Are Electric Cars Dead?

this is Doug deuro and today we are going to talk about the death of electric cars or at least that's what we're hearing in the media electric cars are dying nobody's buying them anymore I know electric cars is not usually the most interesting topic but this one is because we are going to talk about their death so let's get [Applause] started today's video is sponsored by cars and bids which is my online car auction website for modern Enthusiast cars cars and bids has around 600,000 registered users all participating in our auctions of cool special exciting

cars like this and this and this and this if you're looking to buy or sell an Enthusiast car from the modern era do it on carsand bids.com okay so in the last few months I'm sure you have read articles everyone has read them seen them Etc EV sales sales of electric vehicles are dropping they're flying down or at least the rate of their increased growth is decreasing sometimes that's the story uh but it depends on the brand the model the market you're in uh like where in the country or in the world you are but

generally speaking the EV Market has softened I would say and there's been a lot of Doom and Gloom reporting um recently about it electric vehicles are dead sales are slowing of electric cars are they over is it done are they dead there's there's even been articles about how Toyota is celebrating because they didn't really go out and make an electric car and so they're like see we told you we did it right we didn't do electric cars ha now they're failing so the question is is this true are electric cars dying dead failing and my

answer is nope there's a couple major reasons why I feel this way um number one first and foremost most importantly a couple of bad months or quarters with sales declines does not mean that something is dead or done this is one of my biggest annoyances not only about cars but about like financial reporting in general um everybody is so hyper focused on the last month the last quarter that you failed to look at the bigger picture an enormous amount of the time and that's really true in this case the electric vehicle saw like two quarters

of slower sales and people like that's it it's over the electric car is dead and it's like what the hell sense does this make like yeah it's maybe slowing and maybe they will die but how do you extrapolate that from two bad quarters it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me and that's especially true I think in The Current financial climate where you have um higher interest rates which are probably stop stoping people from buying more expensive cars which electric cars tend to be and so that's kind of slowing people down buying cars

in general and especially buying expensive cars in general and so you already have kind of some Market pressure on the car market which is certainly cooled if you look at data over the last couple of years um and so it makes sense that that pressure would also be on the EV Market which is probably disproportionately kind of in the higher price end of the car market in general but I would be super careful to ha the death of electric cars given such a short time Horizon and to be perfectly honest they came on Fast electric

cars own something like 7 to n% of the entire us vehicle Market that's pretty substantial for a completely different method of propulsion of which there were zero cars that existed with it in 2012 12 years ago in only 12 years they've bought 9% of the market that's a pretty substantial increase and in some countries in Europe that are heavily incentivizing electric cars they own a lot more than 9% of the market in some countries it's over 50% of the market which is a substantial gain these EVS have come on Fast and so to me it's

not really all that surprising that there would be kind of a little bit of a pullback at some point and you wouldn't just see a straight upward trajectory and growth especially because a lot of the people who really wanted an electric car wanted to try it wanted to experience it the early adopters who were eager kind of went after it and got it and now kind of a lot of the rest of people sort of need to be convinced a little bit more or need to see that certain things are more correct for their lifestyle

before they go out and do it they're maybe not as easily electric car convinced so I don't I think the the exaggeration of the death of electric cars is is kind of crazy and it's not really the truth however this is an important one I don't think it's totally out of the realm I don't think it's totally crazy that there is a possibility that electric cars have peaked and I don't think they're going to just freef fall back down to zero but maybe aren't going to continue to rise very significantly in the foreseeable future and

I'll tell you why in my mind there are three big drawbacks that electric cars are facing that they never really solved the biggest one to me is still range uh I drove cross country a couple of weeks ago it's rare that people do that I know but you know 300 miles of range and then you got to fill up for for a couple hours 45 minutes or an hour I I saw on Twitter X some guy did an EV road trip that was about as long as my recent road trip 3,300 miles and he said

that adding electric charge added 10 hours it it saved him money and and all this stuff but it added 10 hours to his trip and it's like that's a day you lost a day like I drove from California to Massachusetts in I can do it in two and a half days I took a little more time this time because I made a stop but I I've done it before in two and a half days California to Massachusetts if I added 10 hours it would be three that's a day that's 50% more trip and so like

for people who do long drives it's not feasible and for people even like la to the Bay Area or New York Boston to DC or down to Florida like the supercharger network has become quite crowded and so range is becoming a factor again because you can't just easily plug in and just go you now have to actually make some choices and decisions and I think range is an issue another big issue that I think electric cars are facing which they're not really working on is resale value I have never seen Vehicles plummet in value quite

as quickly as electric cars you can get a Model S plaid in the $40,000 range now um you can get a model 3 Performance in the High Teens low 20s Porsche tyon turbos s's that were $180,000 new are now well under 100 Lucid airs that were 150,000 new are 75 these electric cars seem to be in freef fall in terms of resale value even more than gas powerered cars and that's a bit of a drawback too for people who are considering these vehicles and the final problem I think is charging infrastructure you have a lot

