{"id":89837,"date":"2026-07-17T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=89837"},"modified":"2026-07-16T17:10:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T23:10:31","slug":"the-american-e-v-has-been-crushed-will-it-take-the-u-s-auto-industry-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/the-american-e-v-has-been-crushed-will-it-take-the-u-s-auto-industry-with-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The American E.V. has been crushed. Will It take the U.S. Auto Industry with it?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The first sign of real trouble arrived two years ago, in the guise of an electric S.U.V. so new it did not yet have an official name. Fast and capacious, sleek and quiet, with plenty of comfortable seating and enough juice to carry a family 350 miles on a single charge, the vehicle was unveiled in May 2023, at a Ford investor event in the Michigan factory town of Dearborn. \u201cIt\u2019s beautiful,\u201d Doug Field, the head of Ford\u2019s E.V. unit, promised the audience. \u201cAnd it\u2019s unlike anything else in the segment so far.\u201d A \u201cpersonal bullet train,\u201d he called it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had good reason to be optimistic. Buoyed by billions of dollars in federal investment in charging infrastructure and a generous $7,500 consumer tax credit, the electric vehicle market in the United States had recently hit historic highs, climbing from annual sales of roughly 490,000 in 2021 to more than 800,000 in 2022 \u2014 an increase of approximately 60 percent. Many experts believed that the United States was now poised to enter the fruitful second phase of what\u2019s commonly known as an S-curve, in which early interest in an emerging technology gives way to widespread adoption. If they were right \u2014 and data from other parts of the globe suggested they were \u2014 the rollout of a long-range electric S.U.V. was more than savvy thinking. It was an investment in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet the project seems to have been cursed from the outset. Unlike many of the earlier Ford E.V.s, the \u201cbullet train\u201d was not merely a retrofitted version of an existing vehicle with an internal combustion engine \u2014 ICE, in the industry parlance. It was an entirely new car, requiring a large and complicated battery to match the vehicle\u2019s projected heft. In April 2024, Ford pushed back the sale of the \u201cbullet train\u201d by two years, to \u201cenable Ford to take advantage of emerging battery technology\u201d; that August, it confirmed it was killing it entirely. \u201cThese vehicles need to be profitable,\u201d Ford\u2019s chief financial officer, John Lawler, explained in a conference call with reporters. \u201cIf they\u2019re not profitable, based on where the customer is and the market is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, his comments went relatively unnoticed. But it soon became clear that Ford \u2014 which went on to retire the Lightning, an electric variant of its best-selling F-150 pickup \u2014 was not the only manufacturer to have suddenly developed a case of cold feet. In July 2024, General Motors said it was delaying the introduction of a Buick E.V. S.U.V., and the following September, Volvo dialed back plans for an all-electric lineup of vehicles that would have debuted in the United States. In 2025, Dodge followed suit, axing a battery-powered Charger and its long-anticipated E.V. Ram pickup truck. Two plug-in hybrid Jeeps were sent to the scrap heap in the sky, as were several e-sedans that Honda and Nissan had designed for the U.S. market. Acura pulled the plug on an electric S.U.V. built at a G.M. plant in Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cancellations accumulated at such a rapid clip that the industry press often struggled to keep up: Late last year, for example, MotorTrend published an effusive review of the BrightDrop, a cutting-edge electric van from Chevrolet. The cargo hold of the vehicle was \u201ccavernous,\u201d the magazine\u2019s writers noted approvingly, and the pedal feel supple. As for visibility, it was akin to \u201clooking out of a giant terrarium.\u201d The only problem was that the BrightDrop was no longer available, having been discontinued by Chevy two weeks after its press team dropped the thing off at MotorTrend headquarters. (\u201cWell, this is awkward,\u201d the article begins.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the carnage was far from over: Under the second Trump administration, the E.V. tax credit was eliminated and tailpipe-emission standards were gutted, which more or less instantly drove down sales of new battery-powered vehicles and encouraged the so-called Big Three \u2014 Ford, G.M. and Stellantis North America, the maker of the Dodge, Chrysler, Ram and Jeep brands \u2014 to refocus their considerable resources on trucks and plus-size S.U.V.s. Assembly lines at E.V. plants went dormant, and the battery plants that had sprung up around the country in the Biden years were unceremoniously closed or repurposed for other tasks, like the manufacture of industrial battery storage units. Thousands of workers lost their jobs. One of them was Doug Field, the brain behind Ford\u2019s three-row \u201cbullet train,\u201d who departed the company this spring as part of an internal restructuring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In purely financial terms, the combined cost of this industry about-face remains nothing short of staggering: This year, Stellantis alone was forced to write down $26 billion in E.V.