinese suppliers while integrating some research in-house. Some cars have a lot of features, cute look, and good price.
By features you mean surveillance and spyware bundled with locked down, closed source software aimed at restricting you as much as possible whilst extracting every last cent out of you.
Effectively no modern car "looks cute" or good. They are all stupid SUVs for soccer moms brainwashed by car marketing.
While I'm waiting for my Kia EV3 to arrive, I'm desparately trying to figure out which wallbox I need to buy to make use of V2H/V2G. Everything claims to be "ready", but I still don't know whether V2H/V2L will be DC or AC. Which protocol do my smart meters have to provide? What about the PV-inverter? How many apps will I need? How many cloud accounts? What about island-operation? Will I be able to use Home-Assistant for everything? What about feeding in the flexible pricing of my power provider? Another App/API? Which node in this hairball will have which role? Will the car decide when to charge? Or the App? Or the Wallbox? Or its App?
I'm drowning in theoretical options and I'm left with the feeling that everything seems to be possible in theory, but I won't find a solution that works in practice. There are just too many protocols and regulations at play.
Would have loved to wait another year until the dust around these topics have settled a bit, but the old car broke too early :( (sorry for the rant)
I wish the article was written in a better way. It throws put many percentages in different contexts. 50-26-37-41- …
Not saying any particular number is wrong, just wishing it was a clearer way of writing.
They're making the typical journalism mistake of trying to use prose for what would be better expressed in a chart. This is a pretty common issue with journalists who can write but don't know how to create useful and informative charts.
I looked at other posts by this author and they're all sales by month charts, which are totally devoid of context as they lack historic trend data. So you have to read words to find that out, and its a slog.
I have firsthand experience starting a news company and dealing with this...
Why would anyone buy a Tesla in 2026?
Best charging experience and best software experience.
Note: I do not want this to be true. Other companies please copy what Tesla has done with both of these. You’ve had years to do this and failed.
Price? They are quite cheap these days relative to comparable cars from other manufacturers.
Self driving maybe? I’m happy to be corrected but I think most brands don’t offer the full self driving package Tesla offers.
As a data point - in my market Tesla is the only manufacturer that makes an EV sedan, and has made them long enough for there to be used ones at reasonable prices (not a lot of people have Taycan money). Most of EVs, especially used ones, are tall and heavy SUVs that put driving experience as the absolutely last priority.
Did I actually buy a Tesla? No. But this has entered as part of my "which EV" conundrum.
Well one interesting thing is that if you want to buy a Toyota Yaris right now in Europe (specifically in Greece) the only options offered are hybrid. One with 116 hp and one with 136 hp. No petrol, no diesel. And only automatic transmission (a no no for me but that another discussion).
Now considering that Yaris is one of the most popular cars (if not the most popular), the increase in sales is not surprising
yaris would be the most popular only if you combined yaris cross and yaris together and those are quite different cars, otherwise yaris cross is on 6th place in Europe and ordinary Yaris on 10th, if you are gonna merge them then you should also merge first two places Dacia Sandero and Renault Clio since they share many parts as well
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/europe/2025-full-year-euro...
here in Czechia Toyota is fairly popular, but I wouldn't say Yaris is the best selling car model, the top 10 best selling models is absolutely dominated by Skoda, only 3 spots in top 10 made other brands - 6th place Hyundai i30, 9th Toyota Corolla and 10th Hyundai Tucson
https://www.cebia.cz/novinky/trh-s-automobily/top-30-nejprod...
btw. my mother has the latest Yaris Cross as well and it's horrible car for the money, the rear seats are unusable for anyone taller with very little space, trunk is very small, usable really only for 2 people, for the money it cost I would much rather bought Hyundai i30 Combi or Dacia Jogger
They Toyota hybrids are still gasoline, what's the objection to the eCVT? So long as we're still using combustion engines it seems like the best design anyone's come up with.
What are their sources? How are they defining Europe?
They don't seem to link their sources (that's bad) but the general numbers seem to match The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) report for H1 2026 [0]. They include EU + EFTA + UK.
--
0: https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations-5-7-in-h1-2026-battery-electric-20-7-market-share/Vehicle registrations.
I'm not entirely sure why you're getting downvoted. I wasn't able to find a source for the data but it is probably new vehicle registrations. Europe here seems to include Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland.
We own a Model Y and now subscribe to FSD. The car is basically done and I sort of see why Tesla isn’t bothering
It looks like Europe no longer hates Elon. That didn't last long.
does anyone have a data-backed reason as to why US market share has capped out around 10%? is it economics + lack of access to chinese EVs? range anxiety?
We have just about the cheapest gasoline in the developed world. Partly because we make it here, and partly because we refuse to raise taxes on it. (The federal tax was last raised in 1993. It has be 18 cents per gallon ever since.)
