EV market slowdown: a bump in the road for Tesla?

This year was supposed to be a crucial one for electric vehicles (EVs), and “a turning point” for an industry that has pledged to move away from the combustion engine, said Ryan Felton and Christina Rogers in The Wall Street Journal.

So far, it hasn’t turned out that way. As a flood of new battery-powered models hits the showrooms, there are signs that the industry has got “ahead of buyers” – with potentially alarming consequences for carmakers and dealers. The latest bad news came from the big daddy of EV-makers, Tesla, which warned last week of “notably lower growth this year”, spooking investors so badly that “more than a quarter” of its value was erased in January. That’s quite some loss, said Katie Martin in the Financial Times: equating to “a stonking $240bn” – or the equivalent of “the whole of Coca-Cola”. 

EV carmakers ‘feeling the pain’

Tesla is far from the only carmaker feeling the pain, said The Wall Street Journal. Ford has “slashed production” of its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck, despite a “major buzz at launch”. Other carmakers are “reconfiguring plans to sell more hybrids”, deeming them a more realistic “interim step” for consumers; the Swedish electric-car start-up Polestar is cutting 15% of its workforce. And this week, Renault scrapped plans to float its EV unit, Ampere – bigged up as a €10bn future “Tesla rival” – on the stock market, said Matt Oliver in The Daily Telegraph.