- the range was miserable
- the software quality was bad
- no OTA updates ever (despite Honda's promises)
- slow charging
- poor public charging infrastructure in Germany
I should have known that a 35 kW battery wouldn't deliver great range or charging speed. But I didn't fully appreciate how limiting it would be.
Last year, I bought a new Mini Cooper e. Larger battery. Better software. BMW's quality actually delivered this time. The car feels objectively nice. The software is polished. There are updates. Few bugs. But the range still leaves something to be desired. In summer it's okay. During winter 30-40% of the range just melts away.
Public charging in Northern Germany still sucks:
- too few public chargers
- chargers are often broken or out of service
- pricing is intransparent
Municipal utility companies ("Stadtwerke") seem especially bad at maintaining their charger fleets. Every second charger that I want to use is out of service. The one next to my apartment has been labeled as "defective" for a couple of weeks now. Nobody seems to care...
I still like (love during summer) my car. It's a cool car. It feels luxurious. It's comfortable. It's fun to tear around corners. It's still compact enough to maneuver through the city. And it looks cool. But it also costs 40-50k EUR and only has limited range. And public charging really needs to improve.
When people see you your EVs are a bug ridden mess and say no thank you, they're not rejecting your electric cars because they're electric. The answer isn't to retreat from electric and then excrete the same shitty software from the shelved EVs into the legacy ICE models. Now you just made people annoyed by the remaining cars that you do sell.
Dunno, had a trip through it last year, there are more than enough chargers. Some of them were literally free.
I have 70kWh battery though. Also, I paid much less than 40k for my chinese SUV. The software is buggy though, a random reboot on motorway doesn't feel nice.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be annoyed and unsettled if the sound system or gps or whatever rebooted while I was driving, I'm just curious just how dire it is
One thing that’s super annoying and this is not specific to Germany, but why the fuck do I need some shitty app to use your charger? Should be tap and go like any other purchase. You know, like how I pay for my petrol?
Seems to me like everyone wants to force an app down my throat where it’s really not needed. It especially sucks when you’re a visitor to the country.
It used to be actually true in the 1990s, but right now, I definitely expect better public services in Poland than in DE.
Also your in winter are you running the heater constantly? I find just dressing for outdoors, leaving the heater off and using heated seats/wheel means I only lose maybe 15% range.
I got a heat pump and using the heater or AC only needs around 1 kWh during the winter or when it’s hot.
But winter tires increase the power consumption by 30%, just like with a diesel.
Something every car prior to this has been able to do without any impact on performance.
> means I only lose maybe 15% range.
Which could be a reasonable sacrifice if you choose to make it. It's certainly not included in the marketing for these vehicles.
Nope. But last winter it got really cold (< -10°C). Also the Honda was aggressively heating the battery
Aka, every super market has at least one charger. Most parking spaces have 2-3 chargers. From various vendors. Some even for less money then you can get for your own house per kWh.
I also had no issues in the north east so far or in north rein westfalia.
Chargers usually don’t break but get shut down when the grid can’t handle their load currently.
(EnBW and Ionity for 39ct/kwh, tesla for a bit more or less, depending on time and location)
THIS is where public subsidies makes the difference, finding and spending the way out of the pain points to make the adoption curve steeper.
I don't see poor software as a problem that's related to the powertrain. My ICE vehicle from 2016 has poor software that never gets updates.
You overspent on a Mini because Minis are overpriced vehicles. On mobile.de I see a used VW ID3 (82 kW (Pro S)) with 60000 km miles on it listed for 22000 euros. I see a Kia EV6 GT-line with 18000km (77 kW) for 33000 euros.
I totally understand the issues with broken and insufficient chargers, as we have that same issue in the USA, but that's why you maybe avoid getting the kind of vehicle that has some of the smallest battery on the market if you need that range.
Turns out BYD have one of those already! https://www.theverge.com/news/622963/byd-dji-vehicle-mounted...
