Legacy automakers like Ford and Volkswagen try to blame their declining global market share on unfair subsidies and cheap labor. As a global supply chain expert, I expose the brutal reality: they are actually losing a war of industrial physics.
In this video, I break down “The 18-Month Death Sentence.” We explore how traditional Western automakers are paralyzed by a rigid 4-5 year R&D cycle, launching vehicles with technology that is already obsolete. Discover how Chinese EV manufacturers are treating cars like consumer electronics on wheels, utilizing extreme supply chain modularization to compress development down to an astonishing 18 months. Learn why tariffs and protectionist policies cannot save a fundamentally slower iteration cycle, and why hardware founders must learn to iterate at the speed of software to survive.
With cars a lot of it iterative over the lifecycle anyway. First years have issues and are fixed (usually) as it goes.
Of course that’s not at all why Ford and vw are having issues since they’d still rather focus on the expensive massive vehicles instead of actually improving