November 12, 2024 • 9 mins
Is the electric vehicle market really dying?
Nissan is axing over 9,000 jobs as sales slump in China and the US and Toyota has said that the California regulations around EVs and emissions are unworkable.
EVs are being discounted by a third in Britain as manufacturers rush to meet their end-of-year sales targets.
In New Zealand, October saw the second strongest month when it comes to car sales, but despite heavy discounting, EV sales have slid backwards.
BYD NZ General Manager Warren Willmot told Kerre Woodham that globally, EV sales are actually up around 30% in September, with China contributing heavily to the market.
He said that last month, 53% of all new cars in China had a plug, whether they’re plug-in hybrids or fully electric.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Kerrywood and Mornings podcast from News Talk,
said b As you heard.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Earlier, Mike Costume was talking about global ev sales slowing down. Nissen,
he said, are laying off thousands of workers. Toyota have
said this week that the California regulations around EV's and
engines and emissions are unworkable. Trump's arrived tariffs are an issue.
He is antiv ev Trump. That is, in Britain they're
(00:32):
now discounting EV's by third because of rules that make
manufacturers sell a certain number of evvs. If you don't
sell that many, then the manufacturers are fined. Mike said,
sales here are dire, but sales of cars this past
month are up. Last month was the second best month
of the year for sales, apart from EV's which sold
(00:56):
next to none. So car sales up, EV's down. Warren
Wilmot is the BYD New Zealand General Manager. BYD of
course Chinese built electric cars, and he joins me, now,
very good morning to you, Warren.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Good morning here.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, you send a text to make that he didn't
get at time to deal with but I did. I
leapt in and seagulled your text and I saw too
that I've been reading just the other day that globally
EV sales are up.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
So right, they're actually up around about thirty one percent.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
So yes, that's what that was what I read. And
then I heard make this morning and is and I'm like,
what the dickens? Where are we at?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Right? We look at what media following. If you're looking
at western or traditional car makers like some Volkswagen, you know,
some of them what we call lexy car makers, sales
about EV's are definitely down, and they're definitely down in
some markets. The world's largest car market is China. They
sell twenty seven million new cars there every single year,
(02:00):
and China has had a real turning point in EV's.
So last month, fifty three percent of all new cars
in China had to plug either a what we call
FuG and hybrid or a full battery electric. And it's
a real watershed moment. And we're also at a point
in China where over fifty five percent of the EV's
(02:20):
for sale are actually cheaper than the petrol equivalent ice cars, right,
and so China really is the future of vvs. Sixty
eight percent of the world's evs actually come from Chinese brands,
and there's over ninety two dedicated EV brands in China
alone will.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Have the traditional legacy car marks tried to jump into
the technology without understanding it. Are they delivering a poor product,
which is why the early adopters are going. Don't go
near them.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Absolutely a lot of them. There's big differences in battery technology,
so batteries are at the core of an EV and
a lot of those legacy carmakers are using what we
call NCM batteries, which are nickel Magnese cobal batteries, and
they're the ones with the Da Nazi stuff. You see
people pulling rocks out of the ground and they don't
have a particularly long shelf life. You know, like the
first thing you do when you buy understand leaf for example,
(03:13):
and I'll pick on that as us as important is
you look at the state of health on that battery
as a used car and you say, well, hey, that
the car has got eighty percent LEFTNS battery, it's worth less.
With modern we will at least Pe'll list them for
his phosphate batteries. They just don't degrade. They can sit
there five thousand charging cycles or two point four million
kilometers on a byb D battery, then you might have
(03:35):
worn that battery twenty percent. So our batteries are designed
to last one hundred years less thirty years in the car,
in another seventy years of stand by storage, So everybody's
playing catch up. Battery technology is going ahead and leaps
and bounds. So in the next three years we're going
to see sodium based batteries go into production, and by
twenty twenty eight we'll see solid state batteries. And solid
(03:59):
state batteries will absolutely change the world. So there has
never been so much change and destruction in the car
industries what's happening now. And some of those other legacy
car makers, you know, they're big machines, they're big pets.
