Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
For a handful of years, legacy automakers were pumping out press releases on electric cars consistently and frequently. The portion of press releases that were about EVs was far higher than the portion of legacy automakers’ sales that were EVs. I think this started after Tesla got the Model 3 to mass production and the company’s stock price soared. To put it simply, I think automaker executives and boards decided that the way to get higher stock prices (which strongly benefited them as individuals) was to hype up their EV business and make it seem like they were going to lead the way into this new EV era, even if there had been very little real-world evidence for this before then.
However, despite all their PR efforts and hype, as well as some half-decent EV projects, the stock market didn’t care, and EV sales from these companies have also been meh at best. Tesla can get a P/E ratio that’s out of this world, but that doesn’t mean other automakers are going to get the same kind of treatment. Furthermore, Tesla still accounts for about half of EV sales in the United States.
