The Retreat Detroit Didn’t Make Alone

A recent New York Times Magazine piece builds a case that Detroit fell behind on electric vehicles. Several of the specific comparisons it leans on don’t hold up against the data, and the retreat those comparisons describe turns out to be an industry-wide one, not a Detroit-only story.

I’ve generally been a cheerleader for the legacy auto sector, and for Detroit’s automakers especially, through this period of disruption.

That’s not the same as thinking legacy auto companies have handled the disruption well. The response ranges from very good to not particularly good at all, and that range shows up inside Detroit as much as outside it.

On July 15, the New York Times Magazine published a piece making the case for the “not good at all” end of that range. It argued that Ford, GM, and Stellantis, “Detroit,” backed away from electric vehicles just as the rest of the world has accelerated toward them.

Most of the reporting behind that argument holds up. Some of the specific comparisons built on top of it don’t, and what’s underneath those comparisons is three very different Detroit companies, not one.

A specific claim in the article is that Hyundai sold twice as many EVs in the US last year as Ford. That’s just not correct.

Hyundai Motor Group (Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis combined), sold approximately 104,000 EVs in the US in 2025 against Ford’s 84,113. The group did outsell Ford, by about 24%. It didn’t come close to doubling it, however.

Measured against that same group total, General Motors is even stronger, not weaker. GM’s combined brands (Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC) sold nearly 170,000 EVs in 2025, about 60% more than Hyundai Motor Group’s entire US EV output. GM’s EV sales were the second-most of any automaker in the country except Tesla.

The piece’s own reporting says no. In the same paragraph that lists GM and Ford EV cancellations, it also reports that Volvo scaled back its US EV lineup as well. Additionally, it mentions that Honda and Nissan killed EVs built for the American market. These automakers are not Detroit car companies.

What the article doesn’t discuss is how much further automakers like Nissan have retreated since. Nissan’s EV restructuring is now larger than any single Detroit automaker. The “Re:Nissan” turnaround plan calls for 20,000 layoffs, about 15% of its global workforce, and the closure of seven factories.

Nissan cancelled a $1.1 billion EV battery plant in Japan, killed its own $500 million EV investment in Canton, Mississippi, with a company spokesperson telling reporters directly that Canton’s future will not include EVs.

Another non-Detroit automaker, Porsche, announced a reversal that is smaller in dollar terms but sharper in every other sense. Porsche is adding combustion engines back into a platform engineered specifically to exclude them, and drove $3.3 billion in charges helping to cause its first-ever quarterly loss.

Porsche’s numbers aren’t happening in isolation. Porsche sits inside Volkswagen Group, the world’s second-largest automaker by sales, and its EV write-down is a piece of something considerably larger.

Volkswagen is running a turnaround plan aimed at the company’s very survival, not just its EV lineup, with up to 100,000 jobs on the line. CEO Oliver Blume has called it the most significant restructuring in the company’s 89-year history.

For Detroit automakers like GM and Ford, the EV transition has been a strategic problem. For VW, it’s now existential. And the EV misstep is just one thread of a bad VW story.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. The evidence suggests there’s an industry-wide legacy automaker pullback, not just a Detroit one. Some of it, Nissan, Honda and Porsche, have performed more radical technical and architectural pivots than Detroit.

Worth adding here, because it matters for everything that follows. “Detroit” isn’t three automakers acting like one tired, monolithic car company culture.

GM pushed hard into EVs and became the country’s second-largest seller. Ford scrapped its first approach entirely and is rebuilding an EV platform from the ground up, more on that below. Stellantis took the largest EV-related write-down of the three, €26 billion, and is still working out its answer.

These are three different bets that should not be placed under one Detroit label.

No, and this is where I think the piece is more incomplete than wrong. It mentions, briefly, that Ford is developing a cheaper EV lineup. What it doesn’t convey is how much Ford has actually rethought.

Ford’s new EV platform is a genuine clean-sheet redesign, not a modified version of what it already had, built specifically to produce an affordable EV that can turn a profit from launch rather than chase volume first and figure out margin later.

The first product, a midsize pickup starting around $30,000, is due out in 2027. Farley has called it Ford’s “Model T moment.”

Whatever you think of the branding, that’s a company still very much in the EV development game.

This is where the piece’s implicit comparison breaks down hardest. BYD, held up globally as proof the EV transition works, has posted four straight quarters of falling profit.

Net profit fell 55% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, its steepest decline on record, as a domestic price war compressed margins to approximately 4%. Government subsidies covered more than a third of its 2025 net profit.

BYD can absorb years of margin compression because it has a protected home market, government subsidies, and a state with a high tolerance for thin margins in strategic industries.

Tesla shows this isn’t only possible with a state behind it. Tesla lost money every year from 2008 through 2019, twelve years, $6.7 billion combined, and didn’t post its first full profitable year until 2020, funded by a shareholder base willing to underwrite a growth story instead of current earnings.

None of this settles whether Detroit’s retreat was the right call. It does mean BYD’s numbers aren’t proof the transition is a solved problem elsewhere.

Every legacy automaker in this memo, Detroit and otherwise, is missing the kind of patient capital that funded BYD’s and Tesla’s paths, which makes the comparison less about who was braver and more about who had the investors, or the state, to be patient in the first place.

Correcting these comparisons doesn’t produce a clean “Detroit is fine” story, and it shouldn’t. It produces three separate report cards instead of one.

GM pushed hardest into EVs, took real financial EV losses doing it, and still ended 2025 as the country’s second-largest EV seller despite a rough start to 2026.

Ford tore up its first EV approach and is rebuilding around a cheaper, ground-up platform that won’t prove out for another year.

Stellantis took the deepest write-down of the three and has said the least publicly about what replaces it.

Measured against that wider field, none of the three Detroit companies is the industry’s worst actor.

Nissan is cutting 20,000 jobs and closing seven plants. Porsche just posted its first-ever quarterly loss. Volkswagen is fighting for corporate survival.

In March, Honda cancelled its entire next-generation EV lineup along with the electric Acura RSX, took up to $15.7 billion in related losses, and posted its first annual net loss since the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1957.

None of the three Detroit companies has been through anything close to that.

That’s the actual conclusion. Not that Detroit was treated unfairly, but that “Detroit” stopped being one company’s decision a while ago, if it ever really was one.

Matthew Shaer, “The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry With It?” The New York Times Magazine, July 15, 2026 (paywalled). EV sales data from Cox Automotive and Kelley Blue Book, via Autoblog and Electrek. GM and Ford earnings detail via company filings and Yahoo Finance/Zacks reporting. BYD financial results via CnEVPost, Bloomberg, and Rest of World. Ford Universal EV Platform reporting via TechCrunch, CNET, and Torque News. Tesla financial history via company filings and Wolf Street. Nissan restructuring detail via TheStreet, AOL, Digitimes, and Benzinga. Porsche and Volkswagen Group results via Autoblog, Euronews, and Sharecast, alongside TaaSMaster’s prior Volkswagen research. Honda EV strategy reset via Honda’s own investor disclosures, WardsAuto, Automotive News, and Kelley Blue Book.

If you have a perspective or disagreement, reply directly. I read every response.