The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

Consider who builds American EVs:

1) a SV/Texas "tech" company, which, by its very identity, must yield insane returns to shareholders 2) Legacy auto companies who must yield insane returns to both shareholders and, to a lesser extent, retired employees. In their defense, the second group actually did work

Compare this to Chinese EV makers who are dumpi - I mean, willing to take less return on their sale in order to establish market dominance globally.

Yeah, no wonder American EVs are expensive.

So your issue is that US public companies need return on investment, but that Chinese ones don't? There's nothing "insane" about the ROI at GM or Ford...

That's the issue, yes.

The Chinese are selling either at a loss or far below the return expectations of their competitions' investors. They're not going to stop, because they want to drive everyone else out of the market. The solution is to drop things like dividends and executive bonuses down to sane (or, really, non-existent) levels and pass along the savings to the customer.

Otherwise there might not be a company to collect ROI on in a decade or two. Not that most shareholders care; they hire a guy specifically to engineer the holdings so that they can drop any one of them and not lose lots of value.