To those of us who’ve been following the industry for the past decade, it’s plain that legacy automakers have devoted considerable resources to avoiding the transition to EVs. A new study, “The temporal evolution of resistance strategies during low-carbon transitions: Revealing the industry playbook of US, German, and Japanese automakers in the unfolding electric vehicle transition (1990–2025),” published in ScienceDirect, details the strategies that US, German and Japanese automakers have employed to resist the EV transition.
“Rather than understanding resistance as a temporary phenomenon in early transition stages, we conceptualize it as a dimension recurring over multiple phases,” the authors write. “We develop an ideal-type framework of changes in the type and focus of resistance strategies during five phases of low-carbon reorientation, thereby identifying the industry playbook. We apply this framework to three case studies of incumbent automakers in the United States, Germany and Japan, which since the 1990s have used multiple resistance strategies while reorienting towards BEVs.”
The long process of dragging automakers kicking and screaming into the future has unfolded at different paces in the three major auto markets. The authors found that “US automakers resisted strongly from the early 1990s, German automakers gradually increased their resistance strategies over time, and Japanese automakers hardly resisted in early phases (because of their reorientation towards hybrid electric vehicles) but strongly resisted BEVs in later phases. We further find that US automakers used more overt confrontational strategies, while Japanese and German automakers relied on less visible lobbying and consultation tactics. Automakers shifted focus in the last period from opposing the direction of travel towards resisting the speed of change.”
The authors found that the OEMs have consistently resisted selling EVs over time, and continue to do so even now that they have made significant investments in EV factories and supply chains (and as they fondly fantasize about their “electric futures” in press materials aimed at the left-leaning media).
“Although automakers are now significantly reorienting towards BEVs, they continue to use resistance strategies,” the study authors write. “We explain this paradox by suggesting that automakers play multi-dimensional chess, in which they reorient in some dimensions while resisting in others.”
Another way of explaining the apparent paradox: corporations, like governments, are not monoliths, and their policies are not always logical or consistent. As Charged and others have often noted, there have always been pro-EV and anti-EV factions within every automaker, and like Zoroaster’s good and evil spirits, these eternally vie for the mastery.
Source: The Last Driver License Holder
