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.