If you went into 2023 thinking this year would mark the permanent rise of electric vehicles along some perfect, up-and-to-the-right growth curve, a gloomy tide of recent news may have you wondered how and when, exactly, you ended up in the Twilight Zone. In just the past few weeks, General Motors had a disastrous Q3 earnings call where it abandoned its goal of building 400,000 EVs by mid-2024, announced a delay of more electric models and even hit pause on a new battery plant.
A few bad financial quarters hardly mean those things are going away, and neither is the consumer desire to kick gasoline to the curb – the explosive growth of hybrid sales is proof of that alone. Instead, what we’re primarily seeing is a series of consistent, often related headaches on the automaker side. After all, Americans haven’t exactly been spoiled for choice in terms of affordable EV pricing yet.