By Peter M. DeLorenzo
Detroit. I keep waiting for reality to set in when it comes to the auto industry as practiced around here, but clearly that isn’t happening anytime soon. The “Grand Transition” to EVs is running at such a plodding pace that the idea of a date on the calendar as something you can hang your hat on is simply folly at this point.
Let’s review, shall we?
Lead times have always been part and parcel of this business, no more so than for the artisans in the design community. Designers are used to introducing products to the media that were “baked” at least three to five years prior, and then they go back to their respective studios to work on products coming three to five years down the road. Designers in this industry live in a perpetual Twilight Zone, a peculiar limbo – in fact a warped reality – where the present is never really present, while the future is immediately urgent.
This is readily apparent if you have the privilege of being escorted through one of the design studios. Near-production vehicle work – meaning in showrooms three years away – is already baked, while the future work is everywhere you look. As for the vehicles being introduced at the moment? They are simply yesterday’s news. But then again, that has always been the case for the designers and the design community.
As for the rest of this business, this “Grand Transition” to EVs has upended what passed for the normal order of things. Chalk it up to the Tesla effect, which has caused legacy automakers to collectively lose their frickin’ minds. They are so consumed with gaining credibility in the EV club in the eyes of the consumer and government regulators that they’re pretty much abandoning rational thought altogether.
The automakers have long operated in the quagmire akin to premature ejaculation when it comes to new products. Desperate to show that they’re in the game – whatever the game of that moment is – they show products to the media and the public that are a long way from seeing reality. Students of the game remember the disastrous launch of the “new” Thunderbird in recent (albeit ancient) times, or the “new” Camaro that was unveiled five full years before it darkened any showroom.
To me, this is one of the most screwed-up things about this business. The concept of keeping a lid on a new product until it’s less than six months from the showrooms is simply anathema for the current practitioners at these car companies. They not only don’t understand it, they fundamentally don’t believe in it. They offer up all kinds of reasons for this behavior, but it doesn’t amount to anything substantial, or again, rational. Instead, you hear a lot of moaning and groaning about getting the dealers ready, getting the production facilities ready and a laundry list of blah-blah-blahs that makes your head spin. It’s all bullshit too. They collectively just can’t help themselves, and they shoot themselves in the head every time they do it too.
Take all of this predictive industry behavior into account and add the “EV Thing” or more accurate, the “EV Frenzy” to the mix, and you have an unmitigated disaster that has been unfolding in real time for going on three years now. Companies touting vehicles that they can’t produce and, even worse, spending hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing money advertising upcoming products on big-ticket events when they’re not going to see the light of day for over three years, at least, is not only stupid, it borders on the absurd.
Apparently, there’s no end in sight to this madness, either. It’s almost as if the auto industry is operating with calendars that don’t actually exist in reality. For example, the current auto industry calendars are promising a brace of all-new EVs that will flood the market beginning late this year. And that is flat-out inaccurate and wrong. (Even St. Elon got it horribly wrong with the Cybertruck. It’s allegedly being built – I’m not buying that for one second, by the way – three long years after he first displayed it. And it’s going to be at least another year before it shows up for sale, at least.)
If you want a real-world reality check to this overpromising and underdelivering, here’s an easy, one-step AE Guide to Upcoming EVs that makes it simple for consumers to understand.
So, there you have it. Add basically two years to any EV product intro date from a legacy manufacturer, and you’ll probably be close to accurate. It’s a damn good thing the legacy automakers are fortifying themselves with brand-new ICE engines and ICE manufacturing facilities, because this “Grand Transition” is going to play out easily well into the next decade. The end of the next decade. And, in case you’re wondering, these legacy manufacturers simply can’t afford to play in the EV space unless they keep churning out ICE vehicles in mass quantities.
Meanwhile, Tesla keeps flooding the market at will.
As the Wicked Witch of the West once famously said, “What a world, what a world...”
And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.
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