CEO of Mazda, which makes one bad EV, says EVs don’t sell (except Teslas)

The CEO of Mazda, a company that makes one very mediocre electric car, is still trying to make electrification sound like some strange one-off consumer fad. In an interview with Fortune, Masahiro Moro basically says that if an EV isn’t a Tesla, it’s sitting unsold on a dealer lot somewhere in America.

Specifically, the quote from the interview is, “EV is [an] absolutely important technology, and we are developing it. But [in the US,] EVs last year [were] about 6% of the market. This year it is 8%. And out of that 8%, 57% was Tesla. Other EVs are not taking off, [and] inventory is piling up.” Moro went on to say of Mazda’s timeline for developing a zero-emission portfolio, “How we get to zero is up to consumer choice and social infrastructure.”

That’s about the extent of the interview, but there’s a lot to unpack here from a few short sentences and what they tell us about Mazda’s problematic attitude toward electrification.

City Dwellers’s Take

First, let’s cut through the euphemistic phrasing: Saying Tesla is taking too much of the pie, making other EVs hard to sell, and that the larger zero-emissions transition is “up to consumer choice and social infrastructure” is a very roundabout way of saying, “We don’t think people want EVs unless they’re Teslas, which are some kind of weird fad.”

It’s hard not to look at this like a head coach blaming his own team’s poor record on the winningest team’s dominance. “We can’t start winning until the best team doesn’t win so much. Also, look at all the other teams that are losing. Why even try?” which is to say this makes very, very little sense.

Mazda sells one electric car right now, and “electric” deserves some pretty big air quotes. The MX-30 was never meaningfully sold in the US and is produced in limited quantities globally, with Mazda having sold a whopping 5,849 examples in total in 2022. Many of those were not pure BEVs, either, as Mazda sells a version of the MX-30 called the R-EV that uses a rotary ICE generator to charge the car’s meager 35.5kWh battery. The proper BEV MX-30 without this generator gets around 100 miles of range, making it highly competitive with… an early Nissan Leaf or a gen-one eGolf. The whole product, whether in pure BEV or ICE generator packaging, feels like something that could have been launched 13 years ago. Mazda doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to saying consumers don’t want electric cars when it is producing a single low-volume model, one that is objectively unfit for comparison to modern EVs.

As to EVs that are not made by Tesla “piling up” as inventory, this is a nothingburger. Kia and Hyundai sell tons of electric cars globally, the US included — and they want to increase production capacity further. Rivian is producing as many trucks and SUVs as it can to keep up with demand. And from a purely data-driven perspective, EV demand globally remains a rocket ship. This is all to say if you produce an electric vehicle that customers actually want, they will buy it! Is building a highly desirable EV an easy task? No! But that’s a wildly different premise and not at all the one Mazda’s CEO is starting from. If he’d specifically said, “Six-figure BEV luxury sedans aren’t moving in the quantities manufacturers hoped they would,” that might be closer to the truth, but Mazda doesn’t sell a single car over $60,000, so that’d be neither here nor there anyway.

I personally love Mazda as a brand. I’ve owned two MX-5 Miatas over the years and believe the company is a wonderful rarity in the automotive world — Mazda makes cars it believes can delight people with exciting driving dynamics, thoughtful and cost-conscious engineering, and high dependability. But seeing the company’s leadership so obviously project their frustration at being unable to “crack the code” on electrification is really disappointing.

As a relatively scrappy independent that has worked hard to be considered by customers alongside juggernauts like Honda and Toyota, Mazda should know the value of being a first-mover during a major market shift. If the company truly devoted itself to the electric transition, I firmly believe it would have the engineering, cost management, and marketing chops to set an example. But Mazda seems just as stubborn as its big Japanese conglomerate brothers to electrify. Comments like Moro’s today aren’t going to age well, and as someone who has a soft spot for Mazda, I sincerely hope they aren’t what ends up bookending the company’s history.