Yahoo Finance XPeng stock rises as new production platform forecasts lower manufacturing costs
The Yahoo Finance Live team discuss a jump in XPeng stock after a new production platform was unveiled.
Video Transcript
- And looking at shares of XPeng, those are up today. The EV maker plans to cut manufacturing costs. It unveiled a new manufacturing platform, which will reduce the research and development costs of new cars. The new platform allows it to 25% of costs on its powertrain systems and also save about 50% on intelligent driving features. Now, XPeng has been forced to focus more on costs since Tesla lowered the price of its vehicles. EV makers are in the middle of a price war right now really.
- Yeah. Elon Musk has really forced the whole playing field to kind of readjust what they're doing by cutting their prices. And Elon in his last time we heard him talk about this, he said he's looking to cut production costs by 50% down the road. We haven't exactly seen how he's going to do that. There are some reports emerging that one way he's going to do it with cutting performance bonuses from Shanghai workers. And you can already imagine what they get paid. So that is not going over well. That's according to reports on social media.
But when I was out at the New York International Auto Show, Allie, every single carmaker I talked to said, look, I can't even tell you what the sticker is on this new EV we're rolling out because I don't want to say it publicly because they were so afraid at the reaction being sticker shock because they were talking about an $80,000 SUV. They're trying to cut these prices down. They just don't know how. They're not at this scale. In fact, the two biggest EV debuts there at the New York Auto Show, they didn't release a sticker because they were so concerned with backlash to them.
- It's so interesting. And Tesla is a leader in this space. They've slashed prices five times since January. And that's obviously led to an uptick in demand. But the big question, especially heading into earnings, is what's the impact that's going to have on margin? So I think there's a lot to look at with Tesla overall and really the whole EV space at large because there's this ripple effect that we always tend to see.
