- Mexico aims to manufacture its first electric vehicles with almost entirely local components.
- Mexico’s EV market is expected to grow 25%–30% annually over the next five years.
- Budget cuts, limited charging infrastructure, and difficulty sourcing lithium could delay Olinia’s rollout.
Named Olinia, or “to move” in the Nahuatl Indigenous language, they will be the first EVs to be fully engineered and assembled in Mexico. They will be “safe, efficient, sustainable, and within reach for millions of Mexicans,” Roberto Capuano, the director of the project, said during the presentation. The first model will be ready by the time the 2026 World Cup kicks off in Mexico City, and be available to the general public by 2030, he said.
Slated to make EVs with almost entirely Mexican components, the Olinia project is touted as the answer both to the government’s ambitious goal of generating 45% clean electricity by 2030, and the influx of imported Chinese EVs, including BYD and Chery, which now account for nearly a tenth of new cars sold in Mexico.
But Olinia faces a number of challenges, including an inadequate budget, an undeveloped lithium industry that is essential for battery manufacture, and an unreasonable timeline, experts said.
Of course the first “expert opinion” quote is from a Tesla employee. Otoh, it seems obvious the timeline is too ambitious, but the “starting from zero” line seems like bullshit as well, considering how much auto manufacturing already takes place in Mexico.
Tesla employee or not they’re almost certainly correct, the barriers to entry in the automobile market are very high. Tesla made it, barely, through leveraging enormous amounts of Venture Capital. BYD made it by using even more enormous amounts of Government Funding plus Venture Capital and those were both done in areas that already had stupendously high levels of ICE auto manufacturing.
Mexico has none of that and they’re competing with all of the established players. I wish them success but it’s extremely unlikely that they will succeed.
oh, so it isn’t just America that erases indigenous cultures by appropriating random words from that language on their cars
Enh, it’s at least a little more complicated than that. Native or mestizo people are much more common in Mexico than the US. For example, Nahuatl has somewhere between 1.3 and 1.7 million speakers, mostly in Mexico. This is not counting over a dozen other languages that have hundreds of thousands of speakers apiece (wiki. By comparison, in the entire US there were only about 372,000 people that speak any indigenous language.
Depending on how you want to look at it, this could be just…a normal name, or even a tribute to the Nahuatl community. Or just a cynical attempt to sell more cars by looking inclusive. How many people need to speak a language before it’s ‘normal’, after all? We don’t go asking Italians before we put stuff in Latin. Or the Irish before we sell St Paddy’s Day shirts. Etc.
Native and mestizo aren’t the same thing. Mestizos are the people that assimilated and therefore enjoy privilege over indigenous people. identifying as mestizo is kind of the opposite of being indigenous because you’re adopting a colonial identity.
We don’t go asking Italians before we put stuff in Latin.
except Italians aren’t being genocided by any state for being Italian. Latin would be Spanish in this context, not Nahuatl. Latin was imposed through colonization around the world. And before anyone brings up the Aztec empire, it hasn’t existed in centuries.
Mexico forces Spanish upon indigenous groups to bring them closer to the conquistador ideal of a good Mexican citizen. them appropriating Nahuatl words to seem cool is more akin to racist Republicans stealing words from Black American English to market their products or politics.
Mexico is a bit different from America in their approach to assimilation in that they strive for mestizaje (making every Mexican mixed). You can see the ideology behind it in La raza cósmica.
I think it should be obvious why erasing indigenous cultures through state violence isn’t a benign thing.
Fair enough, I learned some things today. I was under the impression that indigenous languages were a lot more normalized than they actually are. I still think that using more indigenous language in everyday stuff is low-key a win, but for it to be commericalized while denying it elsewhere is just a slap in the face.
promoting indigenous linguistics is absolutely good, the nuance is that some of those languages are a closed practice so it would be disrespectful for outsiders to speak them. it all comes down to autonomy which i think you’re agreeing with in the end of your reply
I hope they release it on time, they have plenty of EV experience in the country
