EV Rivals Find it Difficult to Catch Tesla After Delorean Hits the Brakes

The famous 1980s movie Marty McFly shows Marty McFly driving into the future, making it look as if it was an easy task. Start-ups trying to break into the EV industry are finding it much harder than they thought.

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The car manufacturer DeLorean, made famous by the film Back To The Future, has reimagined the iconic brand and introduced an electric vehicle to the public. The Alpha 5, the company's first vehicle, is due to be released in 2024. Despite this, there will be fewer in the beginning than was originally anticipated.

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According to the company, the number of initial reservation slots was reduced from 9,351 to 4,000 on Saturday “due to supply-chain bottlenecks.”

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Reservations for the car are still available for $3,500. There is a rise in the price of a reservation as the number of available slots increases. DeLorean is also setting up a reservation exchange where people are able to trade their reservations in order to make room for new ones.

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There is no public market for DeLorean vehicles yet. The stock is not available for investors to track, so there is no stock for them to track. There is one thing that the cut does show investors, however. Despite the fact that supply-chain issues are still an issue in the car business, building EVs is a difficult task, and competition for Tesla TSLA –2.57% (TSLA) rarely arrives on time.

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It is only the latest example of all of that that we are seeing with DeLorean's news.

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As part of its initial production guidance for 2023, Lucid (LCID) provided an update on Wednesday evening. Approximately 12,000 vehicles are expected to be produced by the company this year. It was expected that Wall Street would be looking for about 20,000 units. Supply-chain problems are one of the main reasons for the disappointment, and they play a big role in the situation. Lucid LCID –3.19% stock has fallen almost 20% over the last few days as a result of the forecast.

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The stock of Lordstown Motors RIDE –2.75% (RIDE) is also down almost 20% over the past few days. The company halted production on Thursday and recalled a handful of Endurance pickup trucks to evaluate quality problems.

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Automakers with more experience have also encountered some difficulties in recent years. A battery fire forced Ford Motor (F) to halt production of its popular F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. According to Ford, the production delay will last until at least the end of this week.

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In addition to this, Sono Electric Vehicles SEV -26.19% (SEV) announced on Friday that it was canceling the program for its Sion solar-powered electric vehicle. Apparently, the company did not have enough cash to commercialize its vehicle on a large scale.

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Apart from Sion, there are a lot of new electric vehicles coming to the market in the near future. While some investors might expect to be able to catch Tesla, it might be more difficult than they anticipated.

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Stocks of Tesla were up 2.5% in premarket trading on Monday morning. There is almost no doubt that the move has nothing to do with DeLorean. As opposed to that, Tesla was rebounding a little bit from its own challenging week, in which its shares fell by 5%.

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It was a higher market on Monday morning as well. Futures for the S&P 500SPX -1.05% and the Nasdaq Composite futures were both up 0.5% and 0.6%, respectively.