It takes a long time to change your pipeline from
traditional petrol engines new energy.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
When it comes to it, sounds like with this amount
of disruption and this amount of technology changing so fast,
a bit like when computers first came out home computers,
would we be better to do what a caller to the
show said some a year or so ago, she was
all for an electric car, but she was just going
to wait until the dust settled and best practice had
been adopted universally and they were cheaper, and all the
(04:41):
bugs had been named.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Cheaper cars outcoming. We're actually seeing a lot of correction
in the New Zealand market at the moment because some
of these other car reporters here having fought with a
lot of stuff on the ground, so you're seeing a
lot of discounting going on. I expect that mostly flush
out of the market here by the first Court in
extreme will see some sort of normalization in the market.
But the point of the technology is going at such
(05:06):
a great rate. We're developing the bid developed two technologies,
so we've got pure electrics and then we've got what
we call super hybrids, which you know super hybrid currently
in China, we've got the cars that can do over
twenty one hundred kilometers on a single tank of fuel
and a single charge, and lovers are really good for
(05:26):
places like Australian Uzum we don't have great charging networks.
We've got long distances to travel, so there's definitely a
place for petrol. It's not going any not going away
anytime soon, but those two technologies work hand in hand.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
What about hydrogen people have suggested as the way hydrogen.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
So largely hydrogen fuel cell cars are still an EV right,
So what happens is you've got hydrogen fuel cell, there's
a chemical reaction and you end up getting ultracity and
water out of it. And what the electricity does charges
smaller batteries. That then move an EV motor benefit with
(06:04):
hydrogenas that you don't have to have big, heavy batteries.
But battery technology has moved on back ness, getting lighter
and more efficient. So hydrogen really for the pasture car
market doesn't make a lot of sense. They've killed the
hydrogen highway in California. Hydrogen car sales are down about
eighty percent here the larger markets California for that, I
(06:25):
think they've got twelve hoers on the road and it's
just not the refueling networks for them. There is a
place for hydrogen and heavy commercials because again, the hydrogen
tanket doesn't weigh a lot, so you can have less batteries,
which means more payloads, so things like vans and trucks.
Yet there is a place for it. But as far
as the cars concerned, hydrogen cars are dead in the water.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
What textas says that the Chinese government is subsidizing electric
car sales to make sales to power the market.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
So it is true there are subsidies available in China
for manufacturers, but they're available for all manufacturers, not just BHYEB.
They're available for every single manufacturing, including legacy car makers.
Those leaves you carmakers are losing ground in China. I'll
give you some stats. So I think Mitsbush has left China,
GPP left China Windows and in twenty twenty two, when
(07:17):
I first went up there, there were fifty Humani dealers
and shens in Today there's one workshop left. All those
dealers have closed down. There's the technology and the car
from the Chinese brands. It's just as far superior. And
if we look at our BYD in particular, it's a
it's a crazy company in terms of growth. In two
(07:40):
BYD had two hundred and eighty nine thousand employees. This month,
BYD will close on over a million employees. So yes,
you've got companies like Nisana's shedding jobs. But the other
car makers are really ramping up. And I have to
say the Koreans are also doing a very good job,
particularly in places like the United States. They see Kia
and Jumnai EV sales are really really going really well
(08:02):
in the United States, as well as with test or two.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I suppose one last thing though, too, is that as
I understand it, and it's not really to do with
the car sales, but as I understand it, China's still
depends very much on fossil fuels for its energy to
power itself. You're hardly being green if you're buying an
electric car in China, are you.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well, here's the thing. Listens whistle. Electric cars pay a
very important part and a lot of Chinese friends and
some of their Koreans, we have what's called both vehicle
to load and vehicle to grid technology, right. So what
that means is in in times of peak power, you
can general through renewable resource like solar and then you
can put power back into your house or back into
(08:46):
the grid and times of high demand. And we're seeing
that happen a lot more in China, where people would
go to their office, they've got solar panels on the
birth they charge up at work. They should take that
energy home, plug it at home and then power the
house at night when they're into cooking and you're heading
the water and that sort of stuff. So even an
EV powered on by coal power is still cleaner than
(09:08):
a gasoline powercare.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Interesting, thank you very much. Warren Wilmot BYD New Zealand
General Manager. Interesting. So both of them were right. Really,
both Mike and and Warren were right BYD doing great,
legacy car manufacturers doing evs not so great.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
For more from Kerry Wood and Mornings, listen live to
News Talks at B from nine am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Kerrywood and Mornings podcast from News Talk,
said b As you heard.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Earlier, Mike Costume was talking about global ev sales slowing down. Nissen,
he said, are laying off thousands of workers. Toyota have
said this week that the California regulations around EV's and
engines and emissions are unworkable. Trump's arrived tariffs are an issue.
