The total loss has exceeded RMB 500 billion. This is not a company's financial thunderstorm, but Honda, Toyota, GM, Ford, Stellantis, Porsche and other giants have collectively paid "tuition" for pure electricity strategy in the past year. According to incomplete statistics of the car market tale, in the past year, the asset impairment plus project of these car companies has been terminated, exceeding 75 billion US dollars. The latest person to pay this tuition fee is Toyota. The Lexus flagship pure electric sedan "LF-ZC", which is scheduled to start production at the end of 2026, has been postponed until mid-2027. As a result, Toyota has recently stopped directly, and Toyota will also pay compensation to the dragged-down suppliers, which may be as high as tens of billions of yen. This is not an individual car company "retreating". If the time is longer, from 2024 to the present, there are Volvo, Volkswagen, Audi, Nissan, one by one to adjust the electrification strategy or reduce the sales target. Then comes the question: how can it be said that the "full electrification" that once shouted the shock of the heavens changed? More wonderful videos, all in the car home video platform 1, the wind has changed the direction of the electric car in recent years to run fast, to a large extent is the policy behind the push. But the tide came and went fast. On the US side, the subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act ebbed, and the emission regulations were liberalized. Car companies with profitable capital have braked sharply, put aside the unprofitable pure electricity business, and turned to lucrative fuel pickups and SUVs. Ford dissolved its battery joint venture with SK On at the end of 2025, cutting a number of electric vehicle research and development, with a provision for impairment of about $19.5 billion; GM made a provision for impairment losses of $7.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 due to electric business cuts. Across the Atlantic, Europe's old aristocracy is also mired in electrification. Volkswagen's March earnings report showed that it was dragged down by the impairment of Porsche's goodwill and accounted for a special loss of 4.7 billion euros in 2025; Mercedes-Benz paid for former CEO Conlinson's aggressive comprehensive electric strategy and paid 1.6 billion euros for restructuring, forcing it to return to the oil and electricity parallel. Japanese car companies are waking up later and at a higher cost. Due to the suspension of three models, Honda made a loss of 1.58 trillion yen in fiscal year 2025, which directly led to a net loss of 423.9 billion yen in fiscal year 2025, the first loss in 70 years since its listing. Second, if the policy shift is the change of the external environment, then the rise of China's new energy car companies is a real positive competition, and the old car companies are not ready at all. China remains the world's largest electric vehicle market, with sales of 16.49 million NEVs in 2025, up 28.2% year-on-year; retail penetration of NEVs in China has exceeded 60% for three consecutive months since April 2026. According to the International Energy Agency, Chinese electric vehicles account for nearly 55% of all vehicle sales, and Chinese car companies supply about 60% of global electric vehicle sales. BYD sold 4,602,400 new energy vehicles throughout the year, surpassing Tesla for the first time in pure electricity sales and becoming the global annual champion. Even more fierce is the double crush of price and quality. A Toyota Tier 1 supplier executive sighed privately: The quality of Chinese car companies is improving at an alarming rate, but the price is extremely low, and Japanese companies can not touch it head-on. At the beginning of this year, Honda CEO Minho Mibu visited a Chinese parts factory and lamented: "We have no chance of winning against such a rival." However, Chinese car companies are not living easily, with the overall profit margin of the domestic automobile industry only 3.4% from January to May 2026, which is close to the waistline compared to the industrial average of 6.1%. In the first half of the year, domestic passenger car retail sales fell 20.2% year-on-year to 8.701 million units. The domestic market has entered a period of adjustment, and "going to sea" is becoming the second growth curve. So the overseas car companies calculated a clear account: since the Chinese counterparts themselves lost money on this track, they all spent money on electrification, with a high probability of running with them. Instead of burning money to accompany the run, it is better to cover the money bag and take the "profit and loss balance sales" as the core indicator. 3. Money should be spent on returning where it can win, not on conceding defeat, but on exchanging battlefields. Apple performed an early exit two years ago: in 2024, it cut down the "Titan Plan" built for ten years and turned to betting on AI, which is essentially a car's heavy assets, low gross profit, and does not fit its own profit model. Instead of backing down, Tesla has redefined “cars” - Musk says FSD is the core product, with more than $25 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 hitting Robotaxi and the humanoid robot Optimus. Toyota pumps resources into more popular SUVs and all-solid-state batteries: SUVs such as the bZ4X have boosted Toyota's pure-electric sales by 42% in 2025; although the solid-state battery schedule has been postponed many times in history, the direction is clear: I would rather take a step slowly, but I also need to replace the battlefield with technology. Interestingly, Toyota grabbed the hybrid chassis and put the electrification center in China, allowing Chinese engineers to lead R&D. It also intends to export Chinese-made cars overseas in reverse. Most traditional car companies are returning to the defensive line of fuel and hybrid, while the factories with idle production capacity are collectively "joining the army": GM won the order for 121 US Army infantry unit vehicles in March; Ford and the US Department of Defense cooperated in military trucks, covering the United States and Europe, and will also participate in the production of "Tomahawk" missiles and "Patriot" air defense systems; Volkswagen took over the commission of Rheinmetall to produce an armored cabin, which was officially put into production in April. Summary: When European and American Japanese car companies step on the brakes one by one, go around the long road, change the track, the reflection is actually the anxiety and helplessness of the old car companies in the industrial transformation. However, electrification will not go away. The International Energy Agency predicts that global electric vehicle ownership (excluding two- and three-wheelers) is expected to increase from about 80 million today to 510 million by 2035. This reminds car companies of one thing: the current "strategic adjustment", if you go too far, back too hard, it is possible to turn the retreat into a dead end. How to break through the bottleneck of electrification transformation and find a development path that suits you is the key. (By/Automobile House Peng Fei).