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> Toyota is lagging behind the rest of industry It's a very polite way of saying that Toyota is selling electric shit boxes. The brand new Lexus UX 300e is so

> Toyota is lagging behind the rest of industry It's a very polite way of saying that Toyota is selling electric shit boxes. The brand new Lexus UX 300e is so bad and overpriced that it will not surprise me if Toyota's plan is to make a bad selling car on purpose to say that customers don't want EVs.

bluedino 5y ago
At one time, the Prius was the top-rated vehicle.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Toyota killed the Prius in the USA with the RAV4 hybrid, which kinda sucks because being heavy and brick-shaped and equipped with a larger engine, the latter burns much more fuel. The Highlander is even worse: with its huge V6, it is a hybrid that gets only 25 MPG. Ridiculous. Toyota owns about half the US hybrid vehicle market but the Prius is now a small part of that.
  - mcast 5y ago
    The Highlander Hybrid gets 36/35 mpg, but that’s not much better than the all-gas model at 21/29 mpg. But if you drive in constant traffic the regenerative braking gives you better mileage than coasting at a constant speed (sometimes better than MPG stats which Toyota underreports), which also means less pollution on traffic congested roads. For many families, a Prius quickly becomes impractical if you need to fit in more than one car seat for kids and carry around bulky items. Toyota’s hybrid offering is a good middle ground between full-gas and EV cars and very reliable considering how many old Prius’s are still on the road at 200k+ miles.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Was just going from Fuelly. I think sticker MPG is almost useless. Fuelly says the 3.5L is the most common hybrid and the mode is 26 MPG[1], while the same-displacement without the hybrid reports 21 MPG[2]. 1: https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id=364&bodytype_id=&submodel_id= https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id... 2: https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id=102&bodytype_id=&submodel_id= https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id...
      - mcast 5y ago
        It seems the 2019 hybrid model used to come in a more powerful V6 engine, but the latest Toyota hybrids seem to downgrade back to V4 engines to improve efficiency.
      - lostmsu 5y ago
        It looks like 2020 and 2021 models all use L4 with MPG around 32, if I am not mistaken.
    - novok 5y ago
      I think the Prius V was their attempt at addressing that market, but they never made a 3 row Prius. I'm guessing at that point your making a hybrid minivan.
  - novok 5y ago
    I think the more accurate assertion is US customers really loathe the Prius body style and LOVE their SUV body styles via what they buy. I think it's unfair to Toyota to say they killed it, US consumers did. Ford stopped making sedans for a reason. Living in California, it's surprising how much people seem to loathe the prius type of car. They make fun of people who have them as people who have died inside or similar.
  - jrsj 5y ago
    This is a bit hyperbolic, I still see Prius & Camry hybrids way more often than rav4 hybrids
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Market share is instant and fleet composition is the integral of it. In the USA the median fleet age is now over 12 years, so you should expect it to be a while before the sales leader is the most common car in the fleet.
      - jrsj 5y ago
        That is a bad position for Toyota to be in then; this aggressive shift in consumer preference to SUVs and crossovers has been incredibly stupid and bad for just about everything. The way this stuff is regulated and taxed probably doesn’t encourage people to buy smaller vehicles as much as it should.
imglorp 5y ago
Thinking about the engineering, they squandered a tremendous lead. Look what they had on the road, mass produced in 1997: the electric propulsion, control, storage, and regen. If you squint, they solved the hard problems engineering problems already; just take away the gas part to make a full plugin EV. This smells more like a business problem. Maybe they can't scale the battery deals they need, big enough and fast enough.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Toyota bet on Hydrogen, and that bet has failed to pay off.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  > Maybe they can't scale the battery deals My thinking is the same. If they can't make 10 million cars per year, they won't bother with 100k. Tesla is just about to approach 1m cars per year and they are using up majority of worlds batteries.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Toyota could spray silver paint on a dog turd, slap a 40k sticker on it and people would buy it. Toyota isn't in the business of selling cars. They're in the business of selling billboards that say "look how financially savvy I am" on one side and "look I can afford premium products" on the other side to upper middle class types. Toyota isn't innovating because they're under no pressure to innovate as long as people keep buying and tinkering with a brand image like that is fraught with peril so it's hard to justify unless you absolutely have to. This is why they've been so conservative for the last ~20yr.
- jrsj 5y ago
  I mean they could, because they’re known for producing reliable vehicles. It’s not like this is just made up; the stuff they sell is just better than most of the competition in that regard. Being conservative in some aspects can be good. When they started adopting GDI they didn’t only use GDI, they also used traditional port injection to reduce carbon buildup issues and improve efficiency. Whereas a lot of Ford ecoboost engines as an example didn’t do this and started to have problems because cleaning the intake valves wasn’t part of the scheduled maintenance
- tim333 5y ago
  >Toyota could spray silver paint on a dog turd, slap a 40k sticker on it and people would buy it As the owner of a few Toyota's I think you misunderstand how they became pretty much the world's largest car producer. Mostly because they produce no nonsense reliable cars that work well for years and years. I don't think many people think wow cool brand. (I know VW is technically bigger but they did it by acquiring Audi, Porsche etc rather than people buying more VWs)
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    I've bought and sold dozens (probably close to a hundred at this point) of vehicles in the $500-$1500 price bracket. Looking at the kind of condition North American and Asian vehicles end up towards the end of their life I can't really think of any one of them that's particularly special. Every OEM has a handful of product lines and assemblies that suck and Toyota is no exception nor do they have fewer of those kinds of problems than anyone else. I think they make slightly nicer interiors which I think results in less broken knobs and handles when the well to do white collar crowd gives them to their college age kids which is where most of that goodwill comes from. I feel very, very comfortable saying that any edge Toyota has is wholly the result of the additional upfront cost and less attractive financing options and deals ensuring their vehicles start life and rack up miles in the hands of people who can afford to maintain them and treat them nicely. The average Toyota buyer will make almost any vehicle seem highly reliable.
jrsj 5y ago
Eh. Many EVs on the market are shitty. It’s not much more expensive than a Chevy Bolt and those are catching fire often enough Chevy has told everyone not to charge unattended or overnight and to park them outside. That being said I don’t know how bad this vehicle is because it isn’t sold in the U.S. and I’m not really interested in a subcompact crossover regardless
- speedgoose 5y ago
  It's brand new unlike the Chevy bolt and most of the not so great EVs though. It's so bad that for example it doesn't come with the standard European fast charging socket in Europe, and the car has a fuel gauge with a fuel station symbol to show the battery state of charge.
  - jrsj 5y ago
    So the issue is mainly that it’s a quick/cheap conversion of the existing Lexus UX to an EV? That doesn’t sound like a good user experience but it’s not necessarily a bad vehicle from a mechanical standpoint either. I assume it’s more of an experiment with the technology than anything else.
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      It's definitely not an impressive EV mechanically, especially when you consider that it's coming 10 years after the first mass produced EVs.

