For a handful of years, legacy automakers were pumping out press releases on electric cars consistently and frequently. The portion of press releases that were about EVs was far higher than the portion of legacy automakers’ sales that were EVs. I think this started after Tesla got the Model 3 to mass production and the company’s stock price soared. To put it simply, I think automaker executives and boards decided that the way to get higher stock prices (which strongly benefited them as individuals) was to hype up their EV business and make it seem like they were going to lead the way into this new EV era, even if there had been very little real-world evidence for this before then. However, despite all their PR efforts and hype, as well as some half-decent EV projects, the stock market didn’t care, and EV sales from these companies have also been meh at best. Tesla can get a P/E ratio that’s out of this world, but that doesn’t mean other automakers are going to get the same kind of treatment. Furthermore, Tesla still accounts for about half of EV sales in the United States. Perhaps getting jaded and dejected that the market wasn’t recognizing their EV efforts (even if a lot of them had put in limited investment and mediocre messaging), once Trump got into office again and was clearly making EVs a target of attack, legacy automakers seemingly decided that they could drop the whole act, neuter their EV programs, and “get on Trump’s good side” by avoiding any progress on EVs or even any positive mention of EVs. So, press releases about EVs have gotten few and far between, a dramatic departure from what we were seeing for years. Lately, though, man … there has been almost no EV news from automakers in the US — or almost nothing. Now, I have to note an exception. Ford killed a huge existing EV model, the F-150 Lighting, and cancelled billions of dollars of EV investment. However, now it’s working on a “Universal EV” project and has been hyping that up from time to time. So, it’s not complete crickets, but it’s a big departure from the plans and the focus the company had been working on a few years ago. Some people complain that we cover a lot of Chinese EV news. Well, that’s where EV progress and exciting EV innovations are happening! There’s big EV news out of China practically every day. On the flip side, I’m constantly checking for EV news from automakers in the US and it’s typically crickets. So, yeah, it would be great if we had more to cover here in America. But we just don’t. Or what we do have is often bad news from automakers moving in the wrong direction.