Makes me happy for once about the restrictive drone policies where I live.
His idea was like a back up camera, but front-facing and elevated (retractable).
The Yutong electric buses that Ember use around where I live have something like this but I guess it just uses the cameras mounted around the bus. When the driver closes the door, the central screen on the dashboard does a kind "fake drone flyaround" of the bus, even showing reasonably realistic depictions of vehicles on the road around it.
Meanwhile, Renault 5 is selling very well with Renault 4 in the pipeline. Zoes have been selling well too. Peugeot also has good EV models (208 is really fun to drive).
There pretty much isn't a single European car manufacturer that wouldn't have a compact car or an SUV in EV market and most of them have good range, decent pricing and are moving to 800V platforms as well.
Sooo... where's the retreat?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gqyyly9v8o
Volkswagen has said it will cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as its profits dropped to their lowest level since 2016.
It said it was hit by US import tariffs, intense competition from China and high restructuring costs from the shift to electric vehicles.
Honda to lose as much as $15.7 billion this fiscal year.
The write-down is latest in industry grappling with EV transition.
I’m baffled how you think “it’s going to cost us a lot to shift to electric vehicles through 2030” could be read as “VW is retreating from electric vehicles”.
Article seems to be gibberish, carmakers don't seem to be retreating from EVs.
As the article says; "In the US"
American car marques are nearly completely irrelevant outside the US.
VW ID.3 vs BYD Dolphin: https://www.bike-ev.com/reviews/byd-dolphin-vs-volkswagen-id...
Audi Q4 e-tron vs Zeekr 7X: https://www.carsguide.com.au/audi/q4-e-tron/vs/zeekr-7x
People will pay a premium for a brand they recognize, but for how long?
For that, you get more range, faster charging, and better highway driving, even aside from the brand premium.
That doesn’t seem like a slam dunk to me, especially since the Chinese EV market is at the peak of deliberate over-production:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/11/china-elec...
Or if you’re one who thinks home charging isn’t a necessary prerequisite to make EVs attractive, it’ll take that long for fast charging tech to improve even more, and for those public fast chargers, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and need tremendous amounts of power which needs to be brought in, are gonna get built.
And you might argue either is a roadblock that can simply be blown up by strategically placed money bombs, but no Western government has that much money just lying around. The $7,500 handout (that mostly padded EV margins) was the best they’re gonna do. The government isn’t going to bankroll every shopping center in America to put in 10 350kw fast chargers at a cost of $5,000,000 per site, or pay $7,000 for every home to get a service upgrade. And even if they did this, it would take a decade just to build and install all that to get to 90% EV adoption. My point is gas cars are going to be popular and sell well for 1-2 decades more at least. “Retreating” from those would be the real bonehead move.
I'm charging just fine with a decent commute, using only a 120V 12A circuit. You don't need a 240V 50A circuit to charge your car in 4 hours.
Technology Connections does an excellent video on this:
It will help update your knowledge on this topic.
Cheers
I've also owned a house before that had old electricity - knob and tube (this was before I had an electric car) and paid less than 10k to get the entire electricity system upgraded to something modern. I dont think your 5k-10k thing is accurate for the vast majority of houses.
They're getting leapfrogged by Chinese companies despite being extremely early to the Chinese market along with a factory in China.
They've somehow squandered their technology lead despite being profitable and scaled unlike some of the companies leapfrogging them.
They botched the Cybertruck so badly. Imagine an American company failing to make a popular pickup truck. They could have been selling pickup trucks at F-150-like volume and profitability.
Their brand image of tech futurism is outdated and they're squandering the most profitable segments of the automotive market. Just look at stuff that's succeeding and pulling in big money like the Bronco and Toyota TRD lineup.