-related losses. (Ford reported a slightly less ghastly $19 billion loss.) But somehow, it\u2019s the long-term repercussions that look worse. \u201cThe way I\u2019d put it,\u201d the auto journalist Martin Padgett told me recently, \u201cis that we pulled a U-turn while the rest of the world was pushing forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based policy group, one of every four vehicles sold globally in 2025 was battery-powered. Analysts with Bloomberg have predicted that in the next decade, that number will more than double, putting gas-powered cars \u2014 for the first time ever \u2014 in the minority of overall new vehicle sales. Overseas, Asian and European manufacturers have spent years preparing for this eventuality, dumping billions into the development of battery technology. With predictable results: China now makes 75 percent of all E.V.s sold anywhere on earth. (The United States makes around 5 percent.) Many of those vehicles are produced by BYD, a Chinese company that recently became the largest manufacturer of battery-powered cars in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAlready, the technological gap is getting dangerously wide,\u201d says Stephen Ezell, a senior economist with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, or I.T.I.F., a Washington-based nonprofit. \u201cToday, China can get a new E.V. from blueprint to launch about 33 percent faster than a U.S. company, give or take. But that will accelerate, right? The speed of innovation, the speed of the production cycles at these foreign companies, is just going to get faster and faster. And at some point, the gap will get pretty close to fully impossible for American automakers to close.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Detroit, the timing could not be worse. Since the 1960s, the U.S. auto industry\u2019s once-dominant stake in the domestic car business has been slowly chewed up by foreign manufacturers, sinking from a near monopoly of 92 percent in 1965 to 46 percent in 2015. As of 2024, Ezell estimates, only a third of new cars purchased in the United States were built by the Big Three. The E.V. revolution was seen by its proponents as a way to reverse that trend. It was an opportunity for Detroit to rediscover its capacity for ingenuity and to re-establish credibility in an industry it helped to create.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, whipsawed back and forth by shifting political headwinds and afflicted by all manner of self-enforced error, it appears to be in the process of sealing its own doom \u2014 at the precise moment interest in E.V.s is surging in the United States. In April, the analytics firm JD Power conducted a survey showing that 26 percent of prospective buyers in the United States were \u201cvery likely\u201d to consider an E.V. for their next car. And that was before the chaos in the Strait of Hormuz helped push the price of unleaded gasoline to a four-year high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve reached a genuinely existential moment,\u201d Ezell told me. In a best-case scenario, Detroit manages to meet it by crafting a viable, long-term E.V. strategy while also servicing the still dependably lucrative existing market for ICE trucks. In the worst, it retreats onto what the economist Susan Helper calls a \u201cshrinking island of ICE,\u201d churning out outlandishly large trucks and not much else. At which point, the obsolescence of the mighty U.S. automobile industry \u2014 a sector once inextricably associated with American know-how and economic might \u2014 would be all but guaranteed. As Ford\u2019s chief executive, Jim Farley, recently acknowledged in a statement that could apply to any member of the Big Three, \u201cIf we don\u2019t put our chips on the right number and the right color, Ford could maybe not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIs Detroit resigned to its fate? Has it accepted the role of subordinate in the world of cars?\u201d Somewhat remarkably, these lines were not published this year but nearly half a century ago, in 1983, in the last chapter of a book called \u201cThe Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry.\u201d Its author was the legendary journalist Brock Yates; the eerily resonant topic was the threat posed by a new breed of fuel-efficient Asian sedan \u2014 in this case, the Honda Accord, which would go on to become one of the most popular vehicles ever sold in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Yates, there was little question that the Accord was deserving of its popularity. The vehicle was a \u201cmasterpiece,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe ne plus ultra of small cars.