If luxury & exotic & sports cars were only dragsters and their value was measured in quarter mile times at the drag strip, then this might be a real problem. Luckily there are many other dimensions that these cars are sold on, and that’s not new.

I mean, go back to the 1980s when Ferraris and Lambos were nerfed (in the USA at least) by emissions regs and had no power, but people still bought them.

Likewise, the best selling sports car in history is the Mazda MX-5, which is not known for being super powerful.

The question is more about volume than about time, IMHO. What I mean is. . . Bringing any new automotive platform to production, electric or otherwise, costs several billion dollars. Then you need to sell about 50,000 units per year of that platform. So how long will it take to ramp up to that level of production-and-sales?

This is where GM (and several other companies) are having it rough. With Tesla already holding a big chunk of the EV market, and the remaining portion sliced really thinly between different car makers and multiple models and platforms, it’s proving hard for any new automotive platform to reach the scale where it becomes economically viable.

And when I hear about car makers delaying their plans, I have to just shake my head. That means extending their pain.

I don’t have an easy answer for them, though. They can either tough it out for even longer while the electric car market grows, or else they can make a Tesla-like leap of faith: Throw intense effort into designing an amazing vehicle, set up the production lines to produce it on massive scale, and trust that the masses of people will be eager to buy your amazing vehicle. And then die by the sword if you got the product wrong, Edsel style. But I don’t see GM or most other “legacy” auto makers attempting that. It’s too far outside the modern auto industry corporate culture (to include officers, board and shareholders too).

It’s a short article, but it does nicely sum up a couple of points.

Sales are up and up, but what’s putting the hurt on car makers is the number of new models they’re launch into the market. Those sales are being sliced thinly, which means each model (or shared platform, even) is having difficulty racking up enough sales to get economies-of-scale and bring costs down. And if the models your company puts out aren’t attractive and don’t compete well against (let’s be honest) Tesla, then. . . Yeah. That’s a rough spot to be in.

Agree with the outcome, disagree somewhat on the reasons.

I think you are putting too much emphasis on new technology to fix the limitations that you imagine are holding back electric cars. From where I sit, the limiting factors on adoption rate aren’t, for the most part, things like range or charging speed. I’m sure there will continue to be some improvements on those fronts, and that’s all good, but the EV technology we have on the road today is already fit-for-purpose.

What’s holding things back more right now are under-developed charging networks (moreso in some parts of the world) and economics.

It took many decades of scaling up production and iterative cost reduction to make gasoline engine vehicles affordable. This is happening a lot quicker with EVs, but it’s still got a few more years to run its course.

Then there’s the whole dynamic of the used car market to consider. A lot of people simply don’t buy new cars. Even after production of electric cars is ramped up and they become dominant in new-car sales, it’ll take a while for them to filter throughout the used market.

The economic “tipping point” that I’m looking for will happen when more people are switching away from gas cars than want to buy new gas cars. Then we may start to see the used market glutted with unwanted gas cars at peanuts prices. That’s what happened to film cameras, and it became almost impossible for companies to keep producing and selling brand new film cameras, even though quite a few people were still shooting film. I could see something like that happening with combustion vehicles.

You can gripe if you want, but I found this article one of the best analysis of the subject that I’ve seen.

As somebody who’s been watching this scene for many years, it’s been funny to see how it has developed.

In the early days of Tesla, Roadster and Model S, they would get mentioned in the press with sort of gee-whiz “here’s the latest tech” tones. Then, if the story was featured anywhere that allowed user comments, the internet peanut gallery would pile on with every reason why they imagined EVs don’t/can’t work. There was nothing organized, just the natural reaction that we always see against any new idea whatsoever.

And then, as the numbers of cars on the road increased, and they became more familiar, we saw them on the road, we saw them on YouTube, the Model 3 ramped up, etc. . . The internet peanut gallery simmered down. They never shut off completely, but we got to a point where an article about an EV could come out, and the comment section would no longer be dominated by fiery debate about whether EVs can even function as cars.

I thought that would be the end of it. But no. . . Now we’re seeing the (seemingly) organized pushback in the media, in the press, etc. Now we’re getting the actual anti-EV propaganda with backing from. . . . somewhere. And it’s hilarious to me, because it’s so obviously too late to matter. The horse has left the barn. There are literally millions of electric cars on the road now, and people know what they are and what they can do. There is no more real mystery about range, charging, etc. It’s hard to explain to people why an EV can’t work when they’ve already got one, or their neighbors have got one, or their cousin has got one, etc.

Mine has lousy speakers, awful click action on the touch pad, doesn’t close up neatly, runs warm, doesn’t have the greatest battery life. I installed Mint because Pop!_OS drives me up the wall too much.

The touch pad is the worst, as I fumble trying to find the exact spot to press for a click to be recognized, and try to operate it without making the pointer jump off the item I was trying to click on.