If luxury & exotic & sports cars were only dragsters and their value was measured in quarter mile times at the drag strip, then this might be a real problem. Luckily there are many other dimensions that these cars are sold on, and that’s not new.

I mean, go back to the 1980s when Ferraris and Lambos were nerfed (in the USA at least) by emissions regs and had no power, but people still bought them.

Likewise, the best selling sports car in history is the Mazda MX-5, which is not known for being super powerful.

The question is more about volume than about time, IMHO. What I mean is. . . Bringing any new automotive platform to production, electric or otherwise, costs several billion dollars. Then you need to sell about 50,000 units per year of that platform. So how long will it take to ramp up to that level of production-and-sales?

This is where GM (and several other companies) are having it rough. With Tesla already holding a big chunk of the EV market, and the remaining portion sliced really thinly between different car makers and multiple models and platforms, it’s proving hard for any new automotive platform to reach the scale where it becomes economically viable.

And when I hear about car makers delaying their plans, I have to just shake my head. That means extending their pain.

I don’t have an easy answer for them, though. They can either tough it out for even longer while the electric car market grows, or else they can make a Tesla-like leap of faith: Throw intense effort into designing an amazing vehicle, set up the production lines to produce it on massive scale, and trust that the masses of people will be eager to buy your amazing vehicle. And then die by the sword if you got the product wrong, Edsel style. But I don’t see GM or most other “legacy” auto makers attempting that. It’s too far outside the modern auto industry corporate culture (to include officers, board and shareholders too).

Because compact SUVs have replaced the average midsize sedan.

I think you mean CUVs or crossovers. Not that many people are buying SUVs.

Am I fighting a lost battle here? Have we got to the point where we’re just going to call every damn thing a SUV now, and then have to invent some new word for actual SUVs-as-such? I dunno. . . Off-roader? Or just go back to calling them all a “jeep” regardless of make and model?

In a nutshell. . .
Owner: My car doesn’t work! I take to dealer. . .
Dealer: We check car carefully. Your battery bad. That’ll be $50,000 please.
Owner: No way! I ask Hyundai Canada about this.
Hyundai Canada: Not our problem. Dealer handles this.
Owner: FML! I scrap car and blab to press.
Press: No way! I ask Hyundai Canada about this.
Hyundai Canada: Car was never checked carefully, nobody knows what was wrong with it. Too bad it was scrapped. We’ll pay to make the story go away.

It’s a short article, but it does nicely sum up a couple of points.

Sales are up and up, but what’s putting the hurt on car makers is the number of new models they’re launch into the market. Those sales are being sliced thinly, which means each model (or shared platform, even) is having difficulty racking up enough sales to get economies-of-scale and bring costs down. And if the models your company puts out aren’t attractive and don’t compete well against (let’s be honest) Tesla, then. . . Yeah. That’s a rough spot to be in.

Agree with the outcome, disagree somewhat on the reasons.

I think you are putting too much emphasis on new technology to fix the limitations that you imagine are holding back electric cars. From where I sit, the limiting factors on adoption rate aren’t, for the most part, things like range or charging speed. I’m sure there will continue to be some improvements on those fronts, and that’s all good, but the EV technology we have on the road today is already fit-for-purpose.

What’s holding things back more right now are under-developed charging networks (moreso in some parts of the world) and economics.

It took many decades of scaling up production and iterative cost reduction to make gasoline engine vehicles affordable. This is happening a lot quicker with EVs, but it’s still got a few more years to run its course.

Then there’s the whole dynamic of the used car market to consider. A lot of people simply don’t buy new cars. Even after production of electric cars is ramped up and they become dominant in new-car sales, it’ll take a while for them to filter throughout the used market.

The economic “tipping point” that I’m looking for will happen when more people are switching away from gas cars than want to buy new gas cars. Then we may start to see the used market glutted with unwanted gas cars at peanuts prices. That’s what happened to film cameras, and it became almost impossible for companies to keep producing and selling brand new film cameras, even though quite a few people were still shooting film. I could see something like that happening with combustion vehicles.

Mine has lousy speakers, awful click action on the touch pad, doesn’t close up neatly, runs warm, doesn’t have the greatest battery life. I installed Mint because Pop!_OS drives me up the wall too much.

The touch pad is the worst, as I fumble trying to find the exact spot to press for a click to be recognized, and try to operate it without making the pointer jump off the item I was trying to click on.