The concept of entrenchment has been on my mind a lot lately.
I have covered the auto industry as a journalist for more than a dozen years and have been a car enthusiast my entire life. Even so, I can truly say it’s hard to understand how entrenched the car industry is in modern society until you pay close attention to what happens when things start to change.
After a year at the helm of InsideEVs, I can see those fault lines more clearly than ever.
I'm grateful to work alongside such a talented and dedicated team of reporters, editors, video creators and contributors. 2024 isn't even over yet and it's been the wildest and most uneven year yet for the electric vehicle revolution, which to us feels both inevitable and also millions of miles away. We get more news to cover in a day than many publications get in a week.
But covering the EV shift must be like covering the rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s; most people don't yet understand the magnitude of change we're all facing. What's going on right now isn't just "cars that you plug in." It's the rise of the battery economy and the war over who controls it. It's the transition from fossil fuels to a hopefully more sustainable future. It's automation, jobs and widespread economic upheaval. It's a software-driven transformation of how we'll get around someday, with all the good and terrifying things that entails.
I'm not even sure that the car companies can see all of that, either. That's because change is not a concept anyone is used to when it comes to cars.
The world as we know it today is built around the automobile. We have spent a century building a society where a car is an absolute necessity for daily living in most places. A sprawling ecosystem grew around that idea and in support of it: gas stations, highways, insurance providers, dealerships, repair shops, even suburbs. We have generally accepted as normal that a car purchase would be a normal part of life. Even if we don’t always see it, internal combustion touches almost every aspect of our lives.
Now, almost all of that is changing because it has to. Blame global air pollution or a looming showdown with China or just the inevitable march of technological progress. But the era of the EV is changing almost every part of how things have come to work.
Over the past year, I’ve seen every sort of reaction to those changes, from the car companies to consumers to the many institutions that support both. Some automakers are winning thanks to their forward-thinking embrace of what’s next; others are suffering because they realized going from 100 years of internal combustion to batteries and software is far harder than just saying you’re going to.
Millions of consumers are buying EVs in record numbers, albeit not as many as projected. Others curse the idea of being “forced” to go electric eventually. The dealers aren't happy, the parts suppliers worry for their future, the startups are figuring out how they're going to survive, and in America, much of what happens next may ride on what happens in the coming weeks.
I wanted to share a few major observations about our current moment. These are based on countless conversations with our readers—actual EV owners and prospective buyers—and people inside and around the auto industry, the public policy space, the tech sector and beyond. And from those conversations, a few big things keep coming up.
People just want affordable cars. Period.
It’s actually rather unfortunate that the EV race is heating up in the era of 8% interest rates and record-high new car prices. Particularly during and after the pandemic, carmakers banked on the idea that people would just get used to paying $50,000 for family crossovers from now on.
Guess what? Squeezed out in every other area of their lives, they're now saying “No thanks.”
Even more so for the privilege of driving something more expensive that they didn’t understand and didn’t know how or where to “fill up.” (More on that later.) But when we ask people why they don’t want to go electric, “it’s too expensive” is one of the most common refrains we hear. And I certainly don’t blame them.
Hopefully, the next wave of cheaper models will change hearts and minds.
The auto industry can’t expect people to just show up.
But let me put this as bluntly as I can: Everyone must now look at some of these car companies and ask, what is the point of you?
We now can tell the difference between the automakers whose leadership, engineers, designers and even rank-and-file folks are excited about EVs and the ones who are being dragged kicking and screaming into it by emissions and fuel economy rules.
It’s why so many automakers are freaked out by uneven electric sales. It’s an industry largely just used to people showing up like they always have. RAV4 owners buy more RAV4s. Silverado owners buy more Silverados. Much of the Nissan lineup feels like “the same car everyone else makes, except worse, but cheaper.” They’re not used to pitching a new, innovative product to a skeptical audience.
But I’d ask these same automakers what they’re actually doing to convince their customers of the real benefits of going electric. Until fairly recently, the move has been to toss them some Electrify America credits and let the dealers handle the rest, which they often didn’t.
As I started writing this, Ford announced it would hand out complementary Level 2 home chargers and cover most installation costs. That's the right way to play this. It's the kind of outside-the-box thinking they all need to be trying.
Education is key too. Car companies have been generally terrible at this in the EV era. Most people can’t explain how an internal combustion car works beyond “Gasoline goes here” and now they’re getting tossed into the deep end of a new world, one full of kilowatt-hours and charging curves and battery preconditioning.
I got an email a few weeks ago from a gentleman in his 80s who bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5 and did not know how to find fast charging with it. That’s a failure. I don't see a lot of effort to keep that sort of thing from happening again.
Put more bluntly, many of these car companies are just not going to survive this transition. Not if they can't commit to making the very best technology or offering the greatest value proposition while going the extra mile to educate consumers.
Many of them are failing to make cases for themselves—cases for why they’re really better than the competition that’s out there now and getting more intense each year. It’s hard to look at where things are going and feel good about Jaguar or half the Stellantis portfolio, let alone whether the world would be any worse off if those entities ceased to exist.
Like the good former city desk reporter that I am, I have a list of car company obituaries ready to go for when that day comes. The list is getting longer and longer. And if those companies can’t answer that question above, they’re probably on it.
