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Anytime society has an enormous demand for something, especially people/institutions with money, it gets done. If there are hundreds of billions or even trilli

Anytime society has an enormous demand for something, especially people/institutions with money, it gets done. If there are hundreds of billions or even trillions riding on upgrading the grid and securing mineral resources/researching alternative solutions, it will get funded and figured out. There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B. There will be grid upgrades to handle everyone charging (really topping off is more realistic, few drive more than ~25 miles/day, the upgrade to accommodate this might simply be "grid smart" chargers). There will be alternative chemistry batteries that don't need rare earths (like LFP in some Teslas). Toyota is just stubbornly refusing to take the L on their 30 years of research into this. I don't blame them, but I'm not them, so I'll call it how it is.

mhneu 4y ago
Yes, exactly. Toyota is refusing to take the L on this because Toyota is the market leader in gas-electric hybrids and Toyota is not the market leader in EVs. This is business strategy 101.
- adventured 4y ago
  How to cede an enormous market opportunity to a dozen other competitors 101.
- silisili 4y ago
  This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film. In fairness, they did catch up decades later...but that's likely at least a couple decades of revenue lost. And never really innovating. If they'd have been more forward thinking, we'd likely see Kodak sensors in every phone today instead of Sony.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Nobody was ready to make use of digital images until computing was enough of a presence in daily life, digital storage was cheap enough, and sensor resolution increased to compete with casual use of film. That wasn't going to happen in the 70s or 80s.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      But the technology wasn't ready when the rest of computers were. Photo CDs were good but sensors were 20 some years later
  - samatman 4y ago
    Kodak and Sears are my favorite example of this sort of thing, Kodak not only invented the digital camera, they also had a robust business in the 90s of developing color film onto both prints and a CD. Instead of seeing the writing on the wall, they resisted digital because it cut into both film, and their existing way of getting those pictures onto computers. Sears, after dominating mail-order for a century, marketed Prodigy, a successful early dial-up network. But they were by that point heavily invested in malls, and were beat out as the 21st century's Sear's, Roebuck and Co. by a bookseller.
    - scaredginger 4y ago
      I think the way to look at cases like these is to recognise organisations aren't monoliths, but a mass of individuals each tugging in their own direction. Clearly, there were inventors, progressives and visionaries within these companies that correctly predicted future trends and were trying to steer the ship to capitalise on them, but for some reason, other voices drowned them out.
      - derekp7 4y ago
        And that right there is why a good CEO can make or break a company. They don't have to be experts in everything, but they need to be good enough to tell which of their experts working for them to believe, or to bring in outside expertise when needed.
        scaredginger 4y ago
        Completely agree. I think the darker side though is that successful individuals must not only have good ideas, but advocate for their ideas effectively. I still haven't figured that one out, personally
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      Amazon was never a bookseller. How a company that was focused on their legacy customer relationship system and logistics operations lost out to a company that was focused on building the future of customer relationships and logistics is a lot less difficult to understand.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Companies can't change their DNA any more than an individual organism can. Kodak was right to avoid digital photography - and in fact they probably should have stuck with film a little while longer even if it is niche. The public perceives DNA switches all the time, but that's an illusion generated by a free market and it's ability to plug in new sources of value (and unplug old ones) relatively seamlessly.
    - BirAdam 4y ago
      If Kodak were still making film today, hipsters would be all over it just like vinyl records.
      - lytfyre 4y ago
        The remains of Kodak does make film today, albeit in fewer varieties than they once did, and with far less production capacity. Any yes, people are all over it to the point that the most popular varieties can be difficult to find in stock, and prices have climbed significantly from a few years ago.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        There's people now trying to recreate the Polaroid instant film technology and keep it alive. Even when those cameras were current, the pictures they made looked like crap.
      - llampx 4y ago
        Go to any fashionable flea market and you will see old film cameras for sale, usually by a dedicated seller who can also sell you film.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      Yes, a companies DNA can be quite an obstacle to survival in changing markets, but that sounds like a cheap excuse for bad management. The reality is rather: nothing stays forever. All technology markets are in a consistant change and you always have to adapt your company constantly, if you want to survive or even prosper. One good exampel is Apple. They were a computer company which was doing well again after the return of Jobs. Then came the iPod. And revenue exploded. But when the rumors of a phone appeared, a lot of people would comment: no, they won't do that as that would eat into their cash cow iPod. But we know how this ended. They released the iPhone, grew multiple times the size the company was and eventually even stopped making iPods. Back to Kodak: they did invent the digital camera, but at a time it was way too early for being a product. But more importantly, they did bring some important digital cameras to the market in the late 90ies, the first usuable DSLR were Nikon/Canon cameras equipped with Kodak guts. They started the professional digital camera market. Without Kodak, it might have happened years later. And at that moment, when the writing for film was clearly on the wall and they actually had managed to kick start its killer, they dropped the ball. Good management would have seen that they could "protect" film sales only on a per-quarter basis, but it was a dying business. They should have used the billions of cash they still had, to gain a solid foothold in the digital camera business, perhaps even outright bought Nikon, which was limping for a while. Or invest strongly in all the adjacencies of digital imaging, which they did far too late.
