Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with:
a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source
b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
Netherlands. And fuel injection has been a thing since the 1930s for Diesel and the 1950's for vehicles.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
You need both the right geography and a lack of either people or democracy in the place you want to build it. That rules out new large hydro projects in most of Europe.
And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
You can somewhat change the profile by price signals -- however if all vehicles are EVs there is a good portion of that demand that is inelastic. You will also need to be able to handle larger volumes of demand for faster charging stations and that entire effort of infra.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time."
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
2023 is better than 2020. 2026 is not necessarily better than 2023.
Shifting speeds abruptly in the modern FSD notwithstanding, what happened especially for people with HW 2.5/3 (circa 2018/19) is the change in behavior of adaptive cruise control and FSD -- you can go look it up. Essentially they "removed" a useful feature that let the car seemlesly move between the two -- I think because they didn't want to support the drivers "stalk" on the steering wheel anymore - new Teslas don't have it. So basically for me, SDV is not all that it's cracked up to be -- yeah and all that privacy stuff too...
FSD is great for me, although I mostly use it on the highways. But 90% of my driving is FSD now. It can be more conservative for my tastes with street driving
I also recently bought a Honda hybrid. I turned off as many of the data sharing features as I could from the first day I drove it. They don't make it easy, of course.
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
The Honda e was a massively compromised vehicle due to the tiny ~29 kWh net battery and high energy consumption. It was released in 2020 but in terms of utility it's really much more like an early 2010s EV.
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
That’s not really sufficient explanation due to vehicles manufactured in the USA, CA or MX being exempt, and yet there are no small vehicles being made and sold in the USA in any large volume (despite clear demand).
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
OTOH, it really looks like Toyota is Goldilocks. Most companies invested too much too early and had to write off a substantial amount, but Toyota is rolling into 2027 with a small but nice selection of EV's.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Observers and technologists have also consistently failed to appreciate the continuing value proposition of hybrids, and Toyota makes some of the best, top selling models.
My biggest peeve with hybrids is that it gives consumers the mistaken impression that they're going to have to replace the batteries in their EV.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
Hybrids are just amazing and SHOULD have mostly replaced ICE-only a long time ago. I'm going to cry the day the midwestern winter road salt takes my Prius away from me.
But it's not really increasing anymore, and the increase has been almost entirely tied to subsidies. When Germany and America pulled back on EV subsidies, sales dropped significantly.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving. But then, if it were up to me we'd all be driving manual transmissions.
Smart doorbells and thermostats that upgraded in the night often became a nuisance or an expensive brick. But a faulty software upgrade on a car can kill you and others.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
We've had software upgrades on cars for years now.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
The software designed car and continued price growth of automobiles is going to push them out of price range for consumers. Maybe Honda just wants to go out of a dying industry on good terms.
Could it be that the EVs they were planning were just out of touch with what the market wants? Their zero vehicles look butt-ugly in my opinion. They look like concept cars that are great for show, but no serious buyer would consider them for a daily driver.
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
> The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.”
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
I don’t think the title is hyperbole. Toyota isn’t giving up on
their long term EV R&D plans.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
“Many automakers have found that dropping batteries into a car originally designed for an internal combustion engine”. Reminds me of idiotic hybrid variants of Subaru and Honda vehicles that don’t have spare tires because the battery was slapped into the existing vehicle platform as an afterthought. Eg. Subaru forester hybrid. Car bought by educated, practical folks.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
Well, they just launched the Honda WN-7. It seems to be a commuter and fun bike. It has a limited range, so it's not a touring motorcycle but it does have fast-charging.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
I'm yet to see a EV bike that can be classified as a "fun bike". Not fun and impracticle compared to pure "inner city mobility vehicle" such as Renault Twizy.
They had a ubuquitious 100cc/9hp scooter called Activa in India. Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki are a drop in the bucket in EV scooter sales and Honda's offerings are the most hilarious.
Yeah, e-bikes with thumb throttles are so good that the only reason they haven't already supplanted motorcycles is that there are ten bajillion old unkillable motorcycle engines in use.
