Elon Musk Rises, Tesla Slips, China Looms: 2024's Biggest EV Stories
From the rise of Elon Musk and China to Japan Inc.'s blunders, 2024 has been a wild year for the auto industry's ongoing transformation.
For much of 2024, you probably couldn't go a single week without reading a headline or seeing some TV news story about how the electric vehicle market is "stalling" or "stumbling." And yet, the ongoing transformation of the automotive industry seems to be upending everything in its path.
The CEO of the world's biggest EV maker—and one of the world's most valuable companies, period—now wields unprecedented power in the United States government. Household-name companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are now wondering how they're going to survive the next few years. New players seem poised to fill whatever vacuum they leave behind. A zero-emission future is being met with more aggressive resistance than we've ever seen, even as our ongoing climate crisis feels more palpable than ever. We're told the future of cars will be defined by over-the-air software updates and autonomous driving, whether we like it or not.
And you can trace nearly all of the above, in some form or fashion, to the rise of electric vehicles. How's all that for a stumble?
As we wrap up 2024, it's more obvious than ever that business as usual is over for the $3.5 trillion global car industry. All of that has profound effects on the way we live, work and get around every day. After all, like it or not, we live in a car-dependent society; when things start to change, expect chaos.