In the first quarter of 2024, the two biggest manufacturers of electronic vehicles, Tesla and its Chinese rival BYD reports dramatic sales drops compared against the same time last yearElon Musk's announcement that Tesla will lay off ten percent of its workforce shocked many but it may be inline with figures that suggest the global demand for electronic vehicles is slumping across the world.
According to a Financial Times report on the slump, legacy car industry leaders have maintained for years that the average consumer isn't ready for electronic cars. BYD meanwhile saw its sales fall a massive 42 percent compared against the fourth quarter to 300,000, allowing Tesla to usurp the crown of biggest electric vehicle maker in the world, for a time anyway.At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tesla was valued on the stock exchange at around $1 trillion. It's now worth about half that.
Tesla will lay off 'more than 10 per cent' of its global workforce as demands for its electric vehicles starts to falter in a highly competitive market. Pictured is a file photo of a Tesla EV at a supercharger station in California last year GM was one of the automakers impacted by the 2023 United Auto Workers strike which cost the company a total of $9 million in the second half of last year.
Between January and March, Volkswagen sold nearly 75,000 electric cars in Europe and just 13,000 in the US.The market not developing as expected, with the German group's own order intake for EVs down to 150,000 in Europe from 300,000 last year. 'We all agreed that the EV revolution was not going to take place, and instead what we would have is an EV evolution,' Lutz said in an interview with Fox Business.
'The slowdown in the ambition from the two of the Big Three US automakers, combined with Tesla's aging model lineup limiting its growth potential, and tougher economic conditions for many of the US customers, indicate that the US EV market is facing a more difficult year,' analyst Aleksandra O'Donovan wrote.
Most legacy automakers lose money on EVs and hybrids are a more profitable path to reducing CO2 emissions if a future administration changes course, analysts said. Led by Toyota, Ford and Honda, North American production of hybrids could rise to as much as 20% of total light-vehicle production by 2025, compared with 14% for EVs, according to data provided to Reuters by AutoForecast Solutions.