There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.
One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
Your prices are way off. The only car that can be bought brand new for less than $20k in the USA is the Mitsubishi Mirage, and from experience it sucks to drive. A Malibu and a Civic are both like $29k, but actually Chevy just quit making Malibu’s this year.
Not sure what country you’re from but my prices are direct from the US OEM website, but maybe you can let them know they need to update them.
Most cheap cars do. You want cheap? That’s what you get. That has nothing to do with the author’s claims that the OEMs have no interest in selling them.