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jillesvangurp 13 hours ago

If you look here in Germany at the car companies, they are suffering quite a bit. Most of that has to do with EVs eating the market share of their legacy car business. VW, Mercedes, and BMW each make pretty decent EVs at this point of course. And there are a lot of even better ones coming to market soon from them. And they sell pretty well even. But because their legacy business is imploding, profits are down by very large double digit percentages. Despite this, the Germans are adjusting well. VW seems to be having some success in the Chinese market now (lots of China specific VW models coming out there). And BMW is gearing up to what looks like a massive range luxury EV (500 miles) that should be doing well.

EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.

The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.

Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.