\u201d But he was far more interested in the Big Three\u2019s reaction to its release, which he characterized as alternately cocky and flat-footed. Trapped in their corner offices, coasting on the fumes of earlier successes, many executives had hoped that Americans would eventually go back to their preference for heavy gas guzzlers. By the time they realized their error, Yates argued, Detroit had found itself in a position analogous to today: lapped by outsiders, left flailing in the wake of technological advances and cultural currents that it should have anticipated \u2014 forced to play catch-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI remember it as basically all the stages of grief,\u201d says Helper, who wrote her 1987 doctoral dissertation at Harvard on the rise of the Japanese auto industry. Denial \u2014 how could the collective experience of Detroit come up short against an overseas rival? Then anger. Why would anyone in their right mind prefer a small car to a full-size one? Then bargaining, in the form of a few ill-considered sedans designed to compete with the Accord and subsequently rejected by consumers for being too pricey, too ugly and far too slow. Sales of imports, meanwhile, were rising every year, as Honda and another Japanese powerhouse, Toyota, established a bigger foothold in the U.S. market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the Big Three \u2014 and to the American public \u2014 this was unacceptable. Detroit had long been the defining force in American industry, contributing billions of dollars to the domestic economy and regularly making up close to 5 percent of the annual G.D.P. \u201cWhen you think about it, it was the original American start-up,\u201d Ezell says. \u201cI mean, look at what it unleashed in our society: The Interstate highway system, the rise of the suburbs and so on. That\u2019s the coming-of-age story of our entire country.\u201d It was a machine that had remade cities and towns, lifted millions of Americans into the middle class and fueled an array of downstream industries, from steelwork to the manufacture of radial tires and antennas. It would have to be preserved, and the U.S. government would have to help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1980s, under pressure from Detroit, President Ronald Reagan negotiated a \u201cvoluntary\u201d quota that restricted the number of Japanese imports that could be sold in the United States; he also gave Toyota and Honda permission to build a few factories in America, providing they were staffed by local workers. In addition to stemming the loss of American jobs, these moves were designed to buy time for the domestic auto industry \u2014 to allow executives to study (and ideally, to ape) how the Japanese were able to produce their vehicles so efficiently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even with the assist from the White House, Detroit was never able to recover anything like its previous market clout. In the United States, unlike Asia, manufacturers had to contend with a layered corporate bureaucracy that hindered innovation. More than that, they had to contend with their own history. In a paper on the convulsions of the era, Helper noted that \u201cproblems of perception \u2014 or of the failure to recognize that the world is changing \u2014 flow from the fact that senior managers tend to become overly reliant on the mental models and beliefs that undergirded the firm\u2019s success in the first place.\u201d A well-grooved track can transform, with enough traffic, into a rut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the 1990s, sales figures continued to slide, as more foreign automakers targeted U.S. consumers \u2014 Nissan, BMW, a Korean newcomer called Kia, all apparently more in tune with what Americans wanted than the American companies themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What recovery there was for Detroit came in fits and starts. The Dodge Neon, introduced in 1994, was a smart and cheap clone of the top-selling Honda Civic subcompact and a certified hit, generating millions in revenue. (\u201cThe Japanese, then, had created a new American auto industry,\u201d the authors Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White quipped in \u201cComeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry.\u201d \u201cIn the end, Detroit decided to join in.\u201d) And an investment in the growing market in pickups, along with a focus on \u201cshared platform\u201d vehicles \u2014 cars and trucks that used the same underlying architecture, thus reducing production costs \u2014 helped the Big Three hit record profits in 2000. Still, despite the stockpiles of cash it was accumulating, Detroit entered the new millennium in a defensive crouch, low on innovation and lower still on daring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For every Ford Focus \u2014 a compact car that sold well both domestically and overseas, through a partnership with the Japanese company Mazda \u2014 there was an embarrassing stumble, like the Dodge Avenger, a cartoonishly proportioned, strangely underpowered pseudo-muscle car introduced in the European market in 2007 with predictable results. Rather than choosing to refine their export strategy or encouraging their engineers to think more creatively, the Big Three responded to these setbacks, as they would in 2024, by pouring more capital into trucks and S.U.V.s. \u201cBasically, the paragons of the American vehicle \u2014 the sort of products that manage to persist even in the midst of financial messes and industry catastrophes,\u201d says Martin Padgett, the auto reporter. \u201cIt was blinkered thinking, of course. It was an attempt to maximize profits.