  - sbcdz 4y ago
    >This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film. There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt. Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)
    - silisili 4y ago
      This is all correct, but kinda shifting timelines. For example, if Kodak had been first to digital, that doesn't mean they'd have had to give up any film at all. And since they were first, they could have set margins where they liked. Whether it would have survived and thrived...who knows. As others have pointed out, computers weren't commonplace back then. Digital cameras did get commoditized, nearly 30 years after Kodak had invented it. So obviously, by today they'd had to have move on. High end sensors, glass, heck even cloud computing, something akin to Google Photos... there's no telling where they could have been if they'd have leaned in early. That said, you point out the sensor market is 15 billion today... and Sony has about half. This is way, way more money than Kodak makes anymore. Today Kodak is at about a billion revenue per year.
  - melagonster 4y ago
    they can't do this, their company is a chemical company, changing is almost impossible.
  - newbie2020 4y ago
    Toyota is different. They’re also making EVs… they’re just not _only_ making EVs. If EVs really start to take off on their own, Toyota will already have multiple offerings to fill that gap
    - mhneu 4y ago
      Toyota just released their first EV and it was developed in a collaboration with Subaru. https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2021/06/29/at-last-toyota-and-subaru-ready-their-first-electric-vehicles-for-a-2022-launch/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2021/06/29/at-last-to...
      - lastofthemojito 4y ago
        It's not their first EV, there have certainly been others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod But it is the first one where they're aiming for mass adoption.
- joshl32532 4y ago
  Yeah, why would Toyota want to go all in on EV and lose the ICU/Hybrid market lead that they worked so hard to accomplish? And ICU/Hybrid are still dominating sales worldwide. You see those who go all in EV are usually those brands with not much to lose (like Volvo). It's not like they're not going in EV, they are just doing it at their pace (which is slow typical of Toyota). Tesla already got the first mover advantage. Kia/Hyundai/Ford etc are fighting for second place. The gap between second and the rest won't be as large as Tesla vs second.
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    Tesla has already lost the lead in sales. BYD (Chinese brand) took over for the lead for Plug-in EV sales this year. Tesla's has decreased over time and will likely continue to decrease. Kia and Ford aren't really in the picture (among top 5 sellers). Volkswagen, SAIC and Volvo are selling more EVs than Hyundai. https://insideevs.com/news/601770/world-top-oem-ev-sales-2022h1/ https://insideevs.com/news/601770/world-top-oem-ev-sales-202...
  - w0mbat 4y ago
    > Yeah, why would Toyota want to go all in on EV and lose the ICU/Hybrid market The same reason Apple went all in on the iPhone and dropped their lucrative iPod business. You drive your car on the road that takes you to the next level, not the familiar one that's heading off a cliff.
funstuff007 4y ago
> few drive more than ~25 miles/day Where do you get that stat?
- adventured 4y ago
  It's more like ~35-40 miles per day in the US (which will tend to be higher than in other countries). "The United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration said that the average driver traveled 12,724 miles in 2020. That’s down from 14,263 average annual miles in 2019. The 2020 average equates to 1,060 miles per month per driver, or about 35 miles per day. By comparison, the DOT said the average annual miles was 13,476 in 2018." https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year/ https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
- tzs 4y ago
  It sounds plausible at least. The average per year in the US is around 14000 miles according to the FHA, which would be a little under 40 miles per die. I'd expect the distribution of individual amounts driven to be such that the median would be lower than the mean, but a little searching has failed to turn up any details on that distribution.
  - funstuff007 4y ago
    > I'd expect the distribution of individual amounts driven to be such that the median would be lower than the mean True, but there can't be that much skew--there's only so many hours in the day.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      I drive 0 5-6 days a week. I also drive 2000 miles to FL and 600 miles to St Louis etc etc. Somehow I put 32k miles in my EV in 2 years despite WFH with no commute
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      There are some people who drive for work (eg. traveling salespeople, rideshare & delivery drivers, most tradespeople) and then there are others that drive to commute to an office for 8 hours. Rideshare & delivery drivers might be on the road for 8+ hours/day, tradespeople & traveling salespeople for 4-5, office workers for 20-60 minutes, with a skew toward the lower end of that. That's a pretty skewed distribution.
missionlocal1 4y ago
$20k is still too expensive of a car for a lot of people in the US, and for most outside the developed world. Toyota is just keeping that population in perspective.
- stu2b50 4y ago
  That's what the used market is for. You're not getting a new economy sedan for under $20k MSRP in normal times, let alone the weird market right now.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    But 2nd hand ICE cars don’t have to worry about a degraded and very expensive lithium battery and certain models are proven to last a long time. These things may work, but I don’t want to spend the money to be the one that finds out.
