Short-Sighted Analysts Highlight a VW-Tesla Race to Dominate Electric Vehicles
They are ignoring the most likely winner, suggests a top expert — China Inc.
For two weeks, Volkswagen has held auto industry analysts and reporters in unusual thrall: This 84-year-old German automaker, these opinion-makers have said, has managed a miraculous pivot from a legacy industrialist to a front-runner in the race to be the world’s number one producer of electric vehicles. Weighing in, Wall Street sent up VW shares by 20% in the last half of March, while cutting 13% from the stock price of Tesla, the current industry leader.
“The end of Tesla’s dominance may be closer than it appears,” reported Bloomberg. “Volkswagen will catch up with Tesla,” added The Economist in its latest edition.
About the same time all this adulation was going on, Sandy Munro, an iconoclastic former Ford executive who runs his own auto design consultancy north of Detroit, was holding forth in an interview with Alex Guberman, host of E for Electric, a YouTube channel. In a sometimes hilarious, sometimes brutal 23-minute dissection, Munro accused U.S. automakers of moving late into EVs and blundering into the very same market crisis they suffered in the 1980s, when they only belatedly understood that the Japanese could make autos.
