By P Gosselin on 12. April 2025
Germany’s Blackout News here reports that only 4 electric car manufacturers world wide are managing to make a profit, three of which are Chinese: BYD, Li Auto and Seres. And all the rest “are struggling to survive.”
Only four electric car manufacturers are managing to make a profit. Image generated by Grok AI.
“Chinese brands are increasingly taking the lead in the global market. More than 120 brands are competing in the electromobility segment,” reports Blackout News. “Many benefit from low production costs and massive government support. BYD is expanding aggressively, including in Europe, and is becoming a real threat to Tesla.”
Tesla still leads with an operating margin of 7.2 percent, but its growth has stagnated. China’s BYD is expanding aggressively and benefiting from innovation and government support.
Many other manufacturers, especially start-ups such as Lucid Motors and Rivian, are posting high losses. Traditional car manufacturers are also under pressure as electrification incurs high costs. The EU is forcing the switch to e-mobility by 2035, which increases the pressure to adapt. The future of the electric car market depends on innovation, scaling and political framework conditions.
If left to the free market forces and consumer wishes, electric cars would fare very poorly. Few people really want them, and they really are neither good for the environment nor the economy.
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One really needs a detached garage to go with a BEV, to safely charge your toy.
Constructed of concrete
And well away from your residence.
And preferably with a fire dousing system of the scale that they used to use for Space Shuttle launches. Or, constructed over a lake, with a remotely operated trap door.
And a treatment system for the water used to cool runaway battery fires?
And with handles on the quarter panels to carry like a palnquin.
Or you could simply line the garage with Fire Brick. Then you could place concrete shelving around the perimeter and your Garage doubles as a Pottery Kiln once your EV does it’s eventual flambe!
Or just bring back asbestos?
Or put in a steam electric generator. When the car fire starts, you start producing electricity the old fashioned way.
You have to line it with fire bricks. ordinary concrete can’t take that much heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_brick
It won’t be long before EVs are banned from underground car parks. The Chinese have already done this.
50 feet separation.
Get rid of all the subsidies and tax breaks, and let’s see what the market really is.
Indeed. What profit percentage is derived from various tax breaks, government grants, incentives, etc.?
I believe a very large part of Tesla’s profits are derived from trading Carbon Credits.
Thus returning to a supply-demand democracy. People vote with their money.
What is stunning is the total lack of reality in government mandating everything go electric yet failing to understand that this cannot work with Renewable Energy. Renewables are not dispatchable so what do you do when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? Right when all these EV’s want a charge.
But a worse situation is the EU demand for E-Fuels, fuels made from electric power. Oh, Excess Electric power, whatever that is! This is a classic case of using a variable power source for a constant demand situation. All E-Fuels go through electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. H2 is then used directly, or as a reductant to make Ammonia (another wonderful fuel!), methanol (now mandated by the IMO for ships at 40% the energy density of bunker fuel), or hydrocarbon fuels (which are at least a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels, but at great expense).
The EU mandate for Synthetic Aviation Fuels (a variant of SAF, Sustainable Aviation Fuel) is 2% of total fuel consumed by 2032. This will require a minimum of 4 GW of power which must be continuous and renewable. And it must be excess to all other demands for renewable energy like EV’s. So you need to install 16 GW of wind power (25% capacity factor) to get 4 GW of output power, and even then, you can’t count on it. But electrolyzers only operate continuously as do all the other chemical processes used to make E-Fuels. So how do they plan on making this work?
Of course, install 16 GW of battery backup (oops, 16 GW X 24hrs X time between sunlight (16 hours) or the next gust of wind (unknown and unknowable). or install 4 X the electrolyzers at $1500/kW-h ($1.5 million/MW-h) and then compress or liquify H2 to store it for subsequent use.at a 10-30% additional energy penalty. Electrolyzers are already on 58% thermally efficient, so much input power is wasted on thermal losses. You already lose 15% just on the difference between HHV and LHV of H2. 120 MJ/kg/141 MJ/kg.
This is a losing proposition at every step. But the EU government mandates it, so it must be right!