He is antiv ev Trump. That is, in Britain they're
(00:32):
now discounting EV's by third because of rules that make
manufacturers sell a certain number of evvs. If you don't
sell that many, then the manufacturers are fined. Mike said,
sales here are dire, but sales of cars this past
month are up. Last month was the second best month
of the year for sales, apart from EV's which sold
(00:56):
next to none. So car sales up, EV's down. Warren
Wilmot is the BYD New Zealand General Manager. BYD of
course Chinese built electric cars, and he joins me, now,
very good morning to you, Warren.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Good morning here.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well, you send a text to make that he didn't
get at time to deal with but I did. I
leapt in and seagulled your text and I saw too
that I've been reading just the other day that globally
EV sales are up.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
So right, they're actually up around about thirty one percent.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
So yes, that's what that was what I read. And
then I heard make this morning and is and I'm like,
what the dickens? Where are we at?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Right? We look at what media following. If you're looking
at western or traditional car makers like some Volkswagen, you know,
some of them what we call lexy car makers, sales
about EV's are definitely down, and they're definitely down in
some markets. The world's largest car market is China. They
sell twenty seven million new cars there every single year,
(02:00):
and China has had a real turning point in EV's.
So last month, fifty three percent of all new cars
in China had to plug either a what we call
FuG and hybrid or a full battery electric. And it's
a real watershed moment. And we're also at a point
in China where over fifty five percent of the EV's
(02:20):
for sale are actually cheaper than the petrol equivalent ice cars, right,
and so China really is the future of vvs. Sixty
eight percent of the world's evs actually come from Chinese brands,
and there's over ninety two dedicated EV brands in China
alone will.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Have the traditional legacy car marks tried to jump into
the technology without understanding it. Are they delivering a poor product,
which is why the early adopters are going. Don't go
near them.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Absolutely a lot of them. There's big differences in battery technology,
so batteries are at the core of an EV and
a lot of those legacy carmakers are using what we
call NCM batteries, which are nickel Magnese cobal batteries, and
they're the ones with the Da Nazi stuff. You see
people pulling rocks out of the ground and they don't
have a particularly long shelf life. You know, like the
first thing you do when you buy understand leaf for example,
(03:13):
and I'll pick on that as us as important is
you look at the state of health on that battery
as a used car and you say, well, hey, that
the car has got eighty percent LEFTNS battery, it's worth less.
With modern we will at least Pe'll list them for
his phosphate batteries. They just don't degrade. They can sit
there five thousand charging cycles or two point four million
kilometers on a byb D battery, then you might have
(03:35):
worn that battery twenty percent. So our batteries are designed
to last one hundred years less thirty years in the car,
in another seventy years of stand by storage, So everybody's
playing catch up. Battery technology is going ahead and leaps
and bounds. So in the next three years we're going
to see sodium based batteries go into production, and by
twenty twenty eight we'll see solid state batteries. And solid
(03:59):
state batteries will absolutely change the world. So there has
never been so much change and destruction in the car
industries what's happening now. And some of those other legacy
car makers, you know, they're big machines, they're big pets.
It takes a long time to change your pipeline from
traditional petrol engines new energy.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
When it comes to it, sounds like with this amount
of disruption and this amount of technology changing so fast,
a bit like when computers first came out home computers,
would we be better to do what a caller to the
show said some a year or so ago, she was
all for an electric car, but she was just going
to wait until the dust settled and best practice had
been adopted universally and they were cheaper, and all the
(04:41):
bugs had been named.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Cheaper cars outcoming. We're actually seeing a lot of correction
in the New Zealand market at the moment because some
of these other car reporters here having fought with a
lot of stuff on the ground, so you're seeing a
lot of discounting going on. I expect that mostly flush
out of the market here by the first Court in
extreme will see some sort of normalization in the market.
