The ICE aren't any better. My god, what you can spend on a vehicle these days is insane, and you know it's going to be trash in 5 years.

In the EU they would struggle to significantly cut the purchase price without screwing themselves with their liability with leased cars, particularly those on PCP (which is one of the most common ways to buy a brand new car) as the manufacturers own the liability on that final payment (via their finance arm) not the purchaser. If they cut new prices significantly then older cars will also see a significant drop in resale price, those final payments are already finely balanced.

VW in particular fucked up as they put in a janky in car control system after removing all the buttons, stuck the largest battery behind the expensive high performance motor setup only (more people want range not performance at this point, this was a cheap counter productive cash grab trying to force people to a more expensive model), and was at least a generation behind on the EV side of things for charging and efficiency. Oh, and they killed the cheapest version of the car as well. Now they shut down their EV factory and fire workers, blaming falling industry wide EV sales rather than their own fuck ups, and they have the most to lose from China eating their business from the bottom.