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
For the buyer: street legal electric motorcycles are outlandishly expensive compared to equivalent gas ones
For the manufacturer: you have to compete with significantly cheaper illegal bikes, in an environment where there is virtually no enforcement of regulation, so being street legal is not an advantage
Because e-bikes have effectively done regulatory arbitrage and the sky didn't fall. You want more people using small electric vehicles where before they would have used a car, you lower the burden to get one on the road.
Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
Hundreds of millions of motorcycles are still in active use with no real incentive to change
Genuine question, could many of them not charge at home? I own an EV and the number of charging stations near me is irrelevant to it because the 120V outlet in my garage is more than sufficient. My naive thinking is that an ebike is an order of magnitude smaller, so surely the same outlet would be even less of a limitation, right? (not to mention that many other countries have ~240V standard outlets)
Maybe the answer is truly "no, that wouldn't actually be practical for how people in those places live" for some reason, but I'm genuinely curious.
> Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
I was in China last year and one apartment complex I stayed at had a garage full of e scooters and bikes all plugged in to charge.
The streets in China are remarkably quiet now with so many electric vehicles.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
Do people really want "software defined vehicles"? People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
> Do people really want "software defined vehicles"?
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
If it doesn't have a screen or a network connection it can't do either of those things. I'm very eagerly awaiting the Slate truck for exactly this reason. A cheap barebones EV meant for hauling stuff and people locally.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
> People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
All the updates (so far…) have added features that I actually like. Things like Apple Music integration and even safety things like cross-traffic alerts when reversing.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
Is your point that the western car companies are doomed no matter how aggressively they jump into EVs now, and that Chinese EV producers have too much of a lead for them to recover, or that they have time to catch up later and can take it slow for now?
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
I think they can catch up later, spin off some electric project to build know-how without going all-in releasing so many models.
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
The EU regulations are in many ways built to prevent this kind of free riding, for the sensible reasons that if everyone free rides, aiming for excess profits on the short term, the transition doesn't happen and the Chinese eat your whole market.
If you want to sell cars in the EU you have no future without EVs. The fleet emmision fines are quite high already, will be much higher from 2030 and will kick in from 0g CO2/km from 2035, basically killing any ICE passenger vehicle. That's in 8,5 years.
The wind is just blowing back towards internal combustion for the moment. A couple years and they will shift again. Killing the whole research project would be dumb. Killing current models makes some sense.
Only in the US. The rest of the world, especially the undeveloped and developing world, is currently undergoing a car ownership boom due to cheap Chinese EVs.
Ironically, Trump attacking Iran and closing the Strait is a boon to China and EV makers. Once the car is produced, aside from lubricants, it’s completely independent of oil. Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
Sure, but increasingly less so as electrification takes off. And using less gas means you can redirect that to the other derivative products such as plastic.
Quick google math says you get 6 tires from a barrel of oil vs roughly 20 gallons of gas. Unless EVs mean you change tires every 300 miles or so I think we're good.
My ICE vehicles go through many more pounds of gasoline than they do tires. A set of tires is ~100lbs of material. 50,000mi of gas on a 30mpg vehicle is 10,000lbs of gas.
With where the Trumpists want to take us, tires made out of carved stone will suffice. Non-EVs will be retrofitted with a hole in the floor for your feet.
The biggest EV car is Tesla and they aren't good and tesla isn't a car company, its a finance comapny. Like Intel lost its edge because it became finance first engineering almost never. And no one wants a >$20k car. Disposable energy oil or not, manufacturers went nuts in 2020, and just kept pushing prices up and can't figure out why cars aren't selling.
BYD Auto is the worlds biggest, and their cars are affordable and their battery tech is evolving rapidly -- just recently announced batteries that can effectively recharge in the same time it takes to fill up one's gas tank.
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
Honda is an engine company at its heart. It makes very reliable, long lived engines.
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.
well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?
I assume you are coming from a US perspective, because smaller economical EVs are available in europe and dominate in asia. America car companies have managed to make a 50k+ truck the average new car purchase. They aren’t going to kill that golden calf voluntarily. Instead they have managed to lock out the competition. Why Musk elected to build another truck instead of the promised model 2 is beyond me. Besides, with EVs you really have to consider total cost, they are still slightly more expensive to buy in the EU as well, but you quickly make it back on fuel.
Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.
I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family
How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
Electric cars are way way simpler than ICE cars. It's just market segmentation gone wrong when EU car manufacturers wanted to sell these cheaper cars as premium/luxury ones (i.e. greed) and therefore couldn't learn the lessons from producing them at scale on cheaper models. China had poor ICE cars and bet everything on EVs, scaled their production up, reiterated a few times, and now Nio/Xiaomi/BYD/Zeekr are better than anything built in the EU.
I think the fear of low-quality and dangerous corner cutting is a big reason Chinese evs have not been even more popular in the EU. However as some brands start to establish themselves for longer they gain trust. Also we have Euro N-cap tests which are pretty extensive and lots of Chinese cars have earned excellent scores.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
I think this is a smart move, the EV boom is soon coming to and end. There is just not possible to make enough batteries or to deliver enough power, for all of us to drive electric.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Yeah, it's impossible. Also, China is making them too cheap to compete with, and in such quantity that they're basically dumping them and flooding the market. We have to enact laws and trade barriers to keep them out, or else we'll be drowning in them. Plus don't forget it's impossible to make that many EVs in the first place.
You are right. We don't need more EVs. Lets get rid of cars completely and built cheap electrified public transport. Make ICE cars illiegal. Going all EV won't help the environment. Going all public transport would.
Even in places where public transportation is very good, no bus goes everywhere or all the time, and trains are still limited to very specific routes. Need to go to the supermarket to buy food for your whole family? Not very practical on a bus. Live in rough area and come home from work late at night? Perhaps a car is safer. And so on. And this is in a city, it's even worse in rural areas.
Even as someone that loves electric vehicles and uses public transportation a lot, it's hard to get behind these extreme "let's ban X and go all on Y" views. It ignores how things work in the real world.
Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their EV technology into the e-waste bin.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
I live in a top EV market, Norway.
ICE cars have been planned out for years now, and something like 96% of all new cars in Norway were EV last year.
Basically, if you plan on keeping selling ICE cars, you're removing yourself from the market here. There's no future for new personal ICE cars here.
I figure most other countries will be the same.
> I live in a top EV market, Norway.
It is the top EV market.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
I still find it funny when it comes to oil between the USA and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia started moving the electrical system to renewables where USA is doubling down on fossil fuels.
Saudi Arabia is the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must were the USA consumes the crack they sell.
My next vehicle will 100% be pure EV, not Tesla.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with: a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
I mean - how are you defining most?
Most countries are quite poor and/or have small populations and aren't buying many vehicles period.
About ~45% of countries have smaller populations than Norway.
Most countries are not the China and India, yet they make up almost 45% of the global population.
The US and China make up about 45% of the auto market...
There's a lot of European, Asian, and Latin American countries that have more in common with Norway than they do with the US or China or India.
Ok, we'll replace 'most' with 'all except for Norway'.
At least it doesn’t smell ICE fumes downtown. That’s neat.
Most of the profits come from rich countries. And even then especially the more expensive cars.
(Personally I am fine driving a 10 year old shit box because for me it is just a means of going from A to B and rather spend my money on other things)
My daily driver is approaching the ripe old age of 30, my main reason is a lack of software.
I’m what part of the world do you live to have a carbureted car from the late 90s?
Netherlands. And fuel injection has been a thing since the 1930s for Diesel and the 1950's for vehicles.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
I understand the appeal. Do you use paper maps too or you have a smartphone on the dashboard ? That would be a bit cheating.
I know where I'm going :)
EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
Norway is a very special case in that it has massive hydro energy resources and nobody lives there.
Norway has roughly the population of the average US state. So I guess no-one really lives in the USA.
The crazier fact is that a hand full of cities alone in the US has a higher population than all of Norway.
most US states have a lower total population than LA county.
Let's put it more concretely: Norway has about the same amount of people as Alabama.
0.1% of the population is pretty close to 0% to be fair.
> hydro energy resources
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
Building hydro energy requires a very specific geography. You can't just take any river and turn it into an efficient hydroplant.