    - fshr 4y ago
      > These things may work, but I don’t want to spend the money to be the one that finds out. Then don't? There will be millions of people testing it for you.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      no, instead 2nd hand ice cars have to work about a degraded and very expensive engine. an EV battery is likely to last somewhere around 200000 miles (https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/evs-offer-big-savings-over-traditional-gas-powered-cars/ https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/evs-offer-big-sa...), and over that period require essentially no engine maintenance compared to gas cars which between oil changes, break pad replacement (which EVs avoid due to regenerative), and all the other things that can go wrong with an ICE have an extra roughly 500-700 per year of additional maintenance cost.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
        My car should easily last 200K - 250K miles. At least data shows that my model should easily hit those numbers. My yearly maintenance is 250-325USD per year. Occasionally you need to replace the brake pads. And a few other things come up sure. But over 10 years I’m only looking at 5KUSD unless something horrible goes wrong. And I could probably get it cheaper. At my level of fuel consumption I’m looking at another 4K over 10 years. I can’t find an up to date quote, but in Australia, the Tesla 3 years service plan for a rear wheel drive Model 3 was 1.75 times the cost compared to the standard service for my car in 2018. Non Tesla EVs do better. And some are half the price or less than what I pay for annual servicing. But I still have to cough up 3-4 times more money 2nd hand. So potentially a 2nd hand EV based on current prices will start to be cheaper in 8ish years. Not including the loan I’d have to take out to pay for the thing.
rowanG077 4y ago
This is so patently false it's scary. There is an enormous demand for a cure for cancer, dementia, heart disease etc. Yet they haven't even close to materialized. There is an enormous demand for room environment super conductors yet it isn't fixed. It's all sunflowers and rainbows to think like you are thinking but it's just not reality.
- yonaguska 4y ago
  There is an enormous demand for a cure to cancer, but why should it be pursued over enormously profitable cancer treatments? I'm just being pedantic though, I agree with your point.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  Some of the techno-optimism on this site would get you laughed out of the room in some academic circles.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  To be fair, most of the problems are not technical but scale. We know how to build stronger grids, and how to produce more electricity, and how to refine lithium. We haven't got a clue what to do about dementia or room temp superconductors or cold fusion. That said, I am also quite a bit more pessimist than OP that we will see a full conversion in the near future. It will be a long, and quite possibly painful, process.
  - anikom15 4y ago
    Integrating things at a certain scale is a technical problem.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      It's really more about production than integration. We simply don't have the supply volume or production capacity on hand to rapidly replace existing ICE cars. Things are improving, but overall cost is going to stay high until lithium battery and other costs come down. Then, you have the issue of rolling out updates to grids. There's a variety of options, all well technically understood, and little movement in many areas. California, for example, ought to have buried a lot of its electrical lines. Construction work during droughts seem like a good way to start a wildfire, as is installing new overhead lines.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
I refuse to buy new and my current car cost me $15kAUD. Which is 10KUSD (ignoring supply chain issues for a while). My previous car was an older generation of the same model and lasted over a decade. My current car should too. And upkeep is fairly cheap all things considered. 20K isn’t economy. Half that and make sure the car still runs for over a decade with reasonable maintenance costs.
- andrewinardeer 4y ago
  Now include the AUD1.80/L fuel costs into the life of that car.
  - tenpies 4y ago
    And yet the cost of gas is cheaper than the current electric equivalent in many European locations at this point. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63029226 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63029226
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      where by cheaper you mean slightly more expensive if you compare to public charging stations that are the vast minority of charged miles, and 9x more expensive than charging at home.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Last I checked it was a fair bit easier to put up 4 solar panels and an inverter than build your own oil refinery. $1000AU worth of panels, a $200 charge and a $1500 battery will give you 30km or so a day. Pays off in about 4 years vs $1.80/L even with very optimistic fuel economy. if you park at home then the price halves. If you can put the panels where you park that goes down to 1-2 years.
  - alvah 4y ago
    "Now include the AUD1.80/L fuel costs into the life of that car." While remembering, of course, to include AUD0.30-0.60/kwh for charging the EV (or AUD$6-$12/100km for a typical EV).
jrsj 4y ago
It might happen but it might not happen as quickly as they would like. Recent geopolitical issues have substatically harmed supply chains for EVs. There's a reason Tesla has abandoned their plans for a mass market vehicle and are instead sticking in the $40k+ vehicle business. Many of Toyotas competitors have de-emphasized investments in their ICE products to pursue EVs that they can't produce in large enough volumes for longer than anticipated. Toyotas strategy is going to work well at least in the mid term.
- ip26 4y ago
  Tesla gave up on the mass market vehicle because they can sell every Y and 3 they make. That has been going on since before the supply disruptions.
  - dangrossman 4y ago
    They weren't making very many of them before the supply disruptions. They made and sold a total of just 367,500 cars globally in 2019. Toyota does that every two months in just North America. Today, Tesla announced a miss versus forecasted sales/deliveries last quarter, and lowered their forecast going forward.
    - ip26 4y ago
      The point is, Tesla choosing not to pursue the mass market is no reflection on how viable that market is. At Tesla volume, they are better off devoting their production capacity to the upmarket. The upmarket has better margins, so you sell there until you saturate demand.