Further to my comments, “Tech Giants” fund nuclear as they need continuous dispatchable power. Sam as E-Fuels and so many other applications that cannot function on discontinuous power sources.
Billion-dollar tech empires fund controversial energy source to meet soaring global demand: ‘It’s the only way’
Could you clarify what you’re trying to say in this addendum comment?
I believe the original point was that lots of electric toys need electricity sources. I believe the addendum is an example of how one large company plans to source electricity for its toys.
Per peer reviewed literature data, it takes 1.4 GW power to capture and reduce 1 million tons of CO2 to synthetic fuels (E-Fuel). This produces 6557 bbl/day of fuel at 30% energy conversion efficiency. The EU SAF mandate for 2032 is 2% of EU jet fuel use which is 52,156 bbl/day. Thus, 8X that amount of power is required continuously. The 11.2 GW needs to be continuous power so correction for the capacity factor for wind of 25% brings the installed capacity to 44 GW. That is $88B just to build the needed capacity, yet it still isn’t guaranteed to be continuous, just that the wind turbines can produce the needed MW-h per year required.
To solve this deficiency, battery backup of a least a day is needed or 1.1 TW-h of backup gives you one day of reliable power supply (assuming they backup power facility doesn’t catch fire passing all that current through it.)
And I haven’t begun to calculate the land area needed for each 2 MW wind turbine. All to meet an EU mandate that can never actually be met. And for 2050, they want 17X that production of E-SAF. Wow!
“What is stunning is the total lack of reality in government mandating everything go electric yet failing to understand that this cannot work with Renewable Energy.”
They fully understand it. You just don’t understand their goal, which is to de-industrialize the West, and make everyone use mass transit, or walk.
Do you really think that’s the goal? I don’t. I don’t think they have a goal beyond the elite lining their pockets with gold. But doing that needs a rationale and that is supplied by idiot academics running their own grift for grant money and by an idiot press that will publish anything that is hysterical if it sells copy and an idiot populace that if you asked them anything about global warming would barely know how to spell the words. I think the whole damned enterprise of global warming is one giant grift with ideology being tacked on to justify the whole enterprise. Elites like to create controllable churn allowing them to make huge sums of profits with little effort. Their major effort is to lobby politicians to pass laws to make all this possible by the use of coercion. A pathology from top to bottom! And, of course, there is always 25% of the population willing to believe anthing, no matter how dumb and joyfully becoming True Believers with a flag to march under. A fight they can engage that brings no pain to THEM.
Well, they’ve said as much, publicly. Look at quotes from Maurice Strong, Paul Ehlrich, etc.
Daniel, truer words never spoken. But the corruption is becoming so conspicuous that more people are “getting it”. I look for position retractions to begin in less than a year beginning with the worst offending universities. Columbia comes to mind.
I would like to think that the Elite Class’ motivation is merely venal in their promotion of Green Energy, but their pronouncements (“You will own nothing and you will be happy”) suggest they really do want to reduce us all to powerless, indentured serfs.
All in all your just another brick in the wall
One World Order with socialist command economies is the method.
The Population Explosion published in the 1960s is the manual.
Reduce the population to 1 billion or less.
So IF the government is ramping down renewable advocacy THEN is it a good time to ramp up mandating everything go electric?
They’ll solve all the electricity demands once they get fusion power plants on line. Of course those plants were 20 years away 40 years ago…
We’ll see about BYD and the like-
BYD’s Hidden Debt Burden Exposed: “Sick” Reliance on Supply Chain Financing Revealed
The strike at the Chengdu factory of BYD, China’s leading electric vehicle, continues to escalate.
Turns out you can make EVs and sell them really cheap with your government controls your supply chain, is willing to fork over vast sums of money, and turn a blind eye when you decided to not pay your workers.
Slave Labor does produce Low Quality products Cheaply.
Who says the Chinese EV companies are profitable? The Chinese.
Should we believe them? I don’t think so. If non-Chinese EV companies are having problems, then the Chinese EV companies are having the same problems. Chinese government money is what is keeping them in the ballgame, not profits.
Do hybrids count? Our 2010 Ford Escape got 20 mpg, our 2022 Ford hybrid escape gets 40 mpg.