Not just a river, a river plus either an elevation drop or a drownable valley.
A river winding along a flat plain is not a hydro energy resource. A river in the same valley as your capital city is not a hydro energy resource.
You need both the right geography and a lack of either people or democracy in the place you want to build it. That rules out new large hydro projects in most of Europe.
Norway has really a lots of rivers with lots of potential energy of the water, since it comes from the mountains at high altitude (Fjords).
Some big slow moving river in a flat land on the other hand is not helping you here.
Solar and wind is cheap too, no need to attack the Middle East.
There must be more to it than this, or we'd have fantastic EV uptake here in New Zealand (we don't - EVs currently only have a 6% market share).
As other siblings have said, it's also very rich and offers mega tax breaks for EVs.
Out of interest, do you mean 6% of cars on the road of 6% of new cars sold last year?
More importantly it's one of the richest countries in the world, and has high taxes but big tax breaks for EVs.
And lots of bad conscious from all the oil.
And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
isn't that at least partially caused by the rubber tire particles?
Not Germany.
That's the plan. The reality seems different:
https://www.electrive.com/2025/01/09/norway-the-number-of-ne...
You're Norway, you don't count.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
I figure you're wrong on that one.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
Two points.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
Just gotta hope that slate auto is successful!
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
> Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
You can somewhat change the profile by price signals -- however if all vehicles are EVs there is a good portion of that demand that is inelastic. You will also need to be able to handle larger volumes of demand for faster charging stations and that entire effort of infra.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time."
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
> My Tesla is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
I've had FSD since 2020; the latest version is noticeably better than 2020. I wouldn't put too much stock in forums which tend to skew negative.
2023 is better than 2020. 2026 is not necessarily better than 2023. Shifting speeds abruptly in the modern FSD notwithstanding, what happened especially for people with HW 2.5/3 (circa 2018/19) is the change in behavior of adaptive cruise control and FSD -- you can go look it up. Essentially they "removed" a useful feature that let the car seemlesly move between the two -- I think because they didn't want to support the drivers "stalk" on the steering wheel anymore - new Teslas don't have it. So basically for me, SDV is not all that it's cracked up to be -- yeah and all that privacy stuff too...
FSD is great for me, although I mostly use it on the highways. But 90% of my driving is FSD now. It can be more conservative for my tastes with street driving
I just got a Honda Hybrid. It doesn’t phone home or do updates automatically, as far as I can tell, and I love this.
Actually it does do that. They sell your driving data to your insurance company & government.
I also recently bought a Honda hybrid. I turned off as many of the data sharing features as I could from the first day I drove it. They don't make it easy, of course.
Why do you need a EV to be a software defined variable? Maybe just a large enough lithium battery?
> software-defined vehicle (SDV)
I hate that expression. It's software-limited, not defined.
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
> they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement
See my sibling comment. Their moat is the scale and structure of their industry. Some parts of rare earth processing are dependent on that.
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
Dont forget about good old externally excited motors like what Renault uses, no rare earths needed.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
But isn't Japan deeply screwed if they can't drastically cut their dependence on oil imports?
Also going to suffer a demographic crunch, having fewer jobs in more advanced technology would suit well with a shrunk labour force.
Not to mention how adverse they are to foreign workforce
Or they're unprofitable and highly competitive.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-r...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/gm-stock-general-motors-inv...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/honda-to-write-off-15-7-bil...
Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
That's super good news, do you have any info on the name of the manufacturer?
IREL Limited and Sona Comstar.
Trafalgar will be the first large scale NdFeB magnet plant looking to start production in 2027
https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/trafalgar-sets-sights-o...
Thank you, I will make someone super happy with this news.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_e
The Honda e was a massively compromised vehicle due to the tiny ~29 kWh net battery and high energy consumption. It was released in 2020 but in terms of utility it's really much more like an early 2010s EV.
>Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless
Can you elaborate on this? I'd love to have a cheap small truck like they used to make, but CAFE largely killed those.
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
Cheap small trucks were killed by the chicken tax, not CAFE.
That’s not really sufficient explanation due to vehicles manufactured in the USA, CA or MX being exempt, and yet there are no small vehicles being made and sold in the USA in any large volume (despite clear demand).
