The ongoing discussions about profit margins on the “first” [mass scale] generation of EVs from the Big Three supposedly being razor thin or even leading to loses has left me wondering if anyone be it the US DOT or a NGO has attempted to estimate how much the total cost for retooling the US automotive industry towards BEVs might look like in the end.
Obviously, I understand a lot of factors -from funding streams at every level of government, to international relations, to even just timing- can play an immense role in the calculation of such an estimate but I’m curious if there’s even a ballpark estimate. Have any analysts attempted to come up with with a “realistic” estimate of, say, when GM will have fully absorbed the setup cost for Ultium and vehicle unit cost will just be determined by the opex overhead of a given production line rather than having to also account for the upfront capex of the whole platform and production chain buildup?
Remember when tesla ‘was losing money on every car they sold’? They weren’t. They were amortizing the r&d/tooling costs over 3-5 years.
This is the cost of rebooting to build EV’s. You absorb the cost of the factory and designing a new type of car for half a decade. Anyone saying this also needs to be learning from the historical business cycle.