Tesla is retreating to robots because their CEO gets bored of running scaled companies that aren't startups, and they're also doing a whole bunch of financial manipulation to prevent Tesla stock from crashing due to its fundamentals. Without a future moonshot business, the valuation of the stock makes no sense, and would naturally decline to that of a normal automobile company otherwise. That event would destroy Elon's net worth and probably make him default on a bunch of personal loans. By combining other moonshots like xAI and robotics, it lessens the impact of the reality of the automotive business: a profitable but generally low-margin high-maturity type of business.
One is that their stock is priced for extreme growth, so they need to be in businesses that can justify that. Cars are not that kind of business. They were for a while when Tesla was much smaller and the only decent EV maker, but not anymore. For any carmaker with a typical carmaker PE, cars can be a fine business.
Tesla's other problem is that Elon did serious damage to their brand, and they're not even getting the growth that other EV makers are getting.
In Japan Nissan also had a pure electric kei car they sell.
But the hydrogen infrastructure doesn't exist, and they haven't solved any of the real problems with it. So they're stuck flacking technology that was amazing in the 90s.
They also spend a lot of money lobbying against electrification regulation, because they really don’t want to make EVs.
They have some incredibly reliable hybrid drivetrains, but have weak EVs and ancient battery technology throughout.
And the Iran/Hormuz situation actually strengthens the case for EVs, not weakens it. Swedish electricity is almost entirely hydro, nuclear and wind. When oil spikes, petrol drivers feel it immediately. EV drivers barely notice. Pulling back from electrification right now is doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.
But yes, at least where I live, there's a major infrastructure problem that nobody -- consumers included -- want to pay for, and for a lot of us EV's aren't an option until said infrastructure has been upgraded.
Yeah, that's kinda how Cuba winds up with everyone (well, the small portion of society who can obtain one) driving 1950s cars around. It's not a good approach.
It has rarely worked in history, and when it did, it only did so for very short specific time frames intended to kickstart a sector, never to protect it in its mature state.
Examples are south korean and japanese post ww2 protectionism of key sectors, but again, only to kickstart them. Those very sectors had to compete globally quickly to survive.
We're in capitalism, capitalism is about competition and efficiency.
The moment you're shielding your local companies all that happens is that they can raise prices and have even less incentives to compete and innovate.
And I don't buy the "but China fuels money into their EV industry" either.
So what? How many incentives, bailouts, manufacturing credits, sales credits etc do the European and US industries receive regularly?
And why would I care if Chinese taxpayers subsidize my car? I really don't.
Stellantis, a 20B market cap auto conglomerate has received more than 200B euros in help by the Italian government across the last 3 decades. And what did it achieve? Nothing.
Just made the fiat group less relevant, less competitive, and didn't protect jobs in the long term anyway.
All they have to do is hide some remotely activated punches inside the black box battery that can start off the chain reaction. Drive into a military base at full speed, activate the punch, and cause mass confusion, chaos and destruction.
And then do that many times all at once, with helpless drivers stuck inside right before you invade an island nation you claim ownership of.
VW (and their other brands) and BMW have good new EVs coming to market now, while Toyota is waking up too. They will survive I think. Stellantis though, not sure about them. And many Chinese carmakers will be gone too.
It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.
Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.
There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.
Skoda and Cupra are thriving, and it’s not just because of their affordability. They are steadily increasing their EV sales percentages while heavily promoting them as first class citizens within their portfolios. Porsche, by contrast, is hitting roadblocks because they are trying to retrofit their new EV first models to accommodate ICE powertrains. Meanwhile, Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge just posted their best quarter ever, driven specifically by their ICE lineup.
The main problem for German automakers was losing their core identity by chasing a "Modern Luxury" business model prioritizing low sales volume in exchange for high per unit margins. Electricity prices are simply not a factor in their demise.
The EV industry in general is growing quite well in Europe. It's just that China is capturing the biggest share of that growth.
The Volvo XC90 EV is about 90k the petrol equivalent is 60k
Then if you drive 100,000 miles in it you’ll spend £20,000 on petrol.