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
There'll be a need to maintain sales if gas prices stay high.
EVs are going to be an extinction-level event for carmakers.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
OTOH, it really looks like Toyota is Goldilocks. Most companies invested too much too early and had to write off a substantial amount, but Toyota is rolling into 2027 with a small but nice selection of EV's.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
Observers and technologists have also consistently failed to appreciate the continuing value proposition of hybrids, and Toyota makes some of the best, top selling models.
My biggest peeve with hybrids is that it gives consumers the mistaken impression that they're going to have to replace the batteries in their EV.
Most hybrids aren't liquid-cooled (although that is changing), and the smaller size means that a hybrid puts a lot more cycles per mile on the battery than an EV does.
Which in practice means that a hybrid battery lasts about 100,000 miles whereas an EV lasts about 250,000 miles.
A Prius is an amazing car; a 300,000 mile Prius is often still in good shape and worth the expense to replace the battery in. Which means you might put 3 batteries in a Prius and then look at how expensive it would be to replace the battery in an EV 3 times and choke. But very few people are going to spend the significant dollars it costs to replace the battery in a 250,000 mile Tesla so in practice that's an expense you'll never have.
Hybrids are just amazing and SHOULD have mostly replaced ICE-only a long time ago. I'm going to cry the day the midwestern winter road salt takes my Prius away from me.
But it's not really increasing anymore, and the increase has been almost entirely tied to subsidies. When Germany and America pulled back on EV subsidies, sales dropped significantly.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
> But it's not really increasing anymore
EV's are a half trillion dollar market (20 million cars annually, average selling price $25K) that increased by 20% in 2025.
That's a massive increase in a massive market.
It's not the 50% per annum we were seeing earlier, but 20% of a big number is often more impressive than 50% of a big market.
Where does that leave GM?
Interesting they are actually launching EVs in India: https://bwautoworld.com/article/honda-starts-pan-india-test-...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
And what on that list is exclusive to EVs anyway? This whole article reads like a hit piece. It's amateurish.
trick question. all three
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving. But then, if it were up to me we'd all be driving manual transmissions.
I see what you mean but some features are great. The ones that stops automatically to not run over cyclists and pedestrians for example.
Also why manual transmissions for everyone ? It’s kinda slow and cumbersome. It’s fun to pretend play being a good pilot, but that’s obsolete.
Smart doorbells and thermostats that upgraded in the night often became a nuisance or an expensive brick. But a faulty software upgrade on a car can kill you and others.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Consumers have very little power in this space. Have you tried buying a non-premium car with physical buttons instead of touchscreens in recent years? There used to be hardly any option because carmakers all somehow decided this was the way forward, even though science clearly said it was making cars less safe. So if you needed a car and didn't have a ton of money, you could merely accept it. Only now that safety ratings started to include usability of key vehicle controls car makers decided to turn around again.
Toyota Yaris, a small budget car has physical buttons for everything.
A screen is cheaper to design and easier to modify. That’s the motivation for auto companies.
I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
Yeah, the only updates I want are map data for a GPS. And even then, go ahead and leave out the GPS and give me a dumb screen to attach my phone to.
What does any of this have to do with EVs?
We've had software upgrades on cars for years now.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
I expected better from the company that entered the EV market with an impressive aquarium simulator in its Honda E.
Time will tell, but I think it’s a long term mistake.
The software designed car and continued price growth of automobiles is going to push them out of price range for consumers. Maybe Honda just wants to go out of a dying industry on good terms.
You can buy affordable simple EVs in many markets. Not all EVs target the premium segment.
I just hope Honda sticks to making awesome motorcycles.
Oh I mixed up Honda and Hyundai in my head and panicked for a second. Were they even ever trying?
Could it be that the EVs they were planning were just out of touch with what the market wants? Their zero vehicles look butt-ugly in my opinion. They look like concept cars that are great for show, but no serious buyer would consider them for a daily driver.
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
Damn, the Honda E looked great.
Big Vintage Energy
Are they killing their EVs because of vibrations?
lol. Their new F1 engine seems to be a mess (I'm assuming you're referring to that).