bluedino 5y ago

At one time, the Prius was the top-rated vehicle.

jeffbee 5y ago
Toyota killed the Prius in the USA with the RAV4 hybrid, which kinda sucks because being heavy and brick-shaped and equipped with a larger engine, the latter burns much more fuel. The Highlander is even worse: with its huge V6, it is a hybrid that gets only 25 MPG. Ridiculous. Toyota owns about half the US hybrid vehicle market but the Prius is now a small part of that.
- mcast 5y ago
  The Highlander Hybrid gets 36/35 mpg, but that’s not much better than the all-gas model at 21/29 mpg. But if you drive in constant traffic the regenerative braking gives you better mileage than coasting at a constant speed (sometimes better than MPG stats which Toyota underreports), which also means less pollution on traffic congested roads. For many families, a Prius quickly becomes impractical if you need to fit in more than one car seat for kids and carry around bulky items. Toyota’s hybrid offering is a good middle ground between full-gas and EV cars and very reliable considering how many old Prius’s are still on the road at 200k+ miles.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Was just going from Fuelly. I think sticker MPG is almost useless. Fuelly says the 3.5L is the most common hybrid and the mode is 26 MPG[1], while the same-displacement without the hybrid reports 21 MPG[2]. 1: https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id=364&bodytype_id=&submodel_id= https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id... 2: https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id=102&bodytype_id=&submodel_id= https://www.fuelly.com/car/toyota/highlander?engineconfig_id...
    - mcast 5y ago
      It seems the 2019 hybrid model used to come in a more powerful V6 engine, but the latest Toyota hybrids seem to downgrade back to V4 engines to improve efficiency.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      It looks like 2020 and 2021 models all use L4 with MPG around 32, if I am not mistaken.
  - novok 5y ago
    I think the Prius V was their attempt at addressing that market, but they never made a 3 row Prius. I'm guessing at that point your making a hybrid minivan.
- novok 5y ago
  I think the more accurate assertion is US customers really loathe the Prius body style and LOVE their SUV body styles via what they buy. I think it's unfair to Toyota to say they killed it, US consumers did. Ford stopped making sedans for a reason. Living in California, it's surprising how much people seem to loathe the prius type of car. They make fun of people who have them as people who have died inside or similar.
- jrsj 5y ago
  This is a bit hyperbolic, I still see Prius & Camry hybrids way more often than rav4 hybrids
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Market share is instant and fleet composition is the integral of it. In the USA the median fleet age is now over 12 years, so you should expect it to be a while before the sales leader is the most common car in the fleet.
    - jrsj 5y ago
      That is a bad position for Toyota to be in then; this aggressive shift in consumer preference to SUVs and crossovers has been incredibly stupid and bad for just about everything. The way this stuff is regulated and taxed probably doesn’t encourage people to buy smaller vehicles as much as it should.

