Why Have Automakers Written Off $55 Billion In EV Investments?

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An article title caught my attention today for a couple of reasons. The title of the article is: “Major Automakers Have Written Off $55 Billion After Overestimating EV Demand.”

Hmm….

First of all, the thing that jumped out to me was $55 billion. That’s a lot of freakin’ money! The most recent announcement contributing to this was also the biggest. Stellantis just wrote off $26 billion of EV investment. Stunning. Incredible. Horrifying.

Ford wrote off another nearly $20 billion, which triggered a lot of discussion on this topic already.

Taking a step back, it’s greatly disheartening to see that this much money being invested into EVs was just suddenly dropped and written off as a supposedly useless and dead-end endeavor. It is shocking, and also a hugely negative sign for where we are headed with the climate.

But why was the $55 billion written off? Are automakers giving up on their EV plans because they overestimated EV demand?

Well, the obvious answer is actually the most important one: US policy changed dramatically when Donald Trump took office and Republicans took control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. EV subsidies have been killed, the Trump administration is trying to kill EV charging projects, and, in fact, the whole system put in place for the government to force automakers to make more fuel efficient cars and pollute less is being annihilated — despite the fact that it has been in place for decades and is good for consumers and the public at large. When the whole breadth of US policy focused on encouraging automakers to produce and sell EVs gets bombed, automakers lose the incentive to produce and sell EVs. That is cause #1.

There is, still, an apparent problem getting enough customers to buy EVs at the price points automakers want. Perhaps part of this was overestimating consumer interest. However, I do think there are other notable factors at play, such as:

1. Automakers have not been very effective at marketing EVs, at explaining to shoppers why they should want an electric car more than a gasoline one. In fact, I think they’ve been horrible at this. They hardly ever really explain to people why EVs are better.
2. Auto dealers are the main conduits of automaker ideas and eventual reality, and auto dealers seem very uninterested in selling EVs. They often have one EV specialist, and good luck being at the dealer at the right time to go on a test ride with him/her. Even if you do get the EV specialist, they often aren’t very exciting or useful at all. They simply know a little more of the basics about the EV(s) the automaker sells. Overall, though, good luck ever finding an auto dealer that is super into EVs and selling many of them. They typically just want to move what’s easiest and quickest to move, and what gets them the most revenue, including recurring service and maintenance revenue.
3. You really do have to scale up EV production in order to drive costs down and get the most benefits out of a model. Have automakers simply given in too soon or not tried hard enough to scale up, lower costs, and sell millions of EVs?

Anyway, pick a side if you like — do consumers just not want EVs, or have a variety of government and corporate factors stifled EV education and EV adoption?

Also, funny how more than one out of every four European new car shoppers bought an EV in December and one out of every five did so in 2025 as a whole. Funny how 33% of new-car sales in China where fully electric vehicle sales last year. Automakers can find EV buyers there easily enough, but not in the US?