Now electric car transition there is done, too: they won't buy Teslas, but Chinese electric cars are banned, and European one are incredibly expensive, lose money to their makers, and just plain suck. All hope is for "european" cars made by Chinese brands that are "reassembled" (sometimes by doing as little as bolting the wheels on) from "kits" coming from China. Like Volvo. They are actually decent and may be better than Teslas.
The Volkswagen range (ID.3, ID.4, the ID.Buzz van) is excellent. Of all the EVs I've driven, the ID.3 is my favorite, far superior to a Tesla. I've driven rented EVs from Skoda, Opel, SEAT, Peugeot, etc., and they're all fine, if boring. If you count any brand available in Europe, Hyundai and Kia both have excellent EVs, including the Kia EV6 and EV9.
Tesla have definitely nailed certain things that other manufacturers have struggled with. They're the only manufacturer that does a good UI (but like many others I deeply dislike that everything is on a poorly positioned screen), and their integration is excellent (things like automatic navigation to a supercharger when it knows it will need to charge to get to your destination).
Tesla have also strived for more practical ranges; I find it really frustrating when other manufacturers launch new cars with 300-350km ranges, which is a step backwards.
I love my Porsche Taycan as well (even if its resale price is dropping like crazy and sales are down), but whenever I travel outside Europe/USA in LATAM, I only see 1 brand: BYD.
The main differentiator why people will switch to EVs is price, and Tesla seems to have stopped competing on it and is bettin on full autonomy instead (which is not a bad bet, as Waymo is achieving it slowly).
Volvo is designed/engineered in Sweden and has a global production network with factories in Sweden, Belgium, the US, and China. You're massively oversimplifying.
> European one are incredibly expensive, lose money to their makers, and just plain suck
Not true by any means. There are multiple options available and new cars are being planned / released all the time. Not to mention the second-hand market has ample choice.
And also chinese cars that are put together in european factories are not loaded with tariffs, so they are starting to do that. I think Leapmotor in a Fiat factory in Poland is first?
Tesla was given favorable tariffs terms by the European commission, even fro vehicles made in China, but who know how long that will last with Musk insulting them daily.
Tesla is/was the largest importer of Chinese-made cars into Europe. That's why the EU tariffs are decided brand by brand (to spare Tesla and BMW mostly)
We bought our first electric car last summer, we got an VW ID.3 and... we like it a lot. The pricing was pretty good, not much more expensive than a comparable VW combustion car. Apparently the infotainment system was quite bad/slow in older generations, but they fixed that in one of the upgrades and the on in ours is fast and works well.
European, Japanese, and South Korean automakers haven’t achieved the economies of scale drive down EV prices, but they are getting better quickly.
Tesla meanwhile has been stagnant for a while, which means people who wanted that that kind of car likely already bought one and don’t see much reason to buy a new one. The poor publicity from Elon isn’t helping but they peaked in 2023 even as total EV sales grew substantially in 2024.
And right after that, the fight against climate change will be lost.
Electric cars could have been the enabling technology for intermittent renewable power generation. Smart charging and back-feeding into the grid when needed could have largely solved the intermittency problem.
It is not. Only 18% of newly registered cars are electric i.e. over 80% of the people are still buying new CE cars, to say nothing about the massive used car market which is almost completely CE.
Musk's rightward lurch will be good for the electric car transition. His ideological opponents are just switching to other EV vendors. His ideological friends would normally not have considered buying an electric car, because anthropogenic climate change is a socialist hoax or something, but Trump is instructing them to buy Teslas as a sign of solidarity.