Dealers are a big part of that problem.
There's perhaps no greater example of entrenchment than the group of people who have legally cemented themselves into America's new-car buying process and then collectively decided that they aren't down for what's next because it's expensive and hard and requires learning new things.
I can't say all car dealers are averse to selling EVs. Many are doing well on this front. But as a whole, and perhaps more importantly as a lobbying arm, they're going to be a bigger barrier to EV adoption than most people think. And the automakers get this, too; they just can't say anything publicly about their "dealer partners."
There are countless examples of this, like the 150-odd Cadillac dealers who cashed out rather than get ready to go electric or the challenges to Ford's EV sales plans or even how Hyundai's much-publicized Amazon pilot seems to be stuck in neutral.
Maybe things will start to change. Ford and GM seem intent on training those partners to get ready for what's next. And 32,195 GM Ultium-powered EVs don't just sell themselves in one quarter.
But if they don't, some big automaker is going to bring the hammer down, and the rest will follow suit when they do.
The software ship has sailed and it does not look good for automakers.
Entrenchment works both ways. Try reading our emails anytime InsideEVs writes about Apple CarPlay or Android Auto—specifically, the lack thereof in some new cars. People are furious about it and they simply will not buy cars that don’t have the smartphone mirroring systems.
Yes, in-car software is night and day better than it was even a few years ago. Try telling people that. Some two decades of dismal tech experiences have them clinging to what they know.
No automaker wants to cede the software future to the tech companies. But even if they really can find ways to become software giants on the same level as Apple and Google, I’m not sure they’ll ever be able to convince their customers to join them.
If you give people a good reason to break up with gasoline, they’ll do it.
Like the CEOs of General Motors and Ford, the continued knee-jerk reaction to EVs along partisan lines has surprised me too. Sure, our modern perception of EVs was born a decade ago from rich people in California driving Teslas. But in the end, it’s just technology. It doesn’t need to be partisan or inherently only for the politically left-leaning.
Considering that Florida and Texas are some of the top EV-adopting states behind California, I think plenty of people are starting to understand this too.
But there's been an upside to the prevalence of EVs in our wider national conversation: the rise in popularity of hybrid cars. The lack of charging infrastructure, or even the perception of it, is still the obvious barrier to EV adoption. In the meantime, people are waking up to the benefits of electrification with cars that are more familiar to their current lifestyle.
Nobody likes paying for gasoline. That isn't just going to be bad news for the fossil fuel industry; it already is.
The advancements are happening at crazy speeds.
A mere four years ago, probably 80% of the cars we write about daily on InsideEVs didn’t exist yet. The ones that did are now completely outclassed by modern EVs at range, charging times, software features and automated driving assistance tech.
I’ve never seen advancements happening at that rate in the car world before this.
I'm sometimes shocked when I hear things like GM claiming to have PHEVs available in the U.S. market by 2027. I wonder if they know that may as well be 50 years from now, the way things are going. That’s another aspect of this entrenchment thing: many of these companies, and their vast supplier networks, simply aren’t built to move that fast.
Again, it’s no wonder why. Things were always set up to work one way. Customers just showed up and everything else was just a fight over market share—battles over little things like design and features and horsepower, not owning the technologies that will define the future.
Yes, it’s getting better all the time. Mostly. (Depending on where you live.)
It’s not just the cars that are getting better. It’s the charging infrastructure too. People don’t often realize this, but charger growth in America alone is happening at an extremely rapid rate.
But there are two problems at work here. One is that chargers still aren’t getting built at the same rate as EV adoption, thanks to roadblocks around the installation of fast chargers and the fact that not enough is being done to get charging access to people who aren’t single-family homeowners.
The other problem is that this progress really depends on where you live. If you’re in New York, even New York City, things are night and day better than they were even a few years ago. In Nebraska or Idaho? Not so much, unfortunately.
Misinformation can feel impossible to keep up with.
Earlier this year, we launched a story series called EV Myths Discharged. The goal was to dive into some of the most pervasive misconceptions about electric cars out there, while still being factual and fair.
Running this series has been like trying to keep my basement from flooding with a tablespoon. There’s so much misinformation out there that it’s hard for us to keep up with. There are many reasons for this, from lies spreading on social media to intentional clickbait from so-called “traditional” news outlets to documented disinformation campaigns from Big Oil. The stories from ordinary EV drivers who are happy with their purchases get drowned out by the stories about extreme cases or straight-up lies.
Again, entrenchment. Gas cars are the norm, and any deviation from that is scary and worthy of hostility.
I’m also disappointed by the EV coverage I see from other outlets. While there are many thoughtful, well-researched, well-reported perspectives out there, much of what you see is rampant fanboyism, short-sighted “good quarter, bad quarter” financial reporting, or just open hostility from people who think owning a gas-powered car is, or should be, some kind of civil right.
Much of it ignores the fact that adoption of new technologies rarely happens on a straight, up-and-to-the-right line, or it neglects the environmental reasons behind the entire transition. Or fails to pay attention to the massive, massive amounts of investments still going into battery tech, new factories and software. I can’t predict the future more than anyone can. But I will say this: if you’re covering this world, make sure you don’t end up like this guy.
And no matter what happens, I'm always excited for what's next. It beats being bored at work every day.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