imglorp 5y ago

Thinking about the engineering, they squandered a tremendous lead. Look what they had on the road, mass produced in 1997: the electric propulsion, control, storage, and regen. If you squint, they solved the hard problems engineering problems already; just take away the gas part to make a full plugin EV. This smells more like a business problem. Maybe they can't scale the battery deals they need, big enough and fast enough.

sangnoir 5y ago
Toyota bet on Hydrogen, and that bet has failed to pay off.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
> Maybe they can't scale the battery deals My thinking is the same. If they can't make 10 million cars per year, they won't bother with 100k. Tesla is just about to approach 1m cars per year and they are using up majority of worlds batteries.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Toyota could spray silver paint on a dog turd, slap a 40k sticker on it and people would buy it. Toyota isn't in the business of selling cars. They're in the business of selling billboards that say "look how financially savvy I am" on one side and "look I can afford premium products" on the other side to upper middle class types. Toyota isn't innovating because they're under no pressure to innovate as long as people keep buying and tinkering with a brand image like that is fraught with peril so it's hard to justify unless you absolutely have to. This is why they've been so conservative for the last ~20yr.

jrsj 5y ago
I mean they could, because they’re known for producing reliable vehicles. It’s not like this is just made up; the stuff they sell is just better than most of the competition in that regard. Being conservative in some aspects can be good. When they started adopting GDI they didn’t only use GDI, they also used traditional port injection to reduce carbon buildup issues and improve efficiency. Whereas a lot of Ford ecoboost engines as an example didn’t do this and started to have problems because cleaning the intake valves wasn’t part of the scheduled maintenance
tim333 5y ago
>Toyota could spray silver paint on a dog turd, slap a 40k sticker on it and people would buy it As the owner of a few Toyota's I think you misunderstand how they became pretty much the world's largest car producer. Mostly because they produce no nonsense reliable cars that work well for years and years. I don't think many people think wow cool brand. (I know VW is technically bigger but they did it by acquiring Audi, Porsche etc rather than people buying more VWs)
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  I've bought and sold dozens (probably close to a hundred at this point) of vehicles in the $500-$1500 price bracket. Looking at the kind of condition North American and Asian vehicles end up towards the end of their life I can't really think of any one of them that's particularly special. Every OEM has a handful of product lines and assemblies that suck and Toyota is no exception nor do they have fewer of those kinds of problems than anyone else. I think they make slightly nicer interiors which I think results in less broken knobs and handles when the well to do white collar crowd gives them to their college age kids which is where most of that goodwill comes from. I feel very, very comfortable saying that any edge Toyota has is wholly the result of the additional upfront cost and less attractive financing options and deals ensuring their vehicles start life and rack up miles in the hands of people who can afford to maintain them and treat them nicely. The average Toyota buyer will make almost any vehicle seem highly reliable.

jrsj 5y ago

Eh. Many EVs on the market are shitty. It’s not much more expensive than a Chevy Bolt and those are catching fire often enough Chevy has told everyone not to charge unattended or overnight and to park them outside. That being said I don’t know how bad this vehicle is because it isn’t sold in the U.S. and I’m not really interested in a subcompact crossover regardless

speedgoose 5y ago
It's brand new unlike the Chevy bolt and most of the not so great EVs though. It's so bad that for example it doesn't come with the standard European fast charging socket in Europe, and the car has a fuel gauge with a fuel station symbol to show the battery state of charge.
- jrsj 5y ago
  So the issue is mainly that it’s a quick/cheap conversion of the existing Lexus UX to an EV? That doesn’t sound like a good user experience but it’s not necessarily a bad vehicle from a mechanical standpoint either. I assume it’s more of an experiment with the technology than anything else.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    It's definitely not an impressive EV mechanically, especially when you consider that it's coming 10 years after the first mass produced EVs.