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The downsides of the approach became abundantly clear in the mid-2000s, when a global energy crisis drove up the price of gas. To many American consumers, all those heavy trucks were no longer so appealing \u2014 not if they were going to cost a day\u2019s pay to fill up. Sales of new S.U.V.s and pickups slid precipitously. And there was little diversification to offset the losses: Of the small handful of sedans and subcompacts that Detroit was still making, many had been plagued with wiring and engine issues, requiring sweeping, expensive recalls to rectify. (Today, the Big Three have all but fully ceded the category to foreign manufacturers.) The rest were blandly designed, their cabins lined with cheap and coarse plastics. \u201cWhat we were seeing, I\u2019d argue, was the \u2018enshittification\u2019 of American vehicles,\u201d Padgett told me, referring to a term coined by the technologist Cory Doctorow to describe a purposeful, profit-minded degradation in product quality. \u201cWe were being told to expect and accept less.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, it took the financial crisis of 2008, and the ensuing global recession, to truly push Detroit to the brink. Americans stopped spending; reasonable auto loans were close to impossible to find. In a single year, sales of new cars in the United States fell by an astonishing 40 percent. Facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy, the Big Three chief executives traveled to Washington to plead for federal assistance. (They opted to fly private, a tragicomic detail that did not go unignored by journalists or lawmakers.) Not everyone was in a listening mood. As the presidential hopeful Mitt Romney wrote in a now-famous editorial in The Times, there were plenty of good reasons to turn the executives away. Assenting to a bailout, argued Romney, the Michigan-born son of a former auto industry exec, was practically a guarantee that \u201cautomakers will stay the course \u2014 the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Romney, the solution was obvious: Allow the Big Three to go broke and push them to rebuild more wisely. \u201cThe federal government,\u201d Romney wrote, \u201cshould invest substantially more in basic research \u2014 on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like \u2014 that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Romney wasn\u2019t in Congress. He didn\u2019t get a vote. And in late 2008, after months of pitched debate on Capitol Hill, President George W. Bush authorized the use of Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to bail out the automakers. G.M. and Chrysler were forced into a structured bankruptcy, and Washington allocated $17.4 billion to keep them afloat. (Ford was in better shape, having mortgaged its assets ahead of the financial crisis.) An estimated 1.5 million jobs were preserved; sales gradually rebounded as automakers were pushed to embrace more fuel-efficient options. \u201cThe auto industry has proved that any comeback is possible,\u201d President Barack Obama, who tied ongoing federal support for the Big Three to a commitment to fuel efficiency, said in 2012. \u201cAnd by the way, so has Motor City.\u201d Unfortunately, the comeback proved short-lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February 2008, several months before the Big Three chief executives threw themselves on the mercy of the federal government, a Silicon Valley start-up called Tesla unveiled its inaugural E.V., which it named the Roadster. Effectively a Lotus Elise sports coupe with an electric motor in place of the original four-cylinder engine, the car was far from the first E.V. to be built in America: As early as the late 19th century, inventors had been experimenting with battery-powered people carriers. But it was, as the car site Edmunds noted, \u201cthe first car to prove that electric power and high performance need not be mutually exclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Roadster had a range of 220 miles and traveled from a standstill to 60 m.p.h. in about six seconds. The handling was supple, the torque neck-jerking. (Quite literally: Many of the early articles on the car likened the driving experience to being strapped into the cockpit of a fighter jet.) More important, it had curb appeal. If the Toyota Prius resembled a hyphen on wheels, the Roadster was Ferrari-pretty, with swooping curves, an aggressive stance and a removable targa top. You could picture yourself piloting it through the undulating switchbacks of a slot canyon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No matter, as Elon Musk later admitted, that the car \u201cdidn\u2019t really work.\u201d (As with many first-generation E.V.s, the software was cantankerous, the reliability abysmal.) Nor that the price tag \u2014 $150,000 in today\u2019s dollars \u2014 was out of reach for most consumers. The Roadster was a statement piece: an advertisement for the E.V. industry writ large. And in subsequent years, Tesla used what it learned in making the Roadster to develop the considerably more affordable Model S \u2014 a sedan, as the cognoscenti at Top Gear magazine had it, that \u201calmost single-handedly forced mainstream manufacturers to embrace electricity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2012, Tesla sold fewer than 3,000 Model S sedans. In 2013, aided by a drumbeat of positive press \u2014 including the top prize in MotorTrend\u2019s Car of the Year awards, a first for an E.V. \u2014 it sold more than 22,000. Other early E.V.s, like the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf, proved more popular still, to the extent that G.M. had to revise its production capacity to keep up with demand. And the fuel-efficient Toyota Prius \u2014 a hybrid that paired an ICE powertrain with an electric motor \u2014 surpassed 200,000 in U.S. sales for the second year in the row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Encouraged