Detroit's EV Meltdown Is Just History Repeating Itself

[00:01] spent 2 years and God knows how many billions of dollars building an electric SUV so advanced that they called it a personal bullet train. Then, they killed it quietly, like a guy ghosting his own girlfriend after promising her a ring.

[00:15] about the automotive equivalent of setting your own house on fire because thermostat. Detroit has one job, build the electric future before China builds it for you. Instead, the big three looked at the fastest-growing car market

[00:28] on the planet and said, "Well, actually, you know what? Let's make it bigger trucks." Genius. Absolutely rock scientists over there. Let's rewind real quick. May 2023, Ford rolls out this three-row electric SUV concept at a

[00:42] fancy investor event in Dearborn. Doug Field, the guy running Ford's EV division, stands up and calls it a personal bullet train. Beautiful car, apparently. Unlike anything in the segment, the kind of thing that makes

[00:54] you want to trade in your Explorer on the spot. 14 months later, delayed 2 years, 4 months after that, dead. Yes, canceled, deleted from existence like your browser history before your mom uses your laptop. And Doug Field, the

[01:07] guy who dreamed this thing up, he's gone, too. Bye-bye. Restructured right out the door this spring. Bro built a bullet train and got left at the station. And here's the real thing. Ford wasn't even the most embarrassing one.

[01:20] Ford at least had the decency to kill their SUV before it hit dealerships. GM straight-up delayed the Buick electric SUV. Volvo backed off an entire all-electric lineup. Dodge, and I want you to sit with this one, canceled an

[01:33] electric Charger and an electric Ram pickup in the same year. Two Jeep plug-in hybrids got yeeted into the void. Honda and Nissan quietly shelved a bunch of electric sedans they'd built specifically for us. And Acura killed an

[01:45] SUV that was already being built in a factory in Tennessee. Like, the assembly line actually existed. The car existed. They just said, "Nah, brother." Okay, and real quick, here's the deal. Bigger prize, shorter timeline, you are going

[01:58] to love it. We already have given someone their choice of a Shelby GT350 or a Mark V Supra. Before that, we gave away a Bayside blue flame-spitting R35 GT-R. Plus, we've given away a hundred thousand dollars cash. But this next

[02:11] pinned in the first comment. Go tap it, sign up, and go check out the past winners because your name could be drawn next. Now, back to the show. My personal favorite though is the entire Hall of Shame is the Chevrolet BrightDrop a van.

[02:25] glowing review. I wonder if there's money involved. Had a cavernous cargo hold, visibility like a giant terrarium. Genuinely lovely things to say about a van. Two weeks after they dropped it off for review, Chevy discontinued it. The

[02:40] article basically opened by saying, "Well, this is awkward." That's not a headline, that is an eulogy. And it doesn't stop there because this June regulators told Polestar it can't even sell new cars in the US anymore.

[02:52] American showrooms like it never happened. At this point, I am convinced job is just walking around unplugging EVs before anyone can test drive them. And look, I get it. Some of you in the comments are already typing, "EVs are a

[03:07] scam, rare earth minerals, blah blah blah, cool power plants." Save it. This is not a debate whether electric cars are good. This is about Detroit having assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions.

[03:21] I know that so well. Throwing pieces across the room and then blaming Sweden. Because here is what actually happened. Federal EV tax credit, the $7,500 one that made these cars actually affordable, got axed under the second

[03:33] got gutted right alongside it. And the second the government stopped holding what they always do when things get hard. They ran back to trucks and giant SUVs like a kid running back to mommy. Battery plants that popped up all over

[03:47] well, they were shut down or turned into glorified storage units. Thousands of people lost their jobs over this. And the money? Insane, you guys. Stellantis the money? Insane, you guys. Stellantis wrote down $26 billion in EV losses this

[04:01] year. Ford's at 19 billion. And for context, that's enough money to buy every single one of you a brand new Miata and still have change left over basically admitted the company's whole future depends on picking the right bet

[04:14] here, which is a wild thing to say about a 120-year-old car company. But, here we are, Jim. Now, meanwhile, this is the part that should actually scare you. The rest of the planet did not get the memo that EVs are supposedly dead. One out of

[04:27] every four cars sold globally last year was electric. Analysts think that number meaning gas cars officially become the minority. China alone builds 75% of every EV sold on Earth. The US builds about 5%. Five. We invented the assembly

[04:43] the cars that actually represent the future of the assembly line. BYD, a heard of 3 years ago, is now the biggest EV manufacturer on the planet, bigger

[04:55] China can take a new EV from blueprint to showroom about a third faster than the American companies. A third faster. That gap doesn't shrink on its own, chief. It just widens until American automakers are basically watching from

[05:08] the parking lot with a churro, wondering what happened. And it's not like Americans secretly hate electric cars, either. A survey earlier this year found seriously consider an EV for their next car. And I might be one of them, but the

