Snubbed by Tesla, Mexican government pledges to create its own small, affordable electric car
Snubbed by Tesla, Mexico's new president has pledged to create a Mexican-made small, affordable electric car
MEXICO CITY — Snubbed by Tesla, Mexico’s new president pledged Friday to create a Mexican-made small, affordable electric car to compete with vehicles imported from China.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said Teslas were too “onerous,” or expensive, for the Mexican market anyway. Tesla’s cheapest car, the Model 3, costs about $30,000.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in July the company had “paused” plans for a plant in Mexico, citing Donald Trump’s remarks about possible auto tariffs.
Sheinbaum said her government will try to bring together Mexican companies and researchers to produce a “compact, cheap electric car.”
“The idea is to use Mexican companies and Mexican researchers' ingenuity, to bring them together to assemble this electric car,” Sheinbaum said. “The idea is to create production chains so that this entire electric car is made in our country.”
She cited electric vehicles from China and India — some of which are already flooding into Mexico — as examples. Small electric motorbikes from China have flooded Mexican streets in recent months, but Sheinbaum said motorbikes, which in Mexico are often ridden by three people at a time, were too dangerous.
The plan faces a number of problems, including the fact that Mexico doesn’t produce any lithium, the key ingredient for batteries, nor any mass quantity of batteries. High domestic electricity rates could also be a roadblock.
There are some clay-encased lithium deposits in northern Mexico, which the government nationalized under the last administration. However, Sheinbaum said the techniques for mining that lithium weren't currently commercially viable, and that
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