Are electric cars the biggest auto hype from the Edsel?

The electric car industry is going to be the biggest thing from cut bread… or so many people would believe you.

The reality is somewhat different.

As automakers and tech startups overtake themselves in the brilliant future of electric power vehicles, the hype must be blunt to really understand what’s going on. Vehicles with electricity, rather than gasoline, may become regulated to industry but are unlikely to be in the near future.

Two leading national newspapers, The New York Times

NYT

NYT
and the Wall Street Journal, both running major articles in the past few days highlighting the oncoming traffic in electric vehicles. “Electric cars are getting land,” the Times wrote as the Magazine published a full-page story on “The New Electric Vehicles hitting the road. ”They both went on to report on the future of these modes of transport now and we just had to go to our local dealer to trade in our old gas guzzlers for the thing. latest, largest on four wheels. But if you read on, you saw a slightly different picture of the state of the electric vehicle market.

• Electric vehicle sales in the U.S. fell last year, falling about 10% the magazine said. True, the car industry had a tough year but one would think that sales would still rise if the hype were true.

• While all automakers and all kinds of start-up technology are entering the market, the fact is that 80% of the electricity sold in the U.S. carries the Tesla

TSLA

TSLA
brand. Its starting point in the range is the equivalent of four wheels with Amazon

AMZN

AMZN
early control of e-commerce while traditional retailers stood back and watched. Now competitors like Walmart

WMT

WMT
, Targ

TGT
et

TGT
and others are desperate to try to get up, the same situation that most legacy auto makers now find themselves in.

• General motors

GM
has been said to convert its full range of vehicles to electric power by 2035. That’s a 14-year model away for a while but currently GM’s

GM
donations end on patience. This is particularly ironic because GM tested an electric car called the EV1 which was in limited production in the late 1990s… 25 years ago. Currently, its electric vehicles, the Chevy Bolt and Volt, have been embarrassed by sales, each selling less than 5,000 units in their final years of production. And its next electrics may not shift that voltage much more: the Hummer SUV won’t be debating until model year 2022 and will sell for just over $ 110,000. The Cadillac Lyriq will appear perhaps the following year and will be priced at around $ 60,000 according to reports, but the brand’s undeveloped sales over the past decade are not optimistic for numbers large scale of this new model.

• Across the Detroit area, Ford has said it will also be electronic but again the current offerings are largely made up of the new Mustang Mach-E, a branded SUV the image of the sport of sport. While more reasonably priced – starting at around $ 43,000 – it is a stand-alone entry on the company’s model line that is controlled by gas or hybrid power trucks and construction vans.

• Other global automated power stations rarely have access to the electricity sector. Korean Hyundai is not launching its first EV sub-brand, Ioniq, this year although it said it plans to sell one million million electricity by 2025. Volkswagen said it costs $ 42 billion on electricity over the next five years but will also bring only its first battery – powered SUV to the U.S. market this year. Nissan, one of the earliest manufacturers to enter the EV market with the Leaf introduced in 2010, has since dropped the ball ever since and is now counting on his new Ariya to try to pick up the slab.

• Technical startups like Rivian and Lucid are getting a lot of attention for their upcoming debates but at $ 75,000 and $ 169,000, respectively, for their first models a moderately small sale will say the least.

• Major models like Audi and Mercedes Benz also have new models on the way but they will also be in the six-figure range… for their starting prices.

• Even Tesla’s newest vehicle, a construction called Cybertruck, is expected to start at around $ 40,000 but a version will be much closer to $ 70,000 and historically the company has been reluctant to price forecasting.

The cold hard facts are that the average price of a car or light truck in the U.S. was around $ 38,000 last year according to the Kelly Blue Book and although any new technology usually comes in at the high end of the year. price spectrum and then work its way gradually down to more moderate levels, it is a process that will take several years. Although Tesla actually sold nearly half a million vehicles last year, that came 11 years after it sold its first one. Meaning that these predictions for an EV market explosion – the Journal says is a “battery power boost” – could be overly optimistic.

Tomorrow’s vehicles are likely to be electric vehicles. But it still is today.