100000 miles / 32 mpg = 3125 gal 3125 × 4.546 L = 14206 L 14206 L × £1.45/L = £20598.70 ≈ £20.6k total petrol cost
Even with free electricity petrol wins on cost.
If you buy the car used then the story changes.
Not Europe, but unfortunately, my state of Massachusetts has terrible electric costs for complicated reasons, so I understand what the OP is saying. I had to keep explaining this to my friends in MA - I replaced a Prius with a Nissan Leaf and my running costs are far higher.
(note that these prices are yearly averages for the state selected, but you can also fill in your own values since things change)
It's the Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, etc of Europe they'll probably end up the way of Philips, Blaupunkt, Alcatel, Grundig, Nokia, Thomson, Gigaset, SAgem, etc. meaning selling off their consumer civilian operations to chinese OEMs and all that remain will be the recognizable name badge put on imported Chinese components assembled in EU, while the small remaining European operations focus on vehicles and powertrains for defense/naval/aerospace/etc.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
Nearly all these carmakers already do make plenty of EVs. If I’m very wrong and people there wish to buy EVs exclusively, that’s what will sell and what will get made.
A law made up on the way the economy and purchasing power was going in 2020. The reality now is way different. If you don't adjust laws based on economic reality you're gonna have a bad time.
Yes, chargers are everywhere here. But making multiple “stops” to charge that you wouldn’t otherwise make definitely isn’t saving any time.
The seats are horrid.
Watching the windshield wipers freak out over nothing is funny.
“Full self driving” is a bit of a joke.
Also charging at home is a significant part of EV infrastructure which is also sorely lacking in the US
I’m not sure it’s the infrastructure so much as the cost for these vehicles. Well, Tesla has political problems but Rivian and Lucid don’t - but they are priced quite high.
Of course there are also new vehicles that cost quite a bit less than a base Model 3, but they invite a discussion of not being all that comparable.
I also know a lot of drivers who plan to get an EV when their current car stops working. A lot of people are feeling economically anxious right now. They know gas is a dead end so they are squeezing every last mile out of the cars they currently own. Car companies can't exist on the wishes of their customers. Everyone is doing a lot of hoping that its the right time. The EV rebates were a great tool in getting to that tipping point but they were cancelled too son in my estimation.
If you want to make synthetic fuels it’s similar effort and efficiency to make methane as it is to make hydrogen. In fact converting one to the other is trivial and the conversion from methane is how we actually make hydrogen today.
Hydrogen has a lot of issues. It’s a pain to store since it’s corrosive and does not liquify or stay liquified without cooling and extremely strong pressure vessels. Methan is already used pretty commonly. A lot of busses run on methane today.
So we’re taking methane, a fuel that’s used in transit already and that we gave a shortage if right now since it makes fertilizer and the hormuz straight is blocked. We’re taking that precious methane and converting it to hydrogen (not at all green to do this and the carbon goes into the air at this point) and then we’re awkwardly transporting this and storing it in cars with all the problems that has just to burn the hydrogen in the car pretending that we never released co2 in the process.
Now you might say ‘yeah but in theory you could use electricity to make hydrogen’ and I’ll point out that’s grossly inefficient to just using a battery electric vehicle and it’s not at all done at an industrial scale due to the reality that it was always just a way to sell fossil fuels with an obfuscation of where the release of carbon occurs and never intended an actual reasonable way to store electricity.
And increasingly I think that is being quietly admitted. It has a weird afterlife in buses (where the range potential is interesting for long-range intercity routes), but even there, at this point, it’s marginal. The Irish transport authority placed an order a few years back for 800 BEV buses… and three hydrogen buses, for instance. A decade ago, BEV buses and hydrogen buses were both basically experimental. Today BEV buses are ordered by the thousand; hydrogen buses are still experimental.
(Also I expect hydrogen _trains_ to hang around as a concept for a while, and it _may_ actually be viable there where adding overhead lines is not.)