      - KerrAvon 4y ago
        recursive 4y ago
        I mean, that's true. But there's nothing to excuse here.
Ferret7446 4y ago
>There will be $20,000 economy EVs The mindset of the group of people that think $20,000 is economy (and that it "will" definitely get done) reflects everything that is wrong with a lot of recent ESG propaganda and policies. That is, ignorance of the state of most of the world outside of rich, first class bubbles.
- Denvercoder9 4y ago
  New ICE cars are also $20K these days. That's also unaffordable for a lot of people, but they don't buy new cars.
  - bluedays 4y ago
    The problem is that EV cars have a finite lifespan on the most expensive component of the car... the battery. It is not modular despite being composed of several individual cells, and often you are not allowed to work on it yourself. Once the battery is dead that's it. You either pay 3k or bust.
    - eropple 4y ago
      This is true, but an EV that needs a battery swap is still carrying along a ton of mechanics that, compared to an ICE vehicle, are likely to be in generally better condition. People used to do powertrain replacements on used cars, after all. (Maybe still do? The used cars I see are generally in better mechanical shape these days.)
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      3k? That’s a Prius salvage battery. EV batteries won’t get replaced in 20k cars anymore than engines are. You total it out at that point.
      - admax88qqq 4y ago
        Engine replacements are complicated. Many specific parts. Battery replacements may be much easier to complete.
Gatsky 4y ago
I think you are ignoring an important part of this question, which is what is going to happen in India and Northern Africa, where most of the population growth will take place over the next 50 years. I don't think these countries can afford an 'economy' EV, or widespread infrastructure to support them, certainly not in the near term. India is certainly making some encouraging moves [1], but your comment seems quite too optimistic and Western-centric. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58977080 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58977080
- ajross 4y ago
  These places aren't buying new cars at all, though. Nor do they have the "infrastructure" (paved, lighted and signaled road networks are not cheap!) to support a passenger car network like we have in the west either. They are getting by on used/surplus vehicles and lots of spotty access already, and nothing about an EV would do anything but help that process. Electrical grids are much (much) cheaper than fuel distribution in total, and even more so in remote areas.
  - Yeahsureok 4y ago
    > These places aren't buying new cars at all, though. India ranks 4th worldwide for new car sales and will likely take 3rd place in a year or two.
    - ajross 4y ago
      The subject was rural India lacking the infrastructure for EVs, which was a ridiculous point. Obviously there's a market for EV's in Bangalore and Delhi, that's not really much of a discussion. The upthread commenter (who I think is the one you're arguing with, not me) seemed to want to have a carve-out for "EV's can't succeed because of undeveloped regions".
  - hadlock 4y ago
    Have you traveled outside of Europe? Things have... changed dramatically since even like, 2015 in B/C tier cities even in South America. I suggest you travel some more and reevaluate. Somewhere like Medellin or Islamabad in 2022 is almost unrecognizable compared to 2000. The third world you grew up watching in 1980s-era national geographic documentaries is absolutely gone, you have to go way off grid to find something like that now.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
How much money was in 3D TV? Battery powered vehicles will ends up in same bracket as 3DTV. Impractical gimmick.
lowken 4y ago
Toyota has looked at the tea leaves and feels Hydrogen is the future. I think they are correct.
- ikiris 4y ago
  Any other stocks you like we should short? Lots of things could work. The logistics of hydrogen make it laughable as a mass replacement for gasoline as an energy fuel for mass market.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Hydrogen has by far the best subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, though. Funneling money from taxpayers to corporate coffers via government subsidies has proven a winning strategy in many other industries.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Cynically, Hydrogen subsidies today are simple greenwashing of traditional Oil & Gas subsidies and still are benefit the same corporate coffers. Most hydrogen production is a side project of the oil & gas companies and a "by product" of refining operations.
      - nostrademons 4y ago
        I'm pretty cynical by nature, but I don't think that's what's at play here. The IRA's hydrogen production subsidies explicitly don't apply to hydrogen produced from fossil fuels; it has to be from zero-carbon production chains. Moreover, the IRA has upended the economics of the hydrogen market - with the subsidies, electrolyzed hydrogen is now cheaper than methane-derived hydrogen. [1] There's also significant subsidies for hydrogen storage technologies, hydrogen vehicles, and hydrogen fueling stations. Personally I'd take this at face value: the point is that hydrogen has the potential to decarbonize a lot of industrial & transportation uses of fossil fuels, and so it's attempting to build up the necessary technology and infrastructure to make this practical. There are always side effects when you throw massive amounts of money at a problem, so I'd expect some boondoggles, but at least the intent of the law isn't a boondoggle. [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/the-ira-will-accelerate-electrolyzed-hydrogens-future-heres-what-that-me/632925/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/the-ira-will-accelerate-ele...
standardUser 4y ago
"There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B." It's called the Nissan Leaf and it's been available for years!
