Asian electrical vehicle optimism is in the ascendent: Chinese EV company BYD’s announcement that its chargers can in five minutes give its cars enough juice to run for 250 miles catapulted its market value to more than $160 billion — far above that of established Western automakers like Ford and GM.
US EV darling Tesla, by contrast, has seen its shares fall precipitously since December: Its market value fell by about $700 billion in that period — wiping some $100 billion off CEO Elon Musk’s net worth, the Financial Times noted.
The divergence marks a broader shift in the industry as smaller, global companies push to innovate beyond their bigger, more established Western rivals.
US EV sector already faced charger challenges
CNBC, Semafor
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close involvement with the Trump administration could risk not only the company’s own sales, but the country’s entire EV industry: Last month the White House froze $5 billion in federal Biden-era grants to build out EV infrastructure as part of the pivot toward oil and gas. The lack of infrastructure had hamstrung the EV sector as would-be buyers fretted over range anxiety — the grants were aimed to change that, although they had been slow to disburse. Still, cutting the grants is unlikely to help: “BYD’s announcement is a clear signal that the EV race is no longer just about vehicles—it’s about infrastructure,” Satish Jayaram, senior vice president of eMobility at ABM Industries, told Semafor. “The administration’s plan is not to actually impact the deployment of charging infrastructure,” one analyst told CNBC. “It’s to drive the narrative that we’re killing those evil EVs and EV chargers.”