A friend has a hybrid and she plugs it into a “free” charger at a local library. Do you have to plug yours in or just let it charge by driving it and burning gas and some from use of breaks? If you have to plug it in, are you counting that when you show doubling the mileage? (I know nothing about hybrids or EVs- just asking)
We have a hybrid, we don’t have a plug-in hybrid, I wish we did.
I have a Nissan Rogue non hybrid ICV that gets between 36-41mpg on a regular basis. With no Li-Ion battery concerns.
OK, I didn’t realize there are 2 kinds. So, you get great mileage. But, I presume your gas tank can’t hold what it would hold if not a hybrid?
Yes, there are two kinds. Plug ins have separate motors,trams,mission, large lithium batteries, and will normally do about 50 miles on electric battery power. You recharge them from mains current, though some will also recharge when driving on the petrol system.
So called ‘mild hybrids’ are quite different. They will have the usual engine and transmission system – automatic, not stick shift. This is what normally drives the vehicle. The electric drive kicks in during startup and sudden acceleration. It drives the usual transmission so means that the most fuel intensive part of regular ICE cars cycle is made more economical.
An example of a plug in hybrid is the Ford Puma in Europe. Earlier verions of the Toyota Prius were mild hybrids. Which last also used an Atkinson cycle engine to get greater economy. Not practical unless supplemented by electric to make it more responsive. The Suzuki Vitara is a mild hybrid.
Opinions differ. I think mild hybrids are the way to go. They are mechanically simple and they give improved mileage, and they have small batteries which recharge from braking or in normal use. There is really no downside to them. But some prefer the higher mileage you get from a plug-in. I value engineering simplicity over that, but many differ.
Yes, if you have a plug-in hybrid then you, and society, have all the problems that face any rechargeable vehicle.
With a non-plug-in hybrid you just drive like a regular car, with no need to find a charging station. Keep it full of gasoline, and you’re good.
I had a 2011 Hyundai Sonata hybrid [non-plug in] in which the transmission died at 135,000 miles in 2024. The Lithium battery was fine but the car’s resale value was minimal: no one wanted an old hybrid even if I had spent $7000 replacing the transmission [that repair was more than the “Blue Book” price of the used vehicle in good condition]. Ended up having a junk yard tow it away – only got $769 for it.
Hybrids, and especially BEVs depreciate more rapidly than ICE vehicles..
“I had spent $7000 replacing the transmission”
Such a rip-off! Some mechanics are making out like bandits.
I had to buy a replacement transmission for my 1992 Chevy Silverado pickup last year (it had 106,000 miles on it) and it cost me $1400.00. Installed.
Was your transmission a continuously variable transmission (CVT)?
I’ve heard the claim that CVT’s can’t be rebuilt. That sounds ridiculous to me. I did see a video of a guy taking an old CVT apart and it had a LOT of metal fragments falling out of it, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be rebuilt.
CVT’s feel odd to me. I’m used to feeling a transmission shifting gears, so it took a little getting used to to drive a CVT.
I don’t dislike it, and these kinds of transmissions can go for 100,000 miles routinely. I’m not sure what “hotrodding” in a muscle car would do to one. I take it easy on my daughters CVT (the only one I have ever driven). 🙂
If one can get $7000 for a rebuilt transmission, I may have to go into the transmission rebuilding business. It looks like there is a large profit margin there.
There is no downside to them?
We have a non-plug in Toyota hybrid. Honest 52 MPG on the highway and 47 around town. The around town milage is so high because you are not using fuel at signals and cruising at street speeds. Only time engine cuts in is under acceleration.
What kind of batteries are you using, nickel-metal hydride batteries, or lithium?
I would buy an EV with safe nickel-metal hydride batteries. I wouldn’t buy an EV powered by lithium batteries.
I hope Toyota continues using nickel-metal hydride batteries.
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/keir-starmer-outlines-future-hybrid-10088204 2030 no new diesel/petrol engined cars to be sold in U.K. Hybrids likewise from 2035.
Must be a bookmaker out there taking bets as to whether that law will be dropped or not.
