They Saw It Coming

Responding to: “The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry With It?”

Matthew Shaer · *The New York Times Magazine* · July 15, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/magazine/electric-cars-american-evs.html

When Matthew Shaer asked Scott Case about the three-row electric SUV that Ford unveiled in Dearborn in 2023, Case laughed.

Case runs an EV analytics company, and he had reason. The single hottest category in American electric vehicles right now is the three-row, full-size electric SUV. Kia’s EV9 is crushing it. Toyota and Subaru are rushing theirs out. Hyundai sold twice as many EVs in the United States last year as Ford did.

Doug Field stood on a stage in a Michigan factory town in May 2023 and described that exact vehicle. Fast. Quiet. Three rows. Three hundred fifty miles. He called it a personal bullet train. Ford pushed it back two years in April 2024, killed it that August, and let Field go this spring in a restructuring.

He was right. The market arrived precisely where he said it would — about two years after his employer decided he was wrong, and one quarter after it decided he was surplus.

So here is what I think this article proves, against its own conclusion and against forty-three years of American consensus.

Detroit did not fail to see. Detroit saw — in a named man, on a stage, with the product in the room — and could not hold what it saw for twenty-four months. Seeing is an event; you can buy it by Friday. Formation is a stock; it takes fifteen years and it lives in bodies. Every book ever written about this industry has diagnosed the eyes. The failure is in the hands.

That’s the argument.

The genre

There is a shelf of these books. Yates in 1983. Ingrassia and White in 1994. Maynard in 2003. Murray and Schwartz in 2019. Whyte in 2021. Shaer jokes the next will be called Should Have Seen It Coming, and he’s right about that too.

They are all about the same verb. Yates found Detroit cocky and flat-footed, waiting in corner offices for Americans to come back to gas guzzlers. Susan Helper describes an industry moving through the stages of grief, managers grown over-reliant on the mental models that made them successful — a well-grooved track that traffic turns into a rut. Padgett calls it blinkered thinking.

Detroit couldn’t see. Detroit wouldn’t look. Detroit looked and refused to believe.

Murray and Schwartz get closest — their subtitle says the industry destroyed its own capacity to compete. Capacity is one shelf over from the right word. It’s still not the right word.

And notice what that diagnosis buys you. A perception failure is a tragedy: cognition, frailty, unfixable. Write the book, sell the book, wait eleven years, write the next one. A formation failure is a design failure, and design failures get fixed by people who decide to fix them.

What the crusher couldn’t reach

In 1995 my wife drove a GM EV1 home.

She was the design release engineer for its HTCM — the module that regulates heat in the cabin. Not the battery. Not the motor. The part that keeps a human being warm, which in an electric car is the problem nobody outside the program thinks about, because there is no engine throwing off waste heat to steal. Every degree of comfort comes out of the pack and out of the range. Her module is where the car’s physics met a person’s body.

She parked it in the driveway and asked if I wanted to take it around the subdivision.

So that’s how I rode in an EV1. Not at a press event. On a residential street in Michigan, in a car GM would later hunt down and crush in the desert, because my wife drove it home from work and offered me the keys.

GM formed a few hundred engineers on that car. Real formation: a new architecture, no precedent, everything wrong the first time. Then it crushed them. Literally crushed them, which is the part everyone remembers, and it made a documentary, and the documentary was about the cars.

The cars were never the asset.

By the time the crushing started, my wife wasn’t on the program. She had moved to Lansing to follow me to Grand River and taken a job as an electrical quality engineer, on the floor.

Sit with that, because it is the entire argument standing inside one biography. GM destroyed the vehicles. The judgment those vehicles built did not go into the crusher — it went to Lansing and spent years walking a plant floor, in a body, doing electrical quality on Cadillacs. GM kept the asset. It just never knew it had it, never booked it, never named it, and never once asked what else it had formed and thrown away.

The other half went to California. Alan Cocconi worked the Impact program that became the EV1. He walked out and founded AC Propulsion, which built the tzero, which Martin Eberhard drove before Tesla existed. The crusher reached the aluminum. It could not reach what was in Cocconi’s head, and what was in Cocconi’s head became a company now worth more than the one that formed him.

So GM ran the experiment and published the result: formation is the only asset that survives a program cancellation. Some of it stayed and got used without being counted. The rest drove to Palo Alto. GM noticed neither.

Thirty-one years later Doug Field walks in from Tesla carrying formation the other direction, and Detroit dissolves it in a restructuring. Same script, backwards. The industry has now proven it can neither hold formation nor absorb it.

Two ledgers, identical cash

The Tesla Roadster did not really work. Musk has said so. Cantankerous software, abysmal reliability, a price out of reach for nearly everyone. It sold almost nothing. By every measure a program is judged by, it failed.

Tesla used what it learned building it to build the Model S.</