by the consumer response, the Obama administration proposed creating a $2 billion Energy Security Trust to fund the development of non-ICE vehicles. \u201cWith more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil,\u201d said Obama, who predicted that by 2015, the United States would \u201cbecome the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his second term in office, production and sales of E.V.s did indeed climb steadily, flattening temporarily when fuel prices stabilized and reaching a respectable 1 percent of the total U.S. new car market in 2016. But it wasn\u2019t until 2018 that the millionth E.V. was finally sold in the United States \u2014 by which point the dynamics of the global market had been all but set. Even with the temporary boost engendered by the Biden administration\u2019s $7,500 tax credit, American E.V. adoption, according to Pew, has repeatedly lagged behind the international average of 25 percent of new car sales \u2014 to say nothing of the 53 percent recorded by China, or the 68 percent in Nepal. Last year, 97 percent of all vehicles sold by dealers in Norway were electric. The United States has stalled out at 10 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most straightforward explanation for the discrepancy can be found in an innovative paper published in 2024 in Green Energy and Intelligent Transportation, a peer-reviewed journal. Titled \u201cBarriers and Motivators to the Adoption of Electric Vehicles: A Global Review,\u201d the meta-analysis illustrated what compels new-car buyers to go electric \u2014 and the fears, including \u201crange anxiety,\u201d that kept them away. Tellingly, regardless of region and nationality, consumers were far more likely to buy an E.V. if reliable incentive programs were in place. Hence the rates of adoption in a place like Norway, which has long offered E.V. subsidies \u2014 and the comparably pitiful numbers in the United States, which adopted its own federal incentive program only to retract it three years later, leaving both consumers and manufacturers in the lurch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Executives are \u201cessentially being asked to maneuver a giant warship in a space that changes every four years, if not every four days, in terms of tariffs,\u201d says Helper, the economist. For an industry that thinks in specific increments of time, that\u2019s a recipe for disaster. \u201cMost legacy automakers put a business case together up to four years ahead of launch, based on how many cars they expect to sell and the price of goods and labor,\u201d says Adam Bernard, a former G.M. strategist and the founder of AutoPerspectives, a Michigan-based consultancy. \u201cYou\u2019re anticipating what everything will cost and where the vehicle will be assembled. The price of steel. The price of computer chips. You\u2019re making a bet, but it\u2019s an educated bet. You have to be able to gauge where things are headed to get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And you have to do it in an environment almost comically disadvantaged to widespread E.V. adoption. The United States comprises roughly four million square miles of forest, desert and farmland, strung together by 4.1 million miles of paved road and an uncountable number of winding dirt lanes, making the construction of a national charging network considerably more difficult than it would be in a smaller country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you think the longest distance you\u2019re going to drive on a regular basis is 50 miles,\u201d Helper says, \u201cyou might not worry as much about that. But if you\u2019re regularly commuting sizable distances, like a lot of Americans, your anxiety about battery life is going to be heightened.\u201d Especially when the alternative \u2014 an ICE vehicle \u2014 can run on fuel that is often not only more readily available than a charging station but also deeply discounted courtesy of a variety of indirect governmental subsidies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, Helper told me, \u201cI think that sometimes people overlook what we\u2019re up against here. If you\u2019re an automaker, you\u2019re basically starting out with one hand tied behind your back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, a group of researchers combed through new E.V. registrations in the United States and discovered that from 2012 to 2023, close to half of them had been logged in the 10 most Democratic counties in the country, while a third were made by buyers in ultraliberal enclaves like California\u2019s Bay Area and Cambridge, Mass. \u201cHere\u2019s where my pessimism comes from,\u201d says Nate Jensen, a University of Texas professor who studies the auto industry. \u201cWe had a rush of early adopters, right? They lived in cities. They were tech savvy. But now you\u2019re asking: Well, OK, how do you get to the more marginal consumer, without any incentives? How do I persuade a person with range anxiety, or who\u2019s worried about paying an electrician to rewire their house for the right charger?