> It would allow legacy vehicles to stay on the road
How? Hydrogen cars _are electric cars_; they just have a fuel cell instead of a battery. If you’re imagining that they have, er, a four stroke engine that they burn hydrogen in or something, yeah, that’s not a thing.
I suppose if you wanted to get _really_ weird you could have a hydrogen turbine car? But again, that’s nothing like current petrol cars tech (and would be horribly inefficient relative to the fuel cell ones).
You need to use energy to create hydrogen - and the energy required is 5x what would be required to just store the same amount of energy as electricity in a battery.
55kWh of electricity for hydrogen generation results in around 10kWh at the wheels of a hydrogen car.
Or you can just shove the 55kWh directly to an EV battery.
Also, a hydrogen car needs a battery anyway. Just make a bigger battery and skip the hydrogen part. Cheaper, simpler, lighter,…
* in the ICE world, California and EU norms created a tight barrier to entry. the patent portfolio protected the old automotive industry. they only built their patent protected ICEs, and they bought everything else from suppliers.
electric circumvents that barrier and that enabled dozens of new automotive OEMs: the first big disruptor
too bad the hard part for software instead is system integration. consistency cross all components.
all the great hardware engineering processes are completely ND utterly misguided for software system engineering.. integrate rely, often, continuously vs clearly specified interfaces and isolated component engineering with expensive and thus relatively rare integration.
that's IMHO the second disruption for automotive.It's impossible to go on a long off-road travel with the EV equivalent of 50L of gas in a jerrycan.
But some are twisting the narrative to say that because of that reason EV will fail.
Millions of people could use an EV in their daily life, just like I can go without a pickup in my daily life and rent one whenever I need one.
Everyone's willing to admit that.
EV tech is there to replace the vast majority of gas powered cars.
We don't need to get to "fully" to have a replacement event. Horses can travel down trails that cars cannot, that didn't save them.
The easy explanation is that it's because it is there. The article is about the rapid decline of companies that believe otherwise. They aren't doing to great.
The US grid is already stressed by all these new data centers, where is the power to send 10kW of power minimum to tens to hundreds of millions of vehicles every day going to come from?
100M vehicles times 10kW divided by one million is One Million Megawatts.
One Thousand Gigawatts. That’s five hundred 2GW power plants. Four thousand solar panels make 1MW, four million solar panels make 1GW, four billion solar panels make 1000 GW.
And that’s 40% of the fleet converted to EVs, and does not account for diesel semi-tractors being converted to EV.
Obviously that's not "fully replace" territory, but that is most definitely a critical mass beyond being a niche vehicle category.
The EV market globally is growing much faster than the ICE market. At the rate of technology and pricing improvement, EVs taking over the majority of sales is almost inevitable.
It's just not growing as quickly in certain markets like the USA, and many predictions were too aggressive.
Who is really going to prefer ICE vehicles when we start seeing median MSRP vehicles start to reach customers with 400-500mile+ range numbers? This isn't some crazy idea (e.g., see the 2026 BMW i3, estimated range of 440 miles in an entry level premium sedan - in 5-10 years that's the kind of spec you'll be seeing in a cheap Kia).
There just isn't that much more progress in battery technology and pricing left to achieve to make ICE fully obsolete, and that is exacerbated by oil prices that are now set to rise for years to come.
Saying EV tech isn’t there to replace gas is like saying gas tech isn’t there to replace diesel.
Gas powered cars are niche or legacy.
of newly registered cars were BEV. Only Norway reaches 89% you are talking about. The total average of newly registered BEV cars in European Union was 13.6%.
The EV tech is here,but the grid in most EU countries is certainly not. The proliferation of heat pumps in the local area caused 3 blackouts caused by a failure of a local transformer - something that hasn't happened before or at least not as frequently. And in most countries you are looking at doubling the electricity consumption if all road transport was to switch to electricity.
[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registr...
After three years and 50k miles with a Model X, the idea of buying a non-EV seems ridiculous.