Is it worth getting an EV?

Herzlos

Grumpy_chap said:

Herzlos said:

I'm guessing the price reduction in Teslas is somehow related to the collapsing share priced as the world watches Musk screw up Twitter so badly.

Are these price reductions really any different from any other automotive manufacturer?

In 2020, demand across the board fell and there were some very attractive discounts on all sorts of cars.
Then supply chain issues arose, aligned with high demand, car prices went up and discounts ceased.
Now, manufacturing capacity is being recovered and demand is falling (cost of living crisis), so there is the perfect storm.

Most legacy manufacturers are keeping the list price high but introducing offers and discounts. 
So, in the past week, I saw the Skoda Scala with £1.5k discount plus £1.5k finance incentive.  That is not as wonderful as the price in 2020 when demand was really supressed, but is a massively better place (for the consumer) than the summer 2022 position.
Legacy manufacturers are not discounting EV's.

Tesla only have EV's, so can't pile discounts into the ICE ranges only.
Tesla are also being totally upfront and open about the price change so no smoke-and-mirrors that comes with the legacy manufacturer offers & discounts approach resulting in different prices for different customers on the same day while every Tesla customer on the same day seems to be paying the same.

Skoda offering incentives on a fairly unpopular ICE vehicle isn't quite the same as Tesla dropping the price of their entire EV range. If I remember correctly they've always had pretty good incentives on the Scala.

I'm also not sure manufacturing is quite back to normal - there are still supply chain issues on all sorts of things and I suspect that manufacturers have been happy to produce a slightly smaller amount to keep the prices up. We're still looking at 12+ months waiting list for new car orders which implies that things aren't back to normal yet.

As far as I can tell, the list price for everything else seems to be going up, and haggling is still virtually non-existant. I think it'll remain that way until there is excess stock or manufacturing capacity. If you can build 1000 cars a month and have 1001 customers there's no point in reducing prices, but if you've only got 999 customer you're losing money on that spare 1.