The EV market has growing pains, here and abroad

Ford announced this week that it’s cutting 4,000 jobs from its European workforce, most of them in Germany and the United Kingdom. The automaker noted that in Europe, it’s lost money in recent years on passenger cars. It pointed to increased competition as well as the industry shift to electric vehicles, which it called “highly disruptive.”

One big problem for EV makers who sell cars in Europe started about a year ago when the German government, in a surprise move, ended an electric vehicle subsidy program, said Tom Narayan, an auto analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

“Since then, in Germany, EV sales have been quite sluggish,” he said.

There’s since been a big push by automakers — including Ford — to bring an incentive back.

Meanwhile, automakers in Europe are motivated to sell EVs to meet a new continental emissions standard or else they could face big fines. 

Also, said Tallis Blalack, an electrified roadways consultant, automakers have more competition. 

“With the much cheaper Chinese imports, especially in the United Kingdom where they don’t have large automakers themselves, they don’t have any tariffs,” he said.

Here in the U.S., the challenges are a bit different. Blalack said there’s been a lot of focus on the high-end electric car market. But now, pretty much everyone who wants a fancy EV has one. 

“So we need to have lower-cost vehicles … so that the average person that wants a new car looks at an EV and says, ‘It makes economic sense for me to buy that vehicle,'” Blalack said.

Another challenge stateside? Americans like big cars, like SUVs and pickups, said RBC’s Narayan.

“Very expensive, because you need an enormous battery. These are heavier cars,” he said.

Plus, American consumers also don’t always know when and where they’ll charge an EV.

Alicia Freeman lives in a suburb of Baltimore. She affectionately calls her car “a spunky old Hyundai hatchback.” It’s been loved, and she’s thinking about moving on to an EV, but she doesn’t know exactly where she’d plug it in. 

“I live in a townhome, and I would have to put a cord across the sidewalk, which I don’t even know if it’s legal or not, so I’m looking into that,” she said.

Freeman said she’s also just used to gas-powered cars — she’s been driving them for 30 years. She knows how much the repairs will cost. An EV is a whole spunky new beast to learn all about.