rtlfe 4y ago
> few drive more than ~25 miles/day I hope a lot of these people (assuming they're not willing to go car-free, which would be ideal) will switch to low-speed electric vehicles. They're much cheaper than standard cars, take up less space, and are far less dangerous to other road users. This one from Polaris is $15k, and there are off brands for much less. https://gem.polaris.com/en-us/e4/ https://gem.polaris.com/en-us/e4/
- rxyz 4y ago
  That polaris is basically a golf cart. Who wants to drive a golf cart on public roads?
newbie2020 4y ago
EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least. If everyone other than Toyota goes completely electric, Toyota is going to be the monopoly automaker in every underdeveloped country and will be laughing all the way to the bank. I’m with the Toyota CEO on this one. If you’ve stepped outside a devolved country for even a few days… I just can’t fathom how all-electric is going to be realistic
- schuke 4y ago
  I can totally imagine underdeveloped countries where you’ll find a lot of: - Used Chinese EVs which costed around 10-15k USD new. - Used and older upmarket EVs. - Low speed and low range EVs that cost around 1-2k USD new.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  In many ways cars are basically a first world item, even today. Go to various urban centres worldwide and you’ll find a majority of other vehicle types.
- legutierr 4y ago
  > EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least. The largest EV market right now is China, and in India and other similar markets battery-swapping auto-rickshaws are increasingly common. EVs in developing markets won't look like EVs in North America and Europe, but that doesn't mean that they won't be massive EV markets.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    EVs have already hit it big in China now for more than a decade in the form of electric bicycles (the cheap kind, not the fancy > $1k ones we want in the west).
  - verisimi 4y ago
    I guess all their coal fueled power stations produce lots of cheap electricity.
supernovae 4y ago
I learned it takes a lot of grid power to extract, ship, process, store and sell gasoline than it takes to just charge an EV… seems that the reduction of demand of fuel would also reduce grid loads.. plus, just charge at night. cheaper rates usually.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  A lot of that electricity is produced by nuclear or burning low grade oil at site and isn't connected to the grid in many regions.
  - neon_electro 4y ago
    What percentage of operations behave this way?
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      No clue. It's by no means unsolvable (simply charging at off peak times should suffice in many areas), but it does remain true that electricity that goes to the oil refinery can't necessarily make it to a house. I'd much rather we let people not drive at all if they want to as a way of reducing the strain, as well as allowing LEVs or small electric cars on the road for the people that don't insist that they need to tow a boat and a caravan up a mountain at 20 over the speed limit 200km away with a pallet of plywood to drop their kids off at school.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
20k? EV drivetrains are so much simpler than ICE. The fact you can buy in some market somewhere a 20k ICE car means in equivalent dollars, a 10k EV car is possible once the tech maturity of sodium ion and components and all that scaling happens. We are so used to EV drivetrains being more expensive, we can't think of the possibility of EVs become so cheap, but I predict they will, and with sodium ion batteries at 140wh/kg coming into production next year, along with 200+ wh/kg LFP and LMFP, it's going to h ppen sooner than I would have guessed only a couple years ago. I will agree with Toyoda that a PHEV has a functional place in the next two decades. They were one of the top PHEV companies so they probably have the platforms already, so may as well use them. But make no mistake the arrival of usable sodium ion to me is the game changer for the mass production EV: the napkin math says that 140wh/kg cell density if it is efficiently packed (90% is current cell-to-pack expected ratio) will make a 200-300 mile car. That's no cobalt, nickel, or lithium. And a city car only needs 150 miles of range for the "second/third world" urban centers in some teeny car. 200 wh/kg (cell) LFP/LMFP should be 300-400+ mile cars. That leaves the cobalt-nickel and whatever comes out of initial solid state into exotics, supercars, and long haul trucking. And if those sulfur batteries papers are legit, that will also be dirt cheap and near-solid state densities. But yeah, I think in ten years a cheapo EV will be 1/2 the cost of what a cheapo ICE will be. We'll know when the Chinese invade the US market. Luxury cars and big cars will still be dominated by equivalent doodads costs, but I think possibly in ten years the industry will hit 50% of ICE drivetrain cost.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Even if EV all-in isn't good for some reason, my criticism for Toyota is that they should encourage PHEV more in earlier.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    The age of PHEV should have been 2005-2020. The dumb shits in regulatory should have seen the Prius/Insight in 1997 and been HOLY SHIT ALL CARS SHOULD HAVE THIS AND BE PLUGINs. And yet... yeah nothing that was the Bush Administration circa 2000, haha. Not happening. Now? Why invest in a brand new comprehensive PHEV platform? All existing ICE platforms are "last hurrahs". Like, holy shit ALL ICE PLATFORMS are dinosaurs. They won't invest in new ones, no way, they need ALLLLL that for EV switchover to stand a small chance of surviving the big paradigm shift. No new engines, no new transmissions, no new gee-whiz ICE tech. The last gasp was Mazda's compression ignited gasoline engine, that's probably it. If the regulatory agencies had said in 2000, "in 10 years all consumer cars will be hybrids, ideally with PHEV hybrids, and ideally in increasing all-electric range capability, and we will deliver a good subsidy and a hefty penalty" and moved the entire industry to PHEV, we'd have had a good decade of ramp-up to hybrid platforms, getting everyone used to home charging, had great gas mileage, had 50-80% of consumer daily trips fully electric, and probably had all electric drivetrain components further down the maturity path. But... we don't. PHEVs probably could still make an impact in the next ten years, but there is no way our nonfunctional congress could get that done. Instead, it is full bore on full EVs and people carrying around 5x-10x more batteries than they need for driving. My idea for that is to offer a city car that has about 100 miles of range, and then an optimized aerodynamics "trailer" that is either a battery or a gas generator that extends the range of the car. You could rent them, swap them at exchange kiosks (fully charged/fueled) at highway truck stops, and bam no recharge issues on the car's main battery. That would be cheap EV cars that maximize battery supply. All you need is a trailer hitch and a special charging port on the rear of the car. That inside-out rotary engine would be perfect for a really long range extender that uses synthfuels or fossil, or for long haul semis. Oh yeah, semis would be perfect for a two-behind booster battery. It could have drive wheels to help stabilize in crosswinds, it could have aero shape to help with the "flying wall" effect of most trailers. The trailers could also do hydrogen, although I still think hydrogen is a trojan horse by the petroleum companies.
