Looks like there is some more upheaval in the automotive sector. Stellantis and Nissan appear to be struggling and trying to restructure their north American operations to be more competitive. Nissan in particular has noted that there are extreme price pressure with EV's and they need to cut dev costs for these vehicles to be competitive.

Note that Nissan has canceled production of their venerable Nissan Titan pickup truck and Maxima sports sedan. They are also planning to phase out their popular Altima amid this product shift, likely to focus on similarly sized electric cars.

quote:
Nissan is targeting an additional 1 million vehicle sales over the next three years and a 30% reduction in electric vehicle production costs by 2030, the Japanese carmaker announced Monday.

In a new medium-term business plan, Nissan also said it would launch 30 new models by fiscal 2026, with 16 of these electrified. It’s aiming for EV and combustion engine costs to reach parity by 2030.

quote:
It comes as the hype around electric vehicles appears to have cooled a little recently, with major manufacturers including Ford Motor, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen all scaling back or delaying EV plans amid cooling demand. Even sector giant Tesla
is bracing for what CEO Elon Musk said in January “may be a notably lower” rate of growth.

quote:
To address this, Nissan plans to develop EVs in “families,” integrate powertrains and focus on battery innovations as it looks to cut the cost of its next-generation fleet by 30% when compared with the current model Ariya crossover.

“In order to do that, we have to have a great partnership with our suppliers to work on from the app stream earlier with the scale that we have to provide,” Uchida told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”

It sounds like they are going to try to do what General Motors already has underway with the Ultium chassis - making the same platform scalable for multiple models, including licensing it at least 2 Honda products, a couple of military vehicles, and at least one delivery van manufacturing company (Brightdrop). Hyundai/Kia is doing something similar, and they are building some impressive electric cars right now that nobody is buying. The idea of fully scalable architecture and the ability to provide all of this tech at a reasonable price solid, but if will not result in rapid success if there's a limited appetite for EV's outside of the bigger cities/suburbs. And high interest rates are also providing a lot of headwind since EV's are still mostly on the expensive side.

It costs General Motors about $20 billion to develop fully scalable chassis systems like that. While the products are solid, the strategy has yet to pay off because EV adoption isn't really as fast a they expected initially. GM is talking out the side of their mouth with this too, because they are also spending a lot to develop their next line of gasoline V8 engines too - so they clearly anticipate a fairly long timeline for EV adoption. By contrast, Nissan has canceled their full sized trucks and are starting to phase out popular gasoline powered sedans.

The problem with EV adoption is charging infrastructure, range anxiety, and acquisition costs. Billions of public money has been allocated to charging infrastructure since Biden's first year in office, but the progress in this area has primarily been in the private sector. Federal tax credits have been revamped to help make EV's more appealing to consumers. And modern EV's do have long ranges and are capable of rapid charging (most likely the charging infrastructure being the limiting factor).

It's challenging for automakers to make decisions around pulling the trigger on new tech that takes 5-7 years to develop when they aren't sure if the infrastructure will exist for the market to support the product. Auto execs have to balance between developing these expensive new platforms with $$$ that could also go into refining and improving their popular ICE models.

From a tech perspective, it looks like Tesla remains king, with General Motors and Hyundai moving very quickly from the second tier but are also splitting attention with ICE vehicles. VW, BMW, Mercedes, Nissan, and Ford are all selling EVS (some of them are even selling pretty well), but their EV strategy and tech are still not quite as well developed and are clearly lower priority than ICE, which is probably smart.

Oddly enough the highly reputable Japanese brands like Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, and Honda are pretty far behind with electrification. Toyota has an excellent hybrid lineup - arguably that's the best path forward as we balance limited battery resources against our desire to save petroleum resources. Honda and Mazda are completely flat footed right now in EVs - Honda has elected to partner with General Motors for now so they can offer competitive EV's (Prologue and Acura ZDX are actually General Motors Ultium vehicles) while Honda develops their own tech.

Stellantis seems pretty far behind in electrification in north America and are likely the most vulnerable as regulatory pressure hammers their ability to sell gas guzzling V8 muscle cars and trucks. I can't decide if Stellantis, Ford, or Nissan has the worst leadership right now.