AD #3358 – Tesla Market Share About to Plummet; Lead In 12V Batteries 50-60 Years Old; Stellantis Converts Plant to EV Motors

This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry.

TESLA MARKET SHARE ABOUT TO PLUMMET
So far this year, Tesla has 67% of the EV market in the U.S. according to Wards Intelligence. But that will drop to only 11% by 2025. That’s the forecast from Bank of America Research. It predicts that GM and Ford will surpass Tesla, with each of them getting 15% of the U.S. EV market by then. Lead auto analyst John Murphy says Tesla will lose share because of the wave of EVs coming from traditional automakers. These will be much more competitive, not like the compliance EVs they first came out with. Tesla will add only two passenger models over the next three years, the Cybertruck and the Roadster, while GM will add 17, Hyundai and Kia will add 13, Volkswagen will add 11 and Ford will add 6. With those models, they’ll have far greater market coverage and will be in more segments than Tesla is. Murphy spoke at the Automotive Press Association in Detroit yesterday. He says Elon Musk made a strategic mistake by not expanding Tesla faster when the cost of capital was essentially free. “He could have closed the door on them,” Murphy said. Instead, Musk left the door open, and the traditional automakers are racing in to fill the void.

TESLA STOCK FOLLOWS AUTO SECTOR
Speaking of Tesla, its stock is now well under $700 a share and doing a lot worse than the rest of the stock market. Bloomberg reports shares in Tesla fell 35% in the first half while the S&P index is down 20%. That’s music to the ears of Tesla’s critics, who always claimed the company was overvalued and would be headed to a day of reckoning. But Tesla’s stock is just following what’s going on with the automotive sector. And it’s actually doing better than GM or Ford. They’re down 43% and 45%, respectively. Mercedes is down 39%. Stellantis is down 34%. And so on, and so forth. So maybe the news in all this is not so much that Tesla’s stock is down, maybe the news is that Tesla stock is starting to behave like the traditional automakers. 

 

BMW KILLS OFF i3
The BMW i3 is officially done. The last and 250,000th example rolled off the assembly line in Germany. Launched about 8.5 years ago, the i3 came out when there were very few EVs in the market and it was built on a dedicated platform made almost exclusively out of carbon fiber. This was no ICE-based model, unlike every single one of BMW’s current BEV models. But the i3 never really caught on. It has very little in common with BMW’s other models, it certainly didn’t look like a BMW, and we’d guess the company lost big-time bucks on the program. The plant will now ramp up production of eDrive components and battery modules and starting next year it will make the next-gen version of the MINI Countryman. 

GM CRUISE HAS BUGS TO WORK OUT
GM’s autonomous unit, Cruise, still has some bugs to work out. A couple of days ago at least 8 autonomous Cruise Bolts came together at an intersection in San Francisco and then just parked themselves in the street and would not move. They apparently blocked traffic for about two hours before being rescued by human operators. 

GM EXTENDS PRICE CUT TO OLDER BOLT OWNERS
General Motors is stepping up and taking care of customers who bought Chevrolet Bolt EVs too early. As you know, last month GM cut the price of 2023 Chevy Bolt EVs and EUVs by $6,000. And now it’s going to reimburse buyers who purchased new vehicles this year before the price cut, even if it was a 2020, 2021 or 2022 model year vehicle. Customers that leased the vehicle through GM Financial are not eligible. On average, those Bolt owners will get about $5,000. GM only sold 358 Bolts in the first quarter but that shot up to 6,945 in the second quarter.

GM PROVIDES EV 1ST RESPONDER TRAINING
And in other GM EV news, the automaker is expanding its EV first responder training in the U.S. and Canada. It will primarily focus on training firefighters on the best practices for safely handling EVs and hybrids involved in crashes as well as educate them on BEV technology. The National Fire Protection Association says it trained 300,000 first responders on how to handle EV accidents but it estimates that another 800,000 responders need the training. To learn more about GM’s program, first and second responders can go to the website gmEVFirstResponderTraining.com.

STELLANTIS CONVERTS DIESEL PLANT TO EV MOTORS
Critics of the traditional auto industry say they’re going to get financially clobbered by stranded assets, that is, they’ll have to write off all the plants and equipment that make IC engines and transmissions. But many of those plants are already being converted to make parts and components for BEVs. For example, Stellantis’ powertrain facility in France, which used to be the largest diesel plant in the world, is now going to make electric motors. Another engine plant in France will make e-transmissions. And here’s a part we find interesting. Stellantis is not footing the entire bill. It formed joint ventures with two companies to make the motors and transmissions and is tapping them to help fund the transformation. They invested 150 million euros in the latest upgrades. By 2024, they plan to make 1 million motors a year and 600,000 eDCTs.

LEAD IN 12v BATTERIES 50-60 YEARS OLD
Did you know that virtually every electric car comes with a 12-volt lead acid battery? That’s because when you charge an EV, the traction batteries are disconnected from the car for safety reasons. But you still need electricity to run the accessories, or even handle over-the-air updates. Clarios is the largest lead acid battery maker in the world. It used to be part of Johnson Controls. Yesterday we had Mark Wallace, the CEO of Clarios on Autoline After Hours, and we asked him whether they can get all the raw materials they need to make new batteries by recycling old ones. Here’s what he said. 

“That lead acid battery, we can recycle up to 99% of the materials in it and reuse it. There’s nothing like that on the planet, right? It’s the most recycled product in the entire world and we’re the largest recycler of lead in the world as well. So this provides us kind of an entire renewable resource that we can continue putting into new vehicles and new batteries. And there are probably cases in your vehicle today or in an aftermarket battery where the lead can be 50 to 60 years old.”

 

What an amazing statistic, that the lead in your battery can be 50 to 60 years old. That’s quite a recycling story. Mark Wallace said Clarios can get 80% of all the raw materials it needs from recycling old batteries. And that bodes well for the lithium traction batteries in EVs. In the future, automakers may be able to get most of the raw materials they need from recycling, and cut way back on mining them.

A quick note before I sign off. Autoline will be off all next week to celebrate our Nation’s independence.

But that’s a wrap for today and this week. Hope you have a great weekend and we’ll be right back here again on Monday July 11th.