4 Factors That Are Popping the EV Stock Bubble

Shares fell hard across the sector on Wednesday as concern about inflation joined the list of worries dragging on the shares. Stock in Tesla (ticker: TSLA), the leader of the EV pack, dropped 4.4% Wednesday, closing below $600 a share for the first time since early March. Shares closed near the low of the day.

The average drop among the EV stocks Barron’s tracks was about 3%. The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.1%, 2% and 2.7%, respectively.

Behind all those declines was news early in the day that consumer prices increased 4.2% year over year in April, far higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. In April 2020, of course, things were falling apart, sending prices lower, amid Covid-19 lockdowns, so the gain was relative to a low base. But the March to April pickup in prices, excluding food and energy, was 0.9%. That rate equals full-year inflation of more than 11%.

Inflation that high is like a parasite, eating into savings and sucking energy out of the economy. It also tends to hurt stock valuations, especially those of expensive growth companies that are expected to generate most of their cash flows far in the future. Higher inflation means higher bond yields, which reduce the current value of future cash flows, partly because higher rates give investors options to earn more interest on their money right now.

Wednesday’s inflation-fueled declines are just the tip of the iceberg, though, for EV companies. Tesla stock is down about 34% from its January 52-week high of more than $900 a share. The average drop from 52-week highs for the rest of the EV names is about 70%. Investors just don’t have the appetite for more speculative, higher-growth stocks in the current environment.

Stock in Churchill Capital Acquisition Corp. IV (CCIV), the SPAC merging with Lucid Motors, is down about 73% from its 52-week high. Hyliion (HYLN) shares are down about 86%. And the Chinese EV makers NIO (NIO), XPeng (XPEV) and Li Auto (LI) have fallen an average of about 45% from their 52-week highs.

Inflation is just the latest problem for the stocks. More competition in the EV business, with traditional auto makers pouring billions into developing vehicles, is one problem. At the same time, the global shortage of semiconductors is constraining automotive production around the globe, making it hard for EV makers to benefit from red-hot demand for cars and rising gasoline price.

What is more, many of the new EV companies became public by merging with special-purpose acquisition companies. Many SPAC stocks, not just the EV-related ones, are struggling. The Defiance Next Gen SPAC Derived ETF (SPAK) is down 34% from its February 52-week high.

A dozen EV-SPAC companies Barron’s tracks are now down 15% over the past year on average. Only five remain above their SPAC merger price of $10 a share: Lucid, Fisker (FSR), Arrival (ARVL), QuantumScape (QS), and Nikola (NKLA).

Investors might believe that means those are the long-term winners among the EV SPAC stocks. But it is also possible their higher prices mean there is still further to fall.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

4 Factors That Are Popping the EV Stock Bubble

Electric-vehicle investors are going through a brutal stretch after an epic year.

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.