Yes, precisely. /r/formula1 was not leaking here yet ;-)
> The large battery in an EV makes it easier to feed powerful computers, and it allows things like over-the-air updates to happen when the car is parked and “off.”
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
I don’t think the title is hyperbole. Toyota isn’t giving up on their long term EV R&D plans.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
“Many automakers have found that dropping batteries into a car originally designed for an internal combustion engine”. Reminds me of idiotic hybrid variants of Subaru and Honda vehicles that don’t have spare tires because the battery was slapped into the existing vehicle platform as an afterthought. Eg. Subaru forester hybrid. Car bought by educated, practical folks.
New Honda Accord hybrids do not include a spare tire. The manufacturers copied the idiocy.
For Toyota a spare tyre became on optional extra in Europe even on ICE models. They charge 200-300 Euro for having it.
Weird, they do here in Brazil (Hybrid Civics as well). Must be a cost or regulatory thing more than anything else.
This doesn't mention motorcycles
> For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 (FY2025), motorcycles accounted for about 17% of total revenue, while cars made up around 65%.
I wonder what the plan is for motorcycles, where in much of Asia cars aren't really viable and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
Honda is launching the WN7 this year. It seems like a typical Honda motorcycle: not for those obsessed with specs, but definitely a solid and well-designed bike. If I were currently looking for a mid-sized electric motorcycle, this would be my top choice for the same reasons people choose Honda for gasoline-powered motorcycles.
Well, they just launched the Honda WN-7. It seems to be a commuter and fun bike. It has a limited range, so it's not a touring motorcycle but it does have fast-charging.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
I'm yet to see a EV bike that can be classified as a "fun bike". Not fun and impracticle compared to pure "inner city mobility vehicle" such as Renault Twizy.
They had a ubuquitious 100cc/9hp scooter called Activa in India. Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki are a drop in the bucket in EV scooter sales and Honda's offerings are the most hilarious.
What do you mean by "hilarious"?
>and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
e-bikes/mopeds?
Yeah, e-bikes with thumb throttles are so good that the only reason they haven't already supplanted motorcycles is that there are ten bajillion old unkillable motorcycle engines in use.
It's a shame that US law doesn't have a nice in-between that would slot these bikes between proper e-bikes and motorcycles.
What's wrong with following motorcycle regulations?
For the buyer: street legal electric motorcycles are outlandishly expensive compared to equivalent gas ones
For the manufacturer: you have to compete with significantly cheaper illegal bikes, in an environment where there is virtually no enforcement of regulation, so being street legal is not an advantage
Because e-bikes have effectively done regulatory arbitrage and the sky didn't fall. You want more people using small electric vehicles where before they would have used a car, you lower the burden to get one on the road.
Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
Hundreds of millions of motorcycles are still in active use with no real incentive to change
Genuine question, could many of them not charge at home? I own an EV and the number of charging stations near me is irrelevant to it because the 120V outlet in my garage is more than sufficient. My naive thinking is that an ebike is an order of magnitude smaller, so surely the same outlet would be even less of a limitation, right? (not to mention that many other countries have ~240V standard outlets)
Maybe the answer is truly "no, that wouldn't actually be practical for how people in those places live" for some reason, but I'm genuinely curious.
> Ebikes definitely aren't a viable alternative in Asia yet. Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few. Range doesn't compare with gas motorcycles.
I was in China last year and one apartment complex I stayed at had a garage full of e scooters and bikes all plugged in to charge.
The streets in China are remarkably quiet now with so many electric vehicles.
Nope, they're increasingly viable. Nearly 10M electric scooters/bikes were sold last year, with the top three players being China, India and Vietnam.
https://www.motorcyclesdata.com/2026/03/11/electric-motorcyc...
> Most Asian countries either have no charge stations or very few
I think Vinfast would like to have a word with you…
Worldwide ? Seems so from the article.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
As realistic as Toshiba purchasing Apple.
Do people really want "software defined vehicles"? People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
1000% agree.
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
We do want software defined vehicles, we just don’t want automatic updates or cars that require an Internet connection to work.
> Do people really want "software defined vehicles"?
