There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.

Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.

One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.

  • @Wahots
    8•22 days ago

    they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles

    Huh, that’s strange. I’m not really interested in a $25,000+ EV. Turns out that a $1,200 ebike is faster than my car (due to traffic) and costs orders of magnitude less to maintain and charge. I’ve basically just stopped driving.

    Perhaps my interest will be piqued when they can develop a sub $25k EV, without half the “smart” features like subscriptions for Bluetooth audio and heated seats. Until then, I’ll use my old car like…a dozen times a year.

      • @Wahots
        2•21 days ago

        Yeah, it really fucking sucks when there’s only one form of transportation and virtually no alternatives. I’ve lived in places like that, and it’s always infuriating when your car won’t start and you are already running late for work. And the nearest bus is really slow and on a half-hour basis. My old city didn’t even have bus stops for awhile, you just had to flag the bus down and hope they saw you.