The EU 2035 proposal for 100% ZEV was rejected, due to German car industry lobbying against it.

Car manufacturers segment the market in (basically) volume/premium/luxury, where the Ioniq 5 would be an example of a volume car and Model 3 would be premium. Neither would be "top end luxury", for sure. Car prices have gone up the past couple of years due to semiconductor shortage limiting production - it's supply and demand. That in turn has also affected used car prices.

The car industry is transforming; volume and factories are now seen as liabilities, not assets. Innovation and new revenue streams drives valuation. We will see more services, subscriptions, partnerships, and new ways to monetize. Some ideas will be good, others will be like this thing. Not only do most customers hate ads, monetizing ad placement is also really hard, so it's unlikely that it will be profitable.

This is no surprise; if the target had been to drive “slightly better” than humans then we are already there. AD cars are great at avoiding typical accidents, which are caused by inattentive, drunk, or distracted drivers – simply because the car will be neither of those things. However, AD cars will cause OTHER accidents – accidents that a beginner human driver could easily have avoided, or where it is difficult to explain why the AD car crashed. There is very little acceptance for that in society and legislation – and thus the need for several orders of magnitude higher safety.

The fallacy is looking at these companies as simply "electric"; they're not. What these "new" car companies are realizing is that an increasing part of the customer value in a car comes from software, and if you want to focus on software, then building an electric car is easier and a much smaller investment than building combustion engines. The market valuation comes from a belief that traditional car companies suck at software development (look at the ID3 for a recent example) and that catching up takes systemic changes to culture and processes - not an easy thing to do. Yes, I work for a car manufacturer, with software.

I work for a premium car manufacturer, with connected car solutions. Most newer premium cars have "Stolen Vehicle Tracking" standard, i.e. the ability to track and disable the car remotely if stolen. The thieves will drive the car into a nearby container or otherwise suitably shielded space, then physically disable the tracker (there are insurance requirements for how hard that must be). The car is then either shipped abroad (Eastern Europe is a major market for such cars) or stripped for parts. More advanced/expensive parts are locked so they cannot be "married" to another car without connecting the car to our backend servers for authentication.