Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Yeah, there are some exceptions (!), but largely "regular folks" are not buying EVs, at all.  Most of them probably are looking at used vehicles, perhaps coming off a 3 year lease, which makes a lot of sense.  But we all see plenty of BMWs and Mercedes in traffic when most of the drivers would be just as well off with a Camry or Accord.

Your typical BMW owner could plausibly afford an EV, but it still doesn't make sense for most financially, maybe it's close in California.

The EV has more base equipment. 

"You" is who?

Not me

Some models might be positive in gross profit.  And maybe the critique is over played.  But Ford announced their EV division was losing billions, or over a billion, which starts to sound like real money.

Anyway, the Blazer example is one I think where the premium to the customer for an EV is quite a bit outside the range most would pay even after $7500.

IMO, that's really a poor way to look at it.  In the end, it doesn't matter what your unit cost profits/losses are.  That's not nearly as important as overall product profit/loss, and generally products that aren't profitable are laid to rest by the free market.  If I sell a unit at 60k that only cost me 50k to make, I still don't really have profit if the department at large has cost me $2 bil and I've sold $1.3 bil.  Hiding the loss within a larger company with other profitable divisions is no sign of health for the division either, and companies that do this long-term will usually fold those products, as they should.  

The mechanism you're describing is what's called the "push" model, where a company attempts to introduce something the public didn't know it wanted.  There's a longer leash there, and various companies will have various timelines for allowing something to become profitable or not.  Things get even less economically sound when subsidies get involved.  But that in itself tells you something about the EVs in general, and perhaps a brand-specific EV in particular.  The fact it's not a "pull" economic model--where the consumer demands a company make something for them--says a lot about the demand and thus the viability of the product as currently constituted. 

That's not to say there aren't great successes within pushed products....there certainly are.  But they're going to fail at a much higher clip than pull products.  If they're allowed to fail in a free market, that is.  Again, subsidies crash any supply/demand equilibrium I've ever seen.  

IMO, that's really a poor way to look at it.  In the end, it doesn't matter what your unit cost profits/losses are.  That's not nearly as important as overall product profit/loss, and generally products that aren't profitable are laid to rest by the free market.  If I sell a unit at 60k that only cost me 50k to make, I still don't really have profit if the department at large has cost me $2 bil and I've sold $1.3 bil.  Hiding the loss within a larger company with other profitable divisions is no sign of health for the division either, and companies that do this long-term will usually fold those products, as they should. 

The mechanism you're describing is what's called the "push" model, where a company attempts to introduce something the public didn't know it wanted.  There's a longer leash there, and various companies will have various timelines for allowing something to become profitable or not.  Things get even less economically sound when subsidies get involved.  But that in itself tells you something about the EVs in general, and perhaps a brand-specific EV in particular.  The fact it's not a "pull" economic model--where the consumer demands a company make something for them--says a lot about the demand and thus the viability of the product as currently constituted. 

That's not to say there aren't great successes within pushed products....there certainly are.  But they're going to fail at a much higher clip than pull products.  If they're allowed to fail in a free market, that is.  Again, subsidies crash any supply/demand equilibrium I've ever seen. 

I agree with a LOT of what you just said there. However, I think to an extent a company like Ford is realizing that they have to lose money now on EVs to learn the technology and develop the products that make money later. 

There *is* demand for EVs. We posted upthread that US EV sales are up 50% YoY. That's demand. Right now it's not a great market for sellers because a bunch of new entrants jumped in all at once and so supply exceeds demand at current prices. Trust me, being in the data storage industry, I know how painful the market is when that happens. There's no such thing as oversupply--people will buy more X if you sell it cheap enough. There's only oversupply at financially sustainable sales prices!

Tesla lost money for a decade+ before they built enough volume to be profitable. They also basically made the market. I honestly believe that VW, Ford, Hyundai/Kia, Chevy, etc were SMART to wait until that market had been built to enter it. They let Tesla be the "push" guinea pig and take the risk. But it also means that they're behind and are going to lose money in that segment until they can spin up enough volume to be profitable in their EV divisions. And part of that is based on the presumption that battery prices will decline over time, opening up the cheaper product swim lanes since BEVs are mostly a luxury-priced item now. 

Now, maybe it *IS* bad business. With the portion of BEV cost that is battery-dependent and with all of these vendors being dependent on the companies that have legitimate battery tech, there's a chance that the long-term idea is that someone like Panasonic or LG or CATL decide that it's better to acquire an automaker and vertically integrate rather than just selling them batteries. That way they can capture more of the value chain based on their battery tech. I don't know--the next decade could be REALLY interesting. 

I accept that putting out any new product costs money, even just a mild refresh of say a Chevy Malibu.  You don't make money on the first few units, you hope to make it later.  Where I worked, the big thing was called "case volume", or cases.  It was an attempt to put disparate things into a financial framework, like diapers and laundry detergent.  The saying was we only made money on the last cases we sold, the first bunch was to break even off investment (and operating costs).

So, the idea here obviously is that down the road, EVs will be profitable on a unit basis but they have to spend a lot now to get in the game.  And they can't sell them at their actual cost plus because no one would buy them.

So, they discount them, to get sales up, and then hope margins come later.

The problem I'm seeing is none of them make sense for the individual buyer.  Maybe the Chevy Bolt is close-ish.  And this $7500 isn't enough to close that gap.

But where we disagree is that I believe that for most companies, EVs *are* profitable on an individual unit basis but aren't profitable on a business unit basis because of the start-up costs each automaker is incurring. It's a much bigger transition than just releasing a refreshed Malibu, so you have to expect the losses will be larger and the payback period to break-even be longer. 

However I think you're flat wrong on the "none of them make sense for the individual buyer". And it's because you're comparing disparate products and disparate buyers. Yes, name "Blazer" refers to both an ICEV and BEV model. And yes, the base ICEV Blazer starts at $35,400 and the Blazer EV starts at $56,715. But the person looking at that base Blazer isn't a prospective EV buyer and the person looking at the EV version wouldn't be caught dead in the base Blazer. They're different buyers. 

And if you're comparing a buyer who prefers to buy used and spend $20K with a buyer who leases or buys new for vehicles with sticker prices at $50K+, then of COURSE it won't make financial sense for the $20K used buyer to buy a brand new luxury EV. But for buyers in that the luxury segment, it can absolutely make sense.