If gas were 2 to 4 times as expensive, as it is in much of Europe, there would be a lot more demand for electric cars.
It doesn't help that we exclude all of the new BEVs from China, which are considerably less expensive.
EVs continue to be expensive in the US. But the trajectory is the opposite in the rest of the world due to the benefit of Chinese exports. In Brazil, for example, new car prices have a now a discount of up to $10K, all due to increased competition from China.
I’d guess a greater percent of car owners in the US are working class. A lot of cities car modal share is like 85% or higher which shows how much car ownership is democratized in the US compared to asia or eu, where ownership might be higher relative income and more able to afford new ev premium prices vs cheap used gas cars.
probably gas price
Do their dashboards show ads? That's the foremost question in my mind after the BMW fuckup.
> Thanks to a number of factors (new cheaper models, high gas prices, mass arrival of Chinese models, etc.), EVs are currently in high demand in Europe.
EVs are in high demand in the EU because laws have been passed in every country and ICE are getting banned in many cities.
Chinese EVs did flood the EU not because people did want to buy chinese EVs: people in the EU were totally fine buying ICE cars (german, french, italian, spanish, ...) but the EU pushed for both legislation and incentives greatly favoring EVs over ICE cars.
It's IMO a good thing to push people to buy EVs. But the EU being the EU, of course they did it incredibly stupidly and managed to inflict great harm to EU car manufacturers and basically hand the keys of the kingdom to both US and chinese EVs (because in the EU we're led by treacherous dumbasses).
People can nitpick as much as they want as to what makes a great car: I do personally have a car from 1988 (38 and a half years old now) that, unlike chinese EVs, doesn't spy on me and that I could still use as a daily (I regularly use it to go, say, pick my kid at school). It's a gas-guzzler and it's not as safe as a modern car, but we definitely could have a talk about the actual CO2 of that car over its lifetime (which is far from done yet) compared to the CO2 over the lifetime of a brand new EV (and if we talk about chinese EVs brought by boat to the EU, we can have a talk too about coal usage in China).
The article could be summed as: "Yay, the EU caused great harm to its car industry and is now buying chinese EVs by the cargo load!".
I take we should... Applaud that great success!?
> EVs are in high demand in the EU because laws have been passed in every country and ICE are getting banned in many cities.
Can you give us an example of a city in the EU banning ICEs? (Not that I'm complaining, it's nice to have quiet cities with clean air, I just don't know about those)
> But the EU being the EU
The EU being the EU did the responsible thing and gave car manufacturers clear rules and a long timeline (over 15 years) to apply them; they also gave them the escape hatch of hybrids and PHEVs that will only be closed using the OBFCM in the following years. But the manufacturers chased fast money and refused to innovate and lower prices because they still made lots of money in export markets. Then China changed the rules, it became very hard to make money with ICE cars there, and then the mfgs complain about the EU and want to be saved again.
> Chinese EVs did flood the EU
There are tariffs on Chinese EVs, depending on the manufacturer, ranging from 27% (BYD) to 45% (SAIC). If the customers still buy a Chinese EV and not an european EV, then the European EV manufacturer does something wrong.
They may import the cars, but now they don't need to import the fuel.
Yes there are incentives to buy EVs but they are still much more expensive than ICE vehicles (I'm in the market for a new car so that is an observation from my experience)
Short term thinking in the EU and top it off Germany also got rid of their nuclear power plants, and then became dependent on Russian oil and gas.
You imply that ICE is banned when in reality many European cities decided to require that you stop polluting their city by meeting newer standards but a brand new ICE car would do that too today, the problem is always that people think a car produced twenty years ago (or like yours, 38 years ago) ought to count, because hey, by the standards of twenty years ago it didn't pollute very much. Standards change. Fifty years ago you could smoke on an aeroplane, today you can't! When my mother first went out to work it wasn't yet legal for her to have her own bank account, the money was hers, her ancestors won that right, she was an individual who could own things and not legally a component part of her father, but banks didn't give out accounts here without a man's say so. By the time she had me, that changed and they'd also banned employers from paying her less because she was a woman.
Amsterdam's current plan says they'll eliminate ICE from their city centre by 2030. I have no idea why you'd drive in central Amsterdam anyway, seems like a terrible idea - but if you insist on doing it after 2030 you'll need an electric vehicle. But that's not today is it? Things change.
Yes, Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle is in that order for a reason. It's good that you're continuing to use this old car while it meets your needs. A dense European city may well not want you there because the trade-off sucks too bad for them.
And while China does use proportionally more coal than Europe today and likely for the foreseeable future, like European leadership Xi can do the math. The problem I have with Trump is that I'm not sure he even understands the problem, obviously if he did understand he'd lie about it, but I'm just not sure he's even lying, I think he might well be too stupid to understand.