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
If it doesn't have a screen or a network connection it can't do either of those things. I'm very eagerly awaiting the Slate truck for exactly this reason. A cheap barebones EV meant for hauling stuff and people locally.
The thing can't even do OTA updates without you connecting your phone to the car's bluetooth.
A bezos car? Can we get a non oligarch car?
Do you know of a bank willing to make a loan for...startup capital in the amount necessary for a mass-market automaker?
Try Munro: https://www.munro-ev.com/
> Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable
Agree, but then how do you get people to change them?
> People keep repeating how Tesla keeps upgrading their software, but I don't really want my car to change every time I step into it.
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
All the updates (so far…) have added features that I actually like. Things like Apple Music integration and even safety things like cross-traffic alerts when reversing.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
I hate those narratives that if you don't jump on EVs, your future is doomed.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
Is your point that the western car companies are doomed no matter how aggressively they jump into EVs now, and that Chinese EV producers have too much of a lead for them to recover, or that they have time to catch up later and can take it slow for now?
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
I think they can catch up later, spin off some electric project to build know-how without going all-in releasing so many models.
Mercedes-Benz sells 9 different fully electric models and that ignores their trucks and vans.
BMW sells 9 different fully electric models across their BMW/Mini/Rolls Royce brands.
Volkswagen sells more than *30*.
I don't think western automakers can compete in any case unless they can either differentiate their offering or significantly lower the cost of core components like batteries.
The EU regulations are in many ways built to prevent this kind of free riding, for the sensible reasons that if everyone free rides, aiming for excess profits on the short term, the transition doesn't happen and the Chinese eat your whole market.
If you want to sell cars in the EU you have no future without EVs. The fleet emmision fines are quite high already, will be much higher from 2030 and will kick in from 0g CO2/km from 2035, basically killing any ICE passenger vehicle. That's in 8,5 years.
The wind is just blowing back towards internal combustion for the moment. A couple years and they will shift again. Killing the whole research project would be dumb. Killing current models makes some sense.
Only in the US. The rest of the world, especially the undeveloped and developing world, is currently undergoing a car ownership boom due to cheap Chinese EVs.
Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. EVs are still very much in the ascendant in the rest of the world.
The wind is actually blowing towards EVs.
China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/electric-vehicle-sales-i... Europe: https://eleport.com/ev-sales-in-europe/ USA: https://www.statista.com/outlook/mmo/electric-vehicles/unite...
Ironically, Trump attacking Iran and closing the Strait is a boon to China and EV makers. Once the car is produced, aside from lubricants, it’s completely independent of oil. Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
>Heck you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day.
The breakeven for this is so bad that it's only worth it for the gullible "wow" factor from the general public asking about it.
The suuply chain for repair parts is still supported by oil (freight, packaging, any plastics).
Better hope your vehicle is never damaged.
> freight
I know the US primarily uses diesel for its trains, but have you ever been outside of the US before?
Sure, but increasingly less so as electrification takes off. And using less gas means you can redirect that to the other derivative products such as plastic.
> you can put panels on your rooftop and slow charge it during the day
The real Mad Max will be roaming the apocalyptic wasteland in a Kia EV5.
Car tires are made with synthetic rubber, which is made from oil.
Quick google math says you get 6 tires from a barrel of oil vs roughly 20 gallons of gas. Unless EVs mean you change tires every 300 miles or so I think we're good.
My ICE vehicles go through many more pounds of gasoline than they do tires. A set of tires is ~100lbs of material. 50,000mi of gas on a 30mpg vehicle is 10,000lbs of gas.
With where the Trumpists want to take us, tires made out of carved stone will suffice. Non-EVs will be retrofitted with a hole in the floor for your feet.
ICE cars are still the majority of new cars being sold and it'll still take a while for EVs to become more popular.
That will change.
And it must, environmental concerns aside nobody wants to be beholden to oil prices ;)
The biggest EV car is Tesla and they aren't good and tesla isn't a car company, its a finance comapny. Like Intel lost its edge because it became finance first engineering almost never. And no one wants a >$20k car. Disposable energy oil or not, manufacturers went nuts in 2020, and just kept pushing prices up and can't figure out why cars aren't selling.
