Cars & electric vehicles

Car companies design vehicles, run factories that build them, and sell them through dealers (or, increasingly, online). About 90 million cars are sold every year worldwide. It's one of the largest industries on the planet.

Today the industry is splitting in two. Traditional car makers (Toyota, Volkswagen, Ford, GM) and pure-electric upstarts (Tesla, BYD, NIO). Both are racing toward the same destination: most new cars sold will run on batteries within 15 years.

Designing and assembling a car is only part of the work. The rest is a vast supplier network: steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, chips, batteries, tires.

Car makers don't usually make all of those — they buy them and assemble them. That's why a chip shortage or a battery shortage can stop the whole industry.

Selling the car is only the start. Many car companies also make money financing the loan, selling the warranty, and over time, selling parts and service.

Tesla and a few others now also charge for software (autopilot, supercharging). That recurring revenue is small today but is the model investors are most excited about.

Even profitable car makers usually keep about 5-10 cents of every sales dollar as profit. Software companies can keep 20-30. That's because cars need expensive parts, expensive labor, and expensive factories that have to run nearly full to make money.

This is also why electric vehicles are so disruptive. EVs have fewer moving parts, so margins can be higher — but only if you sell enough of them to spread the factory cost.

Traditional car makers know how to build at scale and have decades of supplier relationships. They're slower to change but harder to kill.

EV-first companies (Tesla, BYD) move faster, control software better, and own more of the value chain — but they're newer, smaller, and burning cash to scale.

Recessions hit car companies hard — people delay buying cars when their job feels shaky. Battery costs and supply chains (lithium, nickel, cobalt) are concentrated and politically sensitive.

Self-driving keeps slipping — every "by next year" promise has been wrong for a decade. And Chinese EV makers (especially BYD) are now cheaper and arguably better, threatening Western brands in their home markets.