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
There are already cheap EVs, the made by Wuling is only $5k, 75 mile range and top speed of 62 MPH.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  And during normal used car markets like the one we had in 2015, one could find a used Nissan Leaf, not even out of warranty yet, for $12k. That’s what I paid for my first car, 26k miles on the odometer. Today you’d be lucky to pay that for a Leaf, and if you do it’ll be far more used with far more battery degradation. That’s not a knock against EVs, it’s a product of the car market we have today.
bko 4y ago
Counter example: electronic medical records. Billions was poured into this and I remember it being a big item in healthcare reform. But im still answering the same questions and filling out the same forms every time I go see a doctor. Generally more money and mandates from top down don't work
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  All of my doctors use Epic, and I do not have to answer the same questions. When my wife gave birth in the local hospital, which also uses Epic, they had all her info from her primary physician and OB. The kids’ pediatricians also has access to information since birth, and my doctor can see the information from my vasectomy that a different doctor in a different practice performed. All the labs are also easily accessed online, and I can easily login to my account and download them all to Apple Health app in my phone.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    That's a symptom of a monopoly, not the promise of EMR, IMO.
brightball 4y ago
IMO the biggest challenge is the rapid recharge (< 5 minutes). You just think of a college football Saturday where 100k people drive in, tailgate all day and then either stay in a hotel or head back the same day. Often coming from 3-4 hours away. It’s simply not realistic for all those vehicles to need to do 45 minutes of charging. When that gets solved, you’ll see rapid adoption.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  Further elaborating on that, I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you need to (even partially) charge 20k cars in 5 minutes. That's about one Tsar Bomba of energy.
  - neon_electro 4y ago
    It’s a red herring. We don’t need to do that.
    - brightball 4y ago
      This problem specifically is why I keep an eye on the Graphene Aluminum Ion battery technology coming from Graphene Manufacturing Group. Graphene has seemed to be the key to rapid charging while maintaining temperatures for over a decade. The challenge was always getting enough usable graphene at low cost without mining.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you need to (even partially) charge 20k cars in 5 minutes. That's about one Tsar Bomba of energy. This is too high by 4 orders of magnitude. 100 kWh is a larger than average battery capacity for a contemporary BEV [1]. That's 2000 MWh for 20,000 vehicles charging from empty (modulo charging inefficiencies). 1 megaton is 4.18 * 10^15 joules or 1,162,000 MWh [2] while the Tsar Bomba had a yield of at least 50 megatons as tested [3]. So charging 20k electric cars from empty requires about 0.003% as much energy as the Tsar Bomba released. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
devwastaken 4y ago
The grip of gasoline and corruption of government is severe enough that it is unlikely EV's will be able to scale to current gas vehicle use. 1. Electric charging will never be standardized. Gas is gas. Until we pass laws saying your electric car cannot have subscriptions or non compatability for charging you will always be stuck with specific types. 1. Gas stations are contracted to sell gas. That contract can say "no electric". The stores make money from gas customers. The drive range of EV's would have to run circles around gas to compete, and if it does, they won't be customers anyways. 2. The vast majority of people cannot charge an ev rapidly, if at all. Parking infra did not take access to electricity into account. I know at universities you have to pay extra, and it's just a normal 15A outlet. 3. Ev companies, especially Tesla, are rent seeking. The average consumer cannot afford it. Packages and subscriptions to your own vehicle are a cyberpunk dystopia. We already cannot properly handle power demands. 100% green initiatives lack on demand scaling, especially in disaster conditions. The base cost of natural gas electric generation means it must take up a chunk of overall power gen.
- mertd 4y ago
  Tesla is the only incompatible brand. All other brands use standard plugs. The standards are different in different regions but that's fine. I'm not driving from California to Japan with my car.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Also, Tesla was mandated to use the (CCS) standard in Europe recently, has voluntarily switched to the standard in Asia, and claims they will voluntarily do it in the US when they've hit certain sales goals/gross margin levels.