BYD Auto is the worlds biggest, and their cars are affordable and their battery tech is evolving rapidly -- just recently announced batteries that can effectively recharge in the same time it takes to fill up one's gas tank.
They are an unstoppable force and we ignore them at our own peril.
Honda is an engine company at its heart. It makes very reliable, long lived engines.
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
*edit for typos
Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.
well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?
I assume you are coming from a US perspective, because smaller economical EVs are available in europe and dominate in asia. America car companies have managed to make a 50k+ truck the average new car purchase. They aren’t going to kill that golden calf voluntarily. Instead they have managed to lock out the competition. Why Musk elected to build another truck instead of the promised model 2 is beyond me. Besides, with EVs you really have to consider total cost, they are still slightly more expensive to buy in the EU as well, but you quickly make it back on fuel.
Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.
I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family
We have blocked Chinese EVs precisely because they are 1) super cheap and 2) would wipe out our automakers.
Looked this up yesterday:
Inflation calculator site says 45% inflation since 2011, USD.
Denmark has 6M people. The US has 289M vehicles.
And how many new EVs did China make in the last 5 years?
How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.
Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.
> There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal
That was in 2008, which was 18 years ago. Comparing China in 2026 to China in 2008 is like comparing Japan in 1978 to Japan in 1960.
Electric cars are way way simpler than ICE cars. It's just market segmentation gone wrong when EU car manufacturers wanted to sell these cheaper cars as premium/luxury ones (i.e. greed) and therefore couldn't learn the lessons from producing them at scale on cheaper models. China had poor ICE cars and bet everything on EVs, scaled their production up, reiterated a few times, and now Nio/Xiaomi/BYD/Zeekr are better than anything built in the EU.
I think the fear of low-quality and dangerous corner cutting is a big reason Chinese evs have not been even more popular in the EU. However as some brands start to establish themselves for longer they gain trust. Also we have Euro N-cap tests which are pretty extensive and lots of Chinese cars have earned excellent scores.
China also picked up (from A123) and ran with LFP batteries which are inherently safer.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption
I also have some concerns about our grid, but not from EVs. AI is already consuming more 5% of the grid, more than twice that of EVs (~2%), and is growing far faster. I've seen estimates as high as 17% of the grid by 2030. Most EVs are also charged in off-peak hours when there's plenty of capacity.
> I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
This is not an issue, it’s the one the things that the anti-EV/baby boomer crowd throws out that is completely unsubstantiated. We have plenty of rare earths, America just lit their rare earth refining capacity on fire when China said they would do it for us at a much cheaper price. China doesn’t have a shortage of rare earth refining capacity, and they are producing most of the Eavs in the world as a result. EVs mostly charge at night when the grid is underutilized anyways.
China won the EV war a few years ago while the Japanese spent too much wasted time on hydrogen. Honda just doesn’t have anything to offer that BYD already does much better. That the Chinese auto manufacturers will slow down EV advancements and refinements long enough for Honda to make a significant improvement is a bit ridiculous.
I think this is a smart move, the EV boom is soon coming to and end. There is just not possible to make enough batteries or to deliver enough power, for all of us to drive electric.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
Yeah, it's impossible. Also, China is making them too cheap to compete with, and in such quantity that they're basically dumping them and flooding the market. We have to enact laws and trade barriers to keep them out, or else we'll be drowning in them. Plus don't forget it's impossible to make that many EVs in the first place.
You are right. We don't need more EVs. Lets get rid of cars completely and built cheap electrified public transport. Make ICE cars illiegal. Going all EV won't help the environment. Going all public transport would.
Even in places where public transportation is very good, no bus goes everywhere or all the time, and trains are still limited to very specific routes. Need to go to the supermarket to buy food for your whole family? Not very practical on a bus. Live in rough area and come home from work late at night? Perhaps a car is safer. And so on. And this is in a city, it's even worse in rural areas.
Even as someone that loves electric vehicles and uses public transportation a lot, it's hard to get behind these extreme "let's ban X and go all on Y" views. It ignores how things work in the real world.
Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their EV technology into the e-waste bin.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.