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To a large degree, the answer may reside with cost: In 2026, many E.V.s sold in the United States are considerably pricier than the typical ICE car. But the more investment Detroit makes in battery technology, and the more it experiments with purpose-built E.V.s, rather than modified ICE cars, the cheaper those vehicles will become. If some sort of price parity can be achieved, as it has been in Asia and Europe \u2014 and if prices at the pump keep yo-yoing \u2014 the hesitancy of many holdouts is likely to erode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI talk to a lot of car dealers, a lot of automakers in the U.S.,\u201d says Scott Case, the chief executive of Recurrent, an E.V. analytics company. \u201cAnd I think all of them would agree with the statement that we\u2019re headed toward a fully electric future.\u201d Good E.V.s, he pointed out, are superior products to ICE cars in nearly every way: They accelerate faster; they\u2019re quieter; maintenance costs are lower. \u201cThe debate isn\u2019t about that,\u201d he went on. \u201cThe debate is about the rate at which we\u2019ll get there. The whole globe is aimed in one direction.\u201d Which to Case demonstrates that market receptivity is less of a lasting problem than the quality of the cars themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next time you\u2019re driving on the highway, take a tally of the E.V.s hurtling past you. Many will be built by Tesla. A few by Rivian, a California-based start up. But a surprising number will most likely carry the badge of Hyundai, a Korean automaker that last year sold twice as many E.V.s in the United States as Ford, thanks in large part to several reasonably priced offerings, like the $35,000 Ioniq 5 compact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s funny to me, because if you look at U.S. sales right now, the single hottest category in E.V.s is the three-row, full-size electric S.U.V.,\u201d Case said, laughing, when I brought up the three-row \u201cbullet train\u201d unveiled by Doug Field at the Ford investor event in 2023. \u201cThe Kia EV9 is totally crushing it. Toyota and Subaru are both rushing out new three-row competitors. And the most desirable cars in the used E.V. market are the Tesla Model X and the three-row Model Y,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLook, I don\u2019t envy the job of the planners for these manufacturers,\u201d he continued. \u201cBut it just feels to me like the Big Three have been so overreactive to the government swings and overreactive to small demand shifts \u2014 when, really, if they had just picked a path and stuck with it, and hadn\u2019t jammed the rudder to one side, they would have been a whole lot better off.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predicting the downfall (or resurgence) of the Big Three is practically a national sport. There should be a semiannual award devoted to it. In addition to Brock Yates\u2019s \u201cThe Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry\u201d (1983) and Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White\u2019s \u201cComeback\u201d (1994), there is Micheline Maynard\u2019s \u201cThe End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market\u201d (2003), Kenneth Whyte\u2019s \u201cThe Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise\u201d (2021), as well as \u201cWrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete\u201d (2019), by the sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz. Throw in \u201cAmerican Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company\u201d \u2014 the reporter Bryce G. Hoffman\u2019s 2012 chronicle of the company\u2019s efforts to recover from the bailouts \u2014 and the apparently endless stream of academic papers on the topic, and you\u2019ve got enough reading material to last you years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What kind of books will be written about the current crisis? And what will they be called? If history and the current industry headwinds are any indication, the answer is probably something along the lines of \u201cShould Have Seen It Coming: How the United States Lost the Last of Its Automobile Industry to Asia.\u201d As Stephen Ezell, the I.T.I.F. economist, noted in a trio of white papers published this year, manufacturers in Korea, Japan and China now dominate large parts of the global car business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the time being, China is being held back from the U.S. market courtesy of a 100 percent tariff on its E.V.s. But Mexico imposes no such tax on the Chinese, and new data indicates that around 15 percent of new cars sold in that country are made by the likes of BYD and Geely, another Beijing-based automotive powerhouse. (\u201cIf you see a new car on the road here now, it\u2019s likely to be Chinese,\u201d a Mexican analyst recently told The Financial Times. \u201cWe clearly haven\u2019t reached the peak.\u201d) This spring, 2,900 Chinese E.V.s landed at a port in Canada, where the government has lowered the tariff on the imports to 6.1 percent. In the next five years, the country could import as many as 70,000 more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may be true, as Musk once warned, that if \u201ctrade barriers\u201d were not established against Chinese E.V.s, BYD and Geely would \u201cpretty much demolish most other companies in the world.\u201d But our neighbors seem less concerned, and it\u2019s a short drive from Mexico to the United States, as evidenced by the flood of social media footage of influencers carting their sleek new BYD sedans over the border. Even if more restrictive measures, like a proposed bill in Congress that would fully ban Chinese imports in the United States, were to pass to the president\u2019s desk for signing, China would still be able to exercise free rein in the rest of the globe. (In June, Polestar, an E.V. company owned by Geely, was informed by American regulators that it could no longer sell new cars in the United States.