- gruturo 4y ago
  >1. Electric charging will never be standardized. Gas is gas. Until we pass laws saying your electric car cannot have subscriptions or non compatability for charging you will always be stuck with specific types. Ehm, it's already standardized, or 90% there, in most of the world. In the US it's basically just Tesla, and they announced they'll also conform. And tbh when they invented their own standard it made sense, it's just no longer necessary. >2. The vast majority of people cannot charge an ev rapidly, if at all. Parking infra did not take access to electricity into account. I know at universities you have to pay extra, and it's just a normal 15A outlet. I need rapid charging along highways but not really in a parking - even the slowest available single-phase charger (apart from using a standard wall plug) gets you 41km range in 1 hour in a model 3. That's not quick, but you're likely parked for at least 2 to 3 hours (university, concert, shopping mall, restaurant, movie theater) - if not overnight/a full work day - so that minimum of 82km is already more than what most people drive in a day. We just need cars to have a decent (350km+) range to start with (range anxiety is a thing, efficiency in winter drops significantly, highway driving consumes more, batteries age and lose about 10% over 8 years) so that missing 2 or 3 charges in a row doesn't ruin anybody's day. >3. Ev companies, especially Tesla, are rent seeking. The average consumer cannot afford it. Packages and subscriptions to your own vehicle are a cyberpunk dystopia. Tesla is indeed very pricey and their promise of 35K dollars was not really met, even though it existed (with some caveats) for some time. But we're starting to see decent (not crippled with a comically small battery) models from other manufacturers and we'll hit the 20k threshold for an OK car very soon if we haven't already done so, and then 15k, and then 10k (maybe not in the western world but I'm sure China and India will manage - with cars which are actually safe and which make their buyers happy). Don't judge the entire market by looking at Tesla. They got there first, we owe them this revolution, but they're no longer alone in this space. But don't judge it by looking at Toyota either, they were asleep at the wheel, completely missed the revolution and are now busy coming up with some bullshit to explain it's best for everyone.
philwelch 4y ago
I really don't see the L here. Plug-in hybrids are essentially more capable EV's, Toyota makes them, and if they bet wrong on EV's, it's not going to be difficult for them to convert production from plug-in hybrids to full EV's. On the other hand, if Toyota is betting right and everyone else is betting wrong, it's going to be a lot harder for other companies once they lose the know-how to make ICE cars or hybrids.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Plug-in hybrids have two power trains you need to service. They are an excellent gateway drug to full EVs, but not the ultimate solution. They're also pretty good for special use vehicles, a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is pretty much the best EV-ish vehicle if you need to tow a bigger load for long distances without shelling out 100k€+. And you can still drive on full electric around the town cheaply.
  - Fradow 4y ago
    Honest question: what are the service intervals like for the ICE part of plug-in hybrids? Considering they are unused most of the time, I'd expect very infrequent maintenance, and even some parts switching from X years to lifetime. Edit: a short Google search [1] shows that for actual cost, plug-in hybrids have the same cost per mile than EVs, which is half the cost of ICE cars. It makes sense to me because batteries are a lot smaller/cheaper, the ICE doesn't get used all that much, and there is regenerative braking. [1] https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids-and-evs-cost-less-to-maintain-and-repair-finds-consumer-reports https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids...
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      Toyota's hybrids are wonderful, dunno about other brands. The Prius engine is a good gateway drug to full EV ownership, you'll learn that the amount you press the accelerator doesn't correlate with the engine RPM at all. The car picks whatever it thinks is efficient to move the car, any extra is stored into the EV system.
astatine 4y ago
EVs = Tesla is probably the biggest misunderstanding many people have. EVs are about the energy source for propulsion and not about the smarts (real or claimed). A car with10 year old features powered by electricity is a perfectly usable vehicle without needing any of the glamorous things that tesla adds.
roamerz 4y ago
There is only a sliver of society that is demanding EV’s. I have a normal amount of friends, hundreds of acquaintances and work associates and guess what? Not one of them is demanding EV’s. The government on the other hand is doing it’s best to lure me with incentives and scare me with high gas prices. So what society are you talking about that is demanding them?