“Sales of new diesel and petrol cars in the UK in 2028/29 go through the roof” – forthcoming newspaper headline
They can’t. If they don’t sell enough EVs they are penalised on every additional ICE vehicle. It’s a complicated formula. You can look it up if you’re interested.
Which is why the UK EV market is awash with pre-registered cars, from 2024 and even 2023, with minimal mileage. They could be counted as a ‘sale’ at the time, but that kind of subterfuge cannot go on indefinitely. Just where they have been sitting idle for 1 – 2 years is an interesting question.
Diesel car sales in Paris goes through the roof as Chunnel Traffic increases dramatically
You’d think the first 40 minute or more charge up for a long road trip would teach most people all they need to know about EVs. If not the first, the third or fourth should certainly set the tone.
They want to make travel so painful that the peons stop trying.
BYD suppliers can wait 275 days or take a haircut on the money-go-round with their AAA promissory notes-
BYD’s Supply Chain Financing Masks Ballooning Debt, GMT Says | Financial Post
and if BYD say to the financiers look you don’t really want the cash for those AAA notes when we can pay AAA interest on them that we’ve borrowed or raised elsewhere because we’re AAA and besides you can divvy them up and make even more on the derivatives flogging them to the mums and dads and we’re all in this together making more money. Nothing tacky like RE you understand as we’re all helping to save the planet.
Sounds like BYD should change their name to Pyramid Motors for their financial schemes
Sounds exactly like the first 20 years of Amazon. It’s a sound strategy while the market forms.
And BYD are in the best place to replace the tainted Tesla brand.
Tainted in what way?
Wouldn’t want any Chinese EV … Any EV period.
EV = Exploding Vehicle.
Agreed. BYD cars need to stay in China.
As to Amazon, it was not directly subsidized by the government other than the usual tax games all corporations play. So, not a good comparison to BYD.
Tesla is tainted by selling indulgences –oops! I mean carbon credits to other US car makers. These credits are a total sham. [Calling DOGE! Elon! Where are you? LOL]
No business in a command and control economy makes a profit since most of its costs are obscured. China is no exception.
Tesla’s “profits” are on the back of subsidies which wiped out the cost of the first one off the production line, and therefore not amortised over future production.
Not to mention emission credits sold to other automakers.
https://carboncredits.com/teslas-carbon-credit-revenue-soars-to-2-76-billion-amid-profit-drop/
Which are just subsidies spelled a different way I suppose.
Strip away all government subsidies and see how they go.
The Titanic was unsinkable…
And then it was sinkable .
And it was state of the art-so they thought at the time.
From the above article:
“Tesla still leads with an operating margin of 7.2 percent, but its growth has stagnated. China’s BYD is expanding aggressively and benefiting from innovation and government support.”
. . . thereby explaining why former Co-President Musk has pressured current President Tump to maintain high tariffs on imports of cars and car parts from all foreign countries, with no “exemptions”!
MTGA . . . Make Tesla Great Again!
Try and keep up. Musk is against Tariffs and has not only said there should be no tariffs with Europe and other ‘friendlies’, but that one of the master minds of the tariffs, Peter Navarro, was a “moron”. This is what happens when you have disagreements within an administration that is willing to discuss the +/-‘s of policies sometimes publicly. Kinda like here at Wattsupwiththat, we might not all agree with how much humans are/are not affecting the overall “climate change”, but we’re at least free to argue about it.
Well, as with President Trump, there is what Elon states for public benefit, and then there is what he privately believes is in the best interest of his ambitions as well as the companies he owns.
As one most obvious example, does or does not Elon Musk consider the PRC to be a “friendlie” (your term)??? He had no qualms about building his Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai, with the first production vehicles rolled out of the factory in December 2019. Was that in the best interests of the US, or of Elon Musk?
Anyone who believes that Musk holds the best interests of the US above and his ego/ambitions and maintaining/increasing his wealth is . . . well, to be pitied.
Oh boy. That is much worse than the usual swing and a miss.
“Massive government support” means there’s no actual profit on the things.
The deadly reality behind the ‘clean, green’ electric vehicles:
Why is China so enthusiastic about EVs?
For China it’s a good economic choice.
Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal has added another twist to China’s push for BEVs (other than cornering another market with over capacity, which further damages the West): they expect an oil embargo after invading Taiwan thus their transportation system will less affected.
It becomes hilarious when we shout things like 3 of them are from China… The Chinese are not buying Chinese EVs anymore, they say that BYD stands for Burn You Down. Not a single Chinese EV manufacturer can exist without enormous subsidies and what we can almost call slave labour, where people working in these plants make very long hours and get very little pay, since January last year their pay has only gone down, while inflation in China skyrockets.In January last year we saw in China that just in China the sales of Chinese EVS went down with no less than 48% and every month after it went down more, The Chinese are now mostly buying plugin-Hybrids, and preferably from a non-Chinese brand. All this unsold crap is dumped onto the world market.
Then the innovation, what innovation, China developes no technology, it steals technology, and all their EVs run on opensource Tesla technology, most people dont know that after five years all Tesla technology turns opensource, that is what the Chinese use for their EVs, including BYD, every year on these big events we see Chinese CEOs shouting what breakthroughs they have, but looking at their cars, this technology is not htere9 and wont be for years to come, or it doesnt work.
Brands like BYD are well-kniwn to start rusting within a year, losing wheels while driving including the suspension, or airbags that in a crash more often dont work instead of work. The list with these Chinese cars is long, So yes it is hilarious to name these companies that run completely on taxmoney are making a profit.
Tesla is launching their driverless Robotaxi Network in about 50 days in Houston, with fares at around $1.20/mi.
According to my spreadsheet calculations, this will generate roughly $10/share/1 million units/yr in EPS for Telsa’s-owned Cybercabs, and around $5/share/1 million units/yr for customer-owned Teslas registered in the Robotaxi Network, and Tesla owners will $12K/yr—effectively making Teslas free for the first 5 years, and then owners will clear $12K/yr over the remaining life of their car.
in just 5~7 years most legacy carmakers will either merge or go out of business, and Tesla will be the world’s largest capitalized company.
We’ll see soon enough..
When the lawsuits begin from the self driving accidents, this plan will go in the toilet. When a cab or Uber driver causes an accident, you don’t achieve much by suing the driver. When a self driving Tesla gets into an accident…lawyer payday!
John-san:
There will be a few accidents, but that’s what insurance is for.
Tesla’s L4 FSD is already safer than humans, and improving exponentially because their AI E2E Cortex supercomputer is crunching real-time video data at 100 exaFLOPS.
Waymo, LYFT, and Uber won’t survive as they’ll be unable to compete on fares and safety.
By end of next year Tesla’s L4 FSD should be down to 1 accident/6 million driver miles, compared to human driving at one accident per 600,000 miles.
Cheers!
I wonder how self-driving Teslas will cope with the narrow, winding roads of Devon and Cornwall, full of tractors and horses.
Tesla’s E2E neural network L4 FSD will handle them well.
Tesla’s L2 FSD is already driving very well in the narrow busy streets in China with cyclist, motorbikes, and pedestrians, dodging and weaving in and out of heavy fast-moving traffic, and Tesla’s L4 FSD will me many orders of magnitude better than L2 FSD.
For a known fixed route, a self driving car can work. Autonomous navigation challenges really hamper a self driving road exploring unprogrammed routes.
Sparta-san:
Heuristic algorithms using geofencing with millions of lines of if/then decision trees processing multi-sensor data streams is a failed and dangerous model due to a theory called Complexity Ceiling.
Musk figured this out 5 years ago.
Get a friend with FSD V13.6 to give you test drive and you’ll be amazed how good it is, especially as this is just L2 FSD and Tesla is launching V14 L4 FSD in about 50 days, which will be an order of magnitude better than V13.6.
AI E2E vision-only neural networks is the only viable solution for fully autonomous and safe FSD.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) or advanced driver-assistance features have been introduced and tried in Chinese cities, but with notable limitations and challenges. Tesla rolled out an update in early 2025 allowing some Autopilot functions on urban roads in China, including lane changes, traffic signal recognition, and intersection navigation. However, this system is not branded as Full Self-Driving in China and is considered less sophisticated than Tesla’s FSD in the U.S., partly due to regulatory restrictions and limited training data on Chinese roads[1][2][5][7].