of people who have purchased or leased electric cars that can charge at their house they install a charger in their garage no problem but for the rest of the people who don't really have that situation who aren't easily able to just charge an electric car at home they live in an apartment they park on the street uh they make long trips during the day and can't just come back to their house and charge you have an infrastructure problem and I think those three things are are going to need to be addressed by electric vehicles and

they're really not and so there's going to be a contingent of people for whom electric vehicles either aren't a Smart Financial Choice because of the resale value or they're not a smart lifestyle choice because of the range or the charging infrastructure doesn't make it make sense for their lives and so it wouldn't blow me away I think that people are greatly exaggerating the decline of EVS but it wouldn't blow me away if the electric car did slow down somewhat or even a lot especially because early adopters clearly did go out and get the cars they

wanted and fit into the electric vehicle mold but many people who don't want to adopt or haven't yet may not be able given their situation to actually go out and get an electric car which brings me to actually a different question and sort of a different tangent on the subject of electric vehicles and their slowdown which is where the hell are plug-in hybrids the concept of a plug-in hybrid car was kind of laughed at by the early EV adopters like oh you get the worst of all World wouldn't you rather have fully electric instead of

a but you're you're you're dipping your foot in the pool but you're not jumping in and people just like laughed at it and the the truth is a plug-in hybrid actually has some great benefits I have a friend who's got a plug-in hybrid that only does like 20 it's a Cayenne when they did the Cayenne plug-in hybrid that only does like 20 miles of full electric and then there's a gas motor and believe it or not he'll get a th000 miles per tank of gas because most of his around town driving is done on pure

electric he comes home he plugs it in 20 miles of range when he goes again sometimes he just runs errands comes home uses no gas plugs it back in fully charged again and it's it's surprising how useful that could be for a lot of people and it eliminates your two biggest problems which are range and the charging infrastructure range isn't a problem with plug-in hybrid because you have a gasoline backup so you want to drive your plugin hybrid to the Bay Area from Southern California or from Boston to DC well guess what now you can

because you run out of electrics no problem your gas engine kicks in and you're good to go until you can charge again and it also solves the charging infrastructure problem because you don't really need to charge the car at home if you don't want charge it when it's convenient at a grocery store or at a charging station if you want to but you don't have to and that's pretty beneficial and a nice thing about plug-in hybrids and I don't understand why people haven't demanded plug-in hybrids more but also why the automakers haven't pursued plug-in hybrids

to a higher degree it seems like the perfect middle ground for people who are ready to go electric but maybe can't for some of the reasons that I described and I have to wonder to some extent is the reason that plug-in hybrids haven't been tremendously popular because automakers are incentivized by the federal government in a lot of countries not just the US to make full electric vehicles battery Electric full electric vehicles are heavily tax incentivized and subsidized uh for automakers globally not only from the consumer level but in some cases in the production process um

the more you produce you know the higher number of these electric cars the the better you'll do I mean California has a rule that automakers can't sell cars in the state of California in general unless they sell at least one electric car in California that's why we have the absolutely terrible Toyota bz 4X uh that was their only electric car and they made it just to comply with that rule that was a government incentivizing an automaker to produce an electric car and so is that why we have so many electric cars and why plug-in hybrids

haven't taken off as much sometimes I wonder that there are very few plug-in hybrid cars that are currently on the market but it does seem to me to be a pretty good choice I know that I personally would probably make that choice for my next car if I had the opportunity to if they sold my desired car the Mercedes-Benz E-class station wagon as a plug-in hybrid I would get one but as it stands now I got to make long drives in that car occasionally I don't really want to deal with charging infr structure I still

don't have an electric car charger at my house I'm adding one but it's not there yet and so it wouldn't have made sense over the last few years to do it there are significant drawbacks that the plug-in hybrid addresses and I really think that I don't want to say automakers have been wrongly incentivized to pursue full electric uh but that's they certainly have been incentivized and I think that's one reason why we haven't seen more plugin hybrids but that's just my thought uh and I really think those those those cars would sell reasonably well to

the people who do want to adopt but haven't yet been able to but that's my take that's my thought um I I really strongly believe the EV demise is exaggerated based on just a few bad quarters of sales um but I do think there is a possibility that EVS might not see the explosive growth that they have been predicted to see by some you know industry observers and by some automakers who have put a lot of efforts behind EVS may not really pay off like Porsche but I I do think that plug-in hybrids should be

considered more talked about more and adopted more by the automakers as a nice middle ground for people who want to go uh to that level of of of car and may not be ready for full electric so there you go our E's dead no but there's some Nuance to the situation as I've explained and I hope I've made the potentially boring topic of electric cars at least somewhat interesting for a little while [Applause] [Music]