seydor 4y ago
but there is no "enormous demand" for EVs. Some (small) demand is manufactured by huge subsidies. There is also a subset of the upper middle class that does it for environmental/prestige reasons, but that's also small
philshem 4y ago
> There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B. https://ev-database.org/car/1705/Dacia-Spring-Electric https://ev-database.org/car/1705/Dacia-Spring-Electric
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
heh... you talk about >"There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B." but you know? https://tiagoev.tatamotors.com/ https://tiagoev.tatamotors.com/ tata tiago ev is a $10,000 ev that launched a FEW DAYS AGO. Sure it wont have all features of tesla but it is still ncap 5 stars so its not a death box and will be sold hopefully by thousands
ls15 4y ago
While demand for EVs is certainly growing and in some areas a total switch may be already possible, there still is an enormous critical demand for ICEVs in the world. There are areas in the world where people drive long distances by car, but the homes don't have electricity yet. Especially in non-Western countries. Nobody in their right mind would buy an EV there. It may look differently in 10 or 15 years from now, but this is the reality today and this is one of Toyota's markets. They are the maker of the Land Cruiser and the Prius. There is a reason, why the Prius is so wildly popular all over the world. It is capable of driving long distances anywhere, but it saves money at the same time, while it almost never breaks down. Toyota is not ignorant at all. They realize that now is the time for gradually transitioning to EV, but not for making a sudden dogmatic switch to EV, while ignoring what people actually need. The logical outcome of this though process is the hybrid car. And then the plug-in hybrid. And then the EV - at some point in the future.
- Balero 4y ago
  Where in the world do people drive long distances in a car, but don't have electricity? And do many people actually live there? For example the desert might not have power lines, but it doesn't have many people either.
pif 4y ago
Believing that money can change geology, and physics and chemistry laws, is idiotic at best.
lambda_dn 4y ago
Until you can charge from empty to full in under a few mins and get 700+ real range miles EV's will remain a niche product. It's just not worth the hassle of have to plug your car in any chance you get like an old iphone. 2030 is around the year I think they will become an intelligent buy.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Lol who's driving 700+ miles (10+ hours?), taking a few minutes break, then driving another 700+ miles? I mean, I'm sure there are people out there that do that but even semi truck drivers don't drive that much thanks to federal regulations. Even you actually do drive that much, I'm guessing you know people who don't. An EV that gets 300+ miles to the charge and can be charged (at home!) overnight will do just fine for them. Waking up with a "full" "tank" of "gas" every morning really makes you rethink range and range anxiety.
- Balero 4y ago
  700 real range miles? Why are you holding electric cars to a higher standard than most petrol cars? The average car driven realistically (cities, towns, rural roads, and motorways) gets about 300-500 miles from a full tank. Why do electric cars, which you have specified to have to charge in minutes just like petrol cars, need to have double to 50% extra range? More broadly, having to go 700 miles is a niche issue, I don't drive a lorry/flatbed etc. I drive for more than 3 hours maybe two to three times a year. The vast majority of people are in this situation, in the US, in Asia, in Europe, everywhere. Getting 300-400 miles range and charging in 20 minutes is what is needed. The blockers are initial price, and charging infrastructure.
pritambarhate 4y ago
> There will be $20,000 economy EVs Tata Motors launches $10,000 electric car in India to further its lead https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tata-motors-launches-10000-electric-car-india-2022-09-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tata-m... Here is a walk around of the car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RCXDsfVniY&ab_channel=AutocarIndia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RCXDsfVniY&ab_channel=Autoc...
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
There’s huge demand for solutions to problems people have, not huge demand for specific technologies. People don’t want EVs specifically. People want cheap reasonably clean ways to quickly get from point A to point B.
wlecometo 4y ago
> Toyota is just stubbornly refusing to take the L on their 30 years of research into this. I don't blame them, but I'm not them, so I'll call it how it is. no Toyota is just not buying the "all in" bet on EV, and they keep researching on other alternatives such as Mirai with fuel cells; the article is quite clear on that. this imho makes Toyota more reliable than other manufactures who are running at making only SUVs with shitload of batteries just to please the market, greenwashing and not innovating at all.

mhneu 4y ago

Yes, exactly. Toyota is refusing to take the L on this because Toyota is the market leader in gas-electric hybrids and Toyota is not the market leader in EVs. This is business strategy 101.

adventured 4y ago
How to cede an enormous market opportunity to a dozen other competitors 101.
silisili 4y ago
This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film. In fairness, they did catch up decades later...but that's likely at least a couple decades of revenue lost. And never really innovating. If they'd have been more forward thinking, we'd likely see Kodak sensors in every phone today instead of Sony.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Nobody was ready to make use of digital images until computing was enough of a presence in daily life, digital storage was cheap enough, and sensor resolution increased to compete with casual use of film. That wasn't going to happen in the 70s or 80s.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    But the technology wasn't ready when the rest of computers were. Photo CDs were good but sensors were 20 some years later
- samatman 4y ago
  Kodak and Sears are my favorite example of this sort of thing, Kodak not only invented the digital camera, they also had a robust business in the 90s of developing color film onto both prints and a CD. Instead of seeing the writing on the wall, they resisted digital because it cut into both film, and their existing way of getting those pictures onto computers. Sears, after dominating mail-order for a century, marketed Prodigy, a successful early dial-up network. But they were by that point heavily invested in malls, and were beat out as the 21st century's Sear's, Roebuck and Co. by a bookseller.
  - scaredginger 4y ago
    I think the way to look at cases like these is to recognise organisations aren't monoliths, but a mass of individuals each tugging in their own direction. Clearly, there were inventors, progressives and visionaries within these companies that correctly predicted future trends and were trying to steer the ship to capitalise on them, but for