If you’ve read The Big Short, you’ll remember the housing crisis, and how easily beliefs ran ahead of reality. In autos, we just had a moment like that.

On September 19, 2025, Porsche announced a “strategic realignment” and confirmed that the next 718 Boxster and Cayman will still be offered with internal-combustion power, after years of signaling a clean handoff to EVs. Porsche also said a new flagship SUV that had been planned as electric will now launch with combustion and plug-in hybrid versions, and that its combustion models will stay in the lineup longer than planned. 

That was not a small product tweak. It was public recognition that demand, charging realities, and regional market pressures are not lining up fast enough for an all-EV strategy. Volkswagen even flagged a multibillion-euro hit tied to Porsche’s delay, which tells you this was not a casual decision. 

What Automakers Promised

This reversal looks even starker when you recall how confidently automakers planted their flags just two years ago. In 2023, automakers predicted aggressive EV adoption timelines:

• GM pledged to sell only EVs by 2035.
• Ford, GM, Stellantis targeted 40-50% EV sales by 2030.
• BMW targeted 50% EV sales by 2030.
• Volkswagen aimed for 50% in the U.S. and China and 70% in Europe by 2030.
• Volvo said it would be fully electric by 2030.
• Honda declared its entire lineup would be electric by 2040.
• Porsche itself promised to end the gas-powered Boxster and Cayman in 2025.

Those commitments read like inevitability. Porsche’s reversal shows just how quickly inevitability can unravel. 

When Data Breaks the EV Spell

For years, the EV story seemed unstoppable. Investors rewarded electric dreams with tech-style valuations. Policymakers sweetened the deal with rich incentives, up to $15,000 in the U.S., $13,000 CAD in Canada, and €9,000 in Germany. Automakers raced to keep up.

But the sales data told a different story. Across the U.S. in early 2025, electrified vehicles as a group kept inching upward, but the battery-electric slice stopped making meaningful gains. Hybrids climbed. Plug-in hybrids held steady. EVs were flat. The US EIA estimates that the combined share of hybrids, plug-ins, and EVs reached about 22% in Q1, with hybrids doing most of the climbing while EVs treaded water. Cox Automotive puts BEVs at about 7 to 8 percent nationally. The theme is consistent, even if the exact percentages vary a bit by source. 

That stall says something simple. A lot of people admire EVs in theory, then hesitate in practice.

What Drivers Really Think

At Raise a Hood, we wanted to see past the shouting, so in 2023 we surveyed 620 everyday owners with cars out of warranty. Only 8 percent said they love EVs. Twenty-four percent said they were considering one. The rest were lukewarm or skeptical. That “love” number looks an awful lot like the national market share today.

When you talk to people, their reasons aren’t ideological. They’re practical. They worry about range on cold days and long drives. They don’t want to plan family trips around charging stops. They want confidence that a station will be open and working at 11 p.m. in winter. They want heat that doesn’t cut range in half. Those are solvable problems over time, but they’re real today.

The Physics Don’t Lie

Gasoline is still far more energy-dense than today’s lithium-ion packs. In practice, a modern EV battery stores about 160 watt-hours per kilogram, while gasoline stores nearly 13,000. Even after you credit EVs for being more efficient at turning stored energy into motion, gasoline retains a massive advantage.

That’s why a 1,060-pound long-range battery in a Tesla Model 3 holds about the same usable energy as just 7.5 gallons of fuel, roughly half a tank in a compact car. In winter, effective EV range can be cut in half, making the disadvantage even more obvious. You feel those differences on the road.

It’s not that electric power can’t win, it already dominates wherever the energy demands are modest. That’s why boat trolling motors, golf carts, e-bikes, and so many forklifts went electric first. But when the loads are heavy, the weather brutal, or downtime costly, gasoline and hybrids still make sense. That isn’t politics. It’s physics.

Porsche Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

According to Reuters, Porsche’s pivot made the subtext explicit. A brand that built its reputation on engineering purity looked at the same adoption curves we all see and decided to buy more time for combustion and hybrids. It isn’t alone. Within the Volkswagen Group, timelines are moving, and model plans are being rewritten to keep combustion and hybrid entries in showrooms longer. The signal is clear: the transition will be slower, more regional, and more mixed than the slogans suggested.

The Cost of EV Overreach

The EV cycle has already created a lot of financial stress. More than two dozen EV startups have gone bankrupt or are distressed, marking one of the largest waves of EV failures in auto history; Canoo (ceased operations Jan ’25), Fisker (chapter 11 June ’24), Nikola (chapter 11 Feb ’25) , Lordstown (chapter 11 June ’23) among them. Out of all the hype, only three are expected to survive in the U.S.: Tesla, Rivian, and possibly Lucid.

Meanwhile, the industry has spent between one and two trillion dollars globally chasing electrification in the past decade. If even half that spend would have delivered most of the same technical progress, then prices and balance sheets could be healthier today. Consumers aren’t wrong to wonder why so many promises turned into higher sticker prices.

The Road Ahead

None of this is an argument against EVs. It’s an argument for listening to customers and aligning ambition with reality. The U.S. is not Norway. It’s much harder for an apartment dweller in Chicago to charge an EV than it is for a Phoenix homeowner with a garage and driveway. A Minnesota family driving overnight to Bozeman in January doesn’t face the same constraints as a California commuter heading to Palo Alto in May. National averages hide regional truths.

So where does that leave us? Probably in a future that feels familiar. Gasoline and diesel coexisted for a century. The next decades will likely be a mix as well. Hybrids are surging right now. Plug-in hybrids remove a lot of range anxiety. EVs keep getting better, and when the chemistry, charging, and infrastructure catch up, they’ll grow again.

The mistake was never building EVs. The mistake was pretending EV technology was the only one that could win. Porsche just reminded the market that options matter, and the public had already said the same thing with its wallet years ago. The difference is that now, automakers are finally starting to listen.