But the point of the technology is going at such
(05:06):
a great rate. We're developing the bid developed two technologies,
so we've got pure electrics and then we've got what
we call super hybrids, which you know super hybrid currently
in China, we've got the cars that can do over
twenty one hundred kilometers on a single tank of fuel
and a single charge, and lovers are really good for
(05:26):
places like Australian Uzum we don't have great charging networks.
We've got long distances to travel, so there's definitely a
place for petrol. It's not going any not going away
anytime soon, but those two technologies work hand in hand.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
What about hydrogen people have suggested as the way hydrogen.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
So largely hydrogen fuel cell cars are still an EV right,
So what happens is you've got hydrogen fuel cell, there's
a chemical reaction and you end up getting ultracity and
water out of it. And what the electricity does charges
smaller batteries. That then move an EV motor benefit with
(06:04):
hydrogenas that you don't have to have big, heavy batteries.
But battery technology has moved on back ness, getting lighter
and more efficient. So hydrogen really for the pasture car
market doesn't make a lot of sense. They've killed the
hydrogen highway in California. Hydrogen car sales are down about
eighty percent here the larger markets California for that, I
(06:25):
think they've got twelve hoers on the road and it's
just not the refueling networks for them. There is a
place for hydrogen and heavy commercials because again, the hydrogen
tanket doesn't weigh a lot, so you can have less batteries,
which means more payloads, so things like vans and trucks.
Yet there is a place for it. But as far
as the cars concerned, hydrogen cars are dead in the water.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
What textas says that the Chinese government is subsidizing electric
car sales to make sales to power the market.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
So it is true there are subsidies available in China
for manufacturers, but they're available for all manufacturers, not just BHYEB.
They're available for every single manufacturing, including legacy car makers.
Those leaves you carmakers are losing ground in China. I'll
give you some stats. So I think Mitsbush has left China,
GPP left China Windows and in twenty twenty two, when
(07:17):
I first went up there, there were fifty Humani dealers
and shens in Today there's one workshop left. All those
dealers have closed down. There's the technology and the car
from the Chinese brands. It's just as far superior. And
if we look at our BYD in particular, it's a
it's a crazy company in terms of growth. In two
(07:40):
BYD had two hundred and eighty nine thousand employees. This month,
BYD will close on over a million employees. So yes,
you've got companies like Nisana's shedding jobs. But the other
car makers are really ramping up. And I have to
say the Koreans are also doing a very good job,
particularly in places like the United States. They see Kia
and Jumnai EV sales are really really going really well
(08:02):
in the United States, as well as with test or two.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
I suppose one last thing though, too, is that as
I understand it, and it's not really to do with
the car sales, but as I understand it, China's still
depends very much on fossil fuels for its energy to
power itself. You're hardly being green if you're buying an
electric car in China, are you.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well, here's the thing. Listens whistle. Electric cars pay a
very important part and a lot of Chinese friends and
some of their Koreans, we have what's called both vehicle
to load and vehicle to grid technology, right. So what
that means is in in times of peak power, you
can general through renewable resource like solar and then you
can put power back into your house or back into
(08:46):
the grid and times of high demand. And we're seeing
that happen a lot more in China, where people would
go to their office, they've got solar panels on the
birth they charge up at work. They should take that
energy home, plug it at home and then power the
house at night when they're into cooking and you're heading
the water and that sort of stuff. So even an
EV powered on by coal power is still cleaner than
(09:08):
a gasoline powercare.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Interesting, thank you very much. Warren Wilmot BYD New Zealand
General Manager. Interesting. So both of them were right. Really,
both Mike and and Warren were right BYD doing great,
legacy car manufacturers doing evs not so great.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
For more from Kerry Wood and Mornings, listen live to
News Talks at B from nine am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
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