Car giants forced to confront hard truths over EV transition

European car giants are contending with a perfect storm of challenges on the path to full electrification, including a lack of affordable models, a slower-than-anticipated rollout of charging points and the potential impact of European tariffs on EVs made in China.

Volvo Cars on Wednesday announced it had abandoned its heavily promoted plan to sell only EVs by 2030, citing a need to be “pragmatic and flexible” amid changing market conditions.

The Swedish automaker said it now aims for between 90% and 100% of its car sales to be fully electric or plug-in hybrid models by 2030. The company now says that up to 10% of its sales will represent a limited number of mild hybrid models by that deadline.

Crisis-stricken Volkswagen and several other carmakers, including Ford and Mercedes-Benz Group, have all announced plans to delay earlier targets to phase out sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in Europe.

“I think a lot of manufacturers are obviously going through this process [of delaying electrification targets] at the moment. We’re seeing it across the industry,” Tim Urquhart, principal automotive analyst at S&P Global Mobility, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.

“A lot of manufacturers who had sort of stopped investing in internal combustion engine technology have started to realize that, if we don’t continue to invest, we’re not going to be competitive, we’re not going to actually have the product in showrooms that people want to buy,” he added.

Urquhart said governments in key markets had implemented measures to encourage people to buy battery electric vehicles, or BEVs, with mandated targets — a trend that he described as “increasingly problematic.”

The U.K., for instance, introduced a mandate that requires 22% of new car sales this year to be zero-emission vehicles, or ZEVs. The mandate, which aims to reduce the number of polluting vehicles on the road, will rise annually until it reaches 100% of new car sales by 2035.

“There needs to be a sort of dose of pragmatism from both regulators and the manufacturers. The manufacturers are probably ahead of the regulators on this issue,” Urquhart said.

“The manufacturers are the only other ones seeing what customers are wanting to buy at the moment, and it is not as many battery electric vehicles, as everyone had anticipated,” he added.

On announcing its revised EV plan last week, Volvo Cars laid out a number of challenges facing the auto industry’s electrification ambitions.

The carmaker said there had been a slower-than-expected rollout of charging infrastructure, a withdrawal of government incentives in some markets and additional uncertainty prompted by recent tariffs on EVs in various markets.

Volvo Cars said that these developments showed that there continues to be a need “for stronger and more stable government policies” in order to support the transition away from fossil fuels.

Asked Monday whether some of these industry challenges were likely to disincentivize people from buying EVs, Urquhart replied, “Well, I mean this is the point.”

“There seems to be a daily news cycle in the mainstream media of anti-BEV sentiment, a lot of it is not particularly well researched … but a lot of it is true,” Urquhart said.

“Consumers are facing a very, very difficult choice. They have had the same technology paradigm in the industry for 130 years, and we’re asking consumers to completely change the way they drive their vehicles, use their vehicles, charge their vehicles instead of filling them with petrol,” he continued.

“I think there has been a sort of collective over-enthusiasm from regulators, [original equipment manufacturers], maybe from our side as well in some respects, for BEVs. Not really understanding it is a very, very hard sell to get most mainstream consumers to completely change the way they use and operate their vehicles.”

Analysts, however, have made clear that despite the short-term uncertainties, carmakers realize they cannot afford to miss out on EVs — and the direction of travel remains clear.

“The shift to EVs is a non-linear journey with many uncertainties, as we have seen over the last couple of years. But it’s increasingly putting European carmakers under pressure, while total new car sales fail to return to pre-pandemic levels in their home markets,” Rico Luman, senior sector economist for transport and logistics at Dutch bank ING, said in a recent research note.

Luman said the decision from some European carmakers to delay the shift to EVs is “very much intended to maintain profitability and preserve flexibility in a highly uncertain environment.”

He added that the slowdown in Western EV sales was owed to several reasons and was likely to be temporary.

“The direction of travel has not changed, and investments in the makeover of product portfolios still need to continue to secure long-term positions in the market over the next decade,” Luman said in a note published on Friday.