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as companies like BYD build more vehicles, refining battery life and efficacy, they would steadily improve on an economy of scale. \u201cThey\u2019ll be able to innovate more rapidly and keep costs down,\u201d Ezell told me. \u201cThen there\u2019d be us, over here in Fortress America,\u201d warding off the Chinese but not other Asian manufacturers. \u201cYou also need to think about the side effects of protecting yourself from China,\u201d says Jensen, the University of Texas professor. \u201cYeah, you preserve a bit of your market for now, but what happens to the products we make? Are you going to want to go out, in 10 years, and buy a new Ford or G.M. truck that has been completely shielded from real competition? Maybe not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cfortress\u201d approach would leave the American auto industry isolated in more ways than one. Left with masses of trucks and S.U.V.s unappealing to the rest of the world, and reliant on domestic sales of gas-powered vehicles, Detroit would inevitably be forced to shrink further. And this time around, Washington might not come riding to the rescue. \u201cI don\u2019t know exactly who is going to be part of Detroit 10 years from now,\u201d Case says. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to be the same as the companies that are here now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not necessarily too late to abandon hope: In the wake of the cancellation of the \u201cbullet train\u201d and the F-150 Lightning, Ford has put its weight behind a line of smaller, more affordable E.V.s that it hopes will prove more palatable to American buyers. (The first of those cars, a light pickup, will retail for around $30,000 and debut next year.) And in late June, Slate Auto, a start-up backed in part by Jeff Bezos, began taking preorders for its own bargain e-truck; prices start at less than $25,000. For that amount, says Slate\u2019s chief executive, Peter Faricy, consumers will \u201cget the most beautiful, simplified, E.V. pickup that\u2019s ever been built. And it\u2019s a game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the vehicles would have to be phenomenally successful to have a truly transformative effect on a market that is no longer goosed by the federal tax credit \u2014 or supported in any meaningful way by the Trump administration. Even Tesla, which saw its European sales skyrocket in the early months of this year, has watched its U.S. presence dwindle. (The backlash to Musk\u2019s politics didn\u2019t help.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Helper, a coherent national strategy is needed \u2014 and fast. \u201cComing from a trailing position,\u201d she and several colleagues note in a new paper, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Retreat in E.V.s: Economic Security, Prosperity and the Industrial Future,\u201d \u201cwe must establish a forward-looking agenda that invests in American innovation,\u201d starting with battery research, private-public partnerships and joint ventures with Asian corporations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, the United States will require the same type of incentive and investment programs that have paved the way for E.V. growth in other parts of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe precedent that comes to mind for me is semiconductor chips,\u201d Ezell told me. From 1990 to 2020, he pointed out, China\u2019s share of the global market increased substantially, compelling the U.S. government to pass the CHIPS Act \u2014 a 2022 package of incentives for manufacturers that allowed the industry to rebound. \u201cWe saved ourselves,\u201d Ezell went on. \u201cAnd I think something like that is the only thing that saves Detroit \u2014 Congress wakes up and realizes we\u2019re about to lose this industry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • Credits: The New York Times<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
      \n
    • Author: Matthew Shaer<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
        \n
      • Photo illustration: Justin Metz<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        The first sign of real trouble arrived two years ago, in the guise of an electric S.U.V. so new it did not yet have an official name. Fast and capacious, sleek and quiet, with plenty of comfortable seating and enough juice to carry a family 350 miles on a single charge, the vehicle was unveiled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":89838,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"slim_seo":{"title":"The American E.V. has been crushed. Will It take the U.S. Auto Industry with it? - Opini\u00f3n P\u00fablica","description":"The first sign of real trouble arrived two years ago, in the guise of an electric S.U.V. so new it did not yet have an official name. Fast and capacious, sleek"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1015],"tags":[3991,1755,3992],"class_list":["post-89837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-optv-usa","tag-american-cars","tag-electric-cars","tag-u-s-auto-industry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89841,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89837\/revisions\/89841"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}