[05:22] Taycan is is going bye-bye. And that was before gas prices spiked because of a whole mess in the Middle East. People want these things. Detroit just keeps taking the option off the table before anyone can buy it. And before you say,

[05:34] "Well, this has never happened before." It absolutely has. 1983, a journalist named Brock Yates writes an entire book asking if Detroit has basically accepted the Accord and it was embarrassingly

[05:48] had. Same stages of grief back then, too. Denial, anger, a bunch of ugly, overpriced vans nobody wanted, built specifically despite the Japanese. Reagan eventually steps in, forces a quota on Japanese imports, lets Toyota,

[06:01] Honda build a few US factories, buys Detroit some time to catch up. But did they catch up? Well, kind of, sort of. The Dodge Neon in '94 was basically a cheap knockoff of the Honda Civic, and it actually worked. But mostly Detroit

[06:14] just kept doubling down on trucks every time things got scary, which is the same move they're pulling right now, 40 years later. Like a guy who's been dumped by the same type of person five times and still hasn't updated his type. Then,

[06:26] 2008 happens, right? Financial crisis. Car sales drop 40% in a single year. GM and Chrysler go bankrupt. The government bails them out with taxpayer money, while the CEOs, and I cannot make this up, fly to Washington on private jets to

[06:39] up, fly to Washington on private jets to beg for it. $17.4 billion in bailout funds. Some guy named Mitt Romney writes an op-ed basically saying, "Let them honestly, he might have had a point. And in the

[06:52] middle of all that chaos, some random Silicon Valley startup drops a $220,000 electric sports car based on a Lotus chassis. Didn't even really work half the time. The company, that was Tesla. That car was the Roadster, and it

[07:05] even having this conversation today. Here's a fun little detail nobody talks about, though. One economist put it like this. Automakers are basically steering a battleship through a maze that rearranges itself every 4 years,

[07:18] sometimes every 4 days, once you throw tariffs into it. These companies plan a new car 4 years out based on steel prices, labor costs, and demand put. They almost never do, anyway. You try running a business when the

[07:30] government changes its mind about EVs more often than you change your oil. So, here's where we're at this year. Norway sells 97% EVs. China passed 50%. The US is stuck at 10. And the honest reason isn't that Americans hate electric cars.

[07:45] It's that we live in a country the size of a small continent, 4 million square miles crisscrossed by 4 million miles of roads, with barely any incentive programs. And the second the government pulls the incentives, everybody panics

[07:58] and buys a truck instead. Also worth noting, most of the EVs that have actually sold here are clustered in like 10 counties total, mostly being big cities full of people who already have a charger at home. Try selling that same

[08:10] each way through farmland, and the nearest charging station is two counties over. And instead of fixing it, well, the plan seems to be fortress America. Slap tariffs on Chinese EVs and hope nobody notices. Mexico has basically

[08:24] zero tariffs and is currently flooded with BYDs. Or that Canada just let 2,900 Chinese EVs through the door with barely a 6% tax. You can build a wall, but the gate wide open, and everyone's just

[08:38] compared it to what happened with semiconductors. Decades of losing ground to Asia until Congress finally passed a chip manufacturing bill to claw some of same bill for batteries before it's too late. Because, as of right now,

[08:52] just means that we're going to keep buying trucks that never have to compete with anything. Look, it's not wholly over. Ford's working on a cheaper compact EV pickup for next year. Some Bezos-backed startup called Slate Auto

[09:05] just opened pre-orders on an EV truck for under 25 grand. And, funny enough, the one EV category that's actually crushing it in America right now is the big three-row electric SUVs. The Kia EV9 is doing great. Toyota and Subaru are

[09:19] both rushing out competitors. And the most desirable used EV on the market are the new big three-row Teslas, meaning the exact segment Ford just abandoned still the hottest one out there. Somebody's making money off that bullet

[09:32] There's still a path forward, but it requires Detroit to actually commit to a lane instead of swerving every time gas prices wiggle or a new president shows tell me range anxiety is the real villain here. Sure, buddy. Yeah, that's

[09:47] definitely why you drive a 6,000 lb truck to pick up a single bag of aren't out here doing cross-country hauls every weekend. They're doing a commute, a Costco run, and maybe one road trip a year where they could, I

[09:59] don't know, maybe stop for 20 minutes like a normal person. Range anxiety is real for some folks. Sure, but it's also because this convenient excuse Detroit good affordable EVs and actually

[10:11] marketing them like they believe in the product. Because here is the brutal truth. The exact same guy who called out this exact pattern of behavior did it in 1983, 43 years ago, and here we are watching Detroit run the same play

[10:24] expecting a different result. That's not resilience, that's just really, really expensive déjà vu. So, drop a comment down below. Is Detroit cooked or is this actual comeback? And if you actually made it this far without buying a truck

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