R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over it's lifetime.
Car production is very capital intensive, besides R&D you have the retooling of entire production lines as another major cost factor.
The real question is whether the sales of these cars will eventually pay for the capital expended. At current EV sales number that is not going to happen, but manufacturers like Ford obviously speculate on large future growth in demand for EVs.
At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.
> R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over its lifetime.
You’d think this “101” information would not be needed to be said here, but here we are having to explain it.
> At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.
We should also try to quantify things, because using terms like “much” in italics when it comes to EVs has been so misused that people don’t trust it anymore. We were told that they are much heavier, but then this turns out to be as little as 10-15%. We were told that they lose massive range in the winter, but it can be the same ballpark of 10-15%.
R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over it's lifetime.
Car production is very capital intensive, besides R&D you have the retooling of entire production lines as another major cost factor.
The real question is whether the sales of these cars will eventually pay for the capital expended. At current EV sales number that is not going to happen, but manufacturers like Ford obviously speculate on large future growth in demand for EVs.
At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.