The rollout has been met with mixed reactions. Some Tesla owners in China expressed disappointment because the features do not fully match the capabilities promised or available in other markets. The system struggles with complex urban traffic scenarios and is seen as lagging behind domestic Chinese EV makers like BYD and Huawei, which offer advanced driver-assistance technologies at lower costs or for free[3][6][9].
Tesla faces regulatory hurdles in China, including strict data localization laws that prevent transferring vehicle data outside China for AI training, which slows development. Tesla is working on establishing a local data center and using publicly available videos to train its AI. Despite these challenges, Tesla’s Autopilot update in China represents a significant step toward eventual full self-driving deployment, but it remains a level-2 system requiring driver supervision[3][4][7].
In summary, Tesla’s self-driving technology has been tried in Chinese cities but is currently limited compared to its U.S. counterpart and faces stiff competition and regulatory challenges in China.
Citations:
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-prepares-deploy-full-self-driving-features-china-bloomberg-news-reports-2025-02-24/
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250225-tesla-rolls-out-advanced-self-driving-functions-in-china
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2025/02/25/tesla-autopilot-update-china-disappoints/80293331007/
[4] https://thehill.com/opinion/5247226-tesla-full-self-driving-regulatory/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/business/china-tesla-self-driving-musk.html
[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-china-self-driving-features-byd-offers-free-ev-2025-2
[7] https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-full-self-driving-isnt-called-that-in-china
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylv6Cdg_XQ0
[9] https://amp.scmp.com/business/china-evs/article/3304267/sci-fi-reality-chinese-ev-makers-outpace-tesla-autonomous-driving-race
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Answer from Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/tesla-is-launching-v14-l4-fsd-WTRQid1MSVmjiS87Ig79Vg?utm_source=copy_output
All your information is basically correct, however, even with the Chinese government restrictions, Tesla’s Chinese L2 FSD version still far exceeds all other Chinese ADA systems.
Tesla China is creatively working around many of the Chinese government restrictions to further improve their Chinese FSD version, and are also negotiating with Chinese officials to remove/revise them.
Tesla FSD is a huge phenomenon in China with Tesla’s drive videos on Chinese roads getting billions of views on Chinese websites.
BTW, Tesla’s Model Y is the #1 selling car in China for both EV and ICE cars.
Let the market make the decision, it will make the correct choice.
You can’t count the Chinese companies. Everything in China is government owned, so there is no “profit”.
Governments and the EV manufacturers have themselves to blame. Too many of the former alienated consumers by mandating a phase-out of gas/diesel types by such-and-such future dates forcing consumers into having to buy EVs. The latter were greedy from the outset by seizing the opportunity in overpricing a product of unproven reliability but hoping the above mandates would create an automatic demand for them, particularly when vehicle rebates were thrown in.They also both mistakenly thought people would be gung-ho about doing their parts to save the planet. Except even with those rebates EVs were still overpriced, and when reliability, charging availability and resale issues began surfacing, sales really began diving. GM’s 6-month shutdown of its electric van facility in Ingersoll, Ontario is just another example of how even businesses are turning away from EVs.
The climate changers and their lackey media must know they can’t hide the bleeding obvious from insurance underwriters and that’s their whole fickles firming plan up in smoke-
Racing could be next victim of net-zero battery obsession
Won’t you please think of the horsies?
Volkswagen Hybrid EXPLODES at Gatwick Airport | MGUY Australia
Yep that’s Northvolt NCM cylindrical cells hot off the press from the Sweden factory that uses some recycled batteries (2-3 times more costly than virgin materials) running on wind and hydro and yet Northvolt is cooked.
Story tip
PS: Howsabout some Regulations climate changers before we start asking more hard questions about the risk we’re taking on to jack up that pricing so we’re a lot less worried than we are at present?
Insurance industry seeks regulation to curb lithium-ion battery fires
PPS: Even the commies are feeling the pressure-
China to tighten EV battery rules to reduce fire and explosion risks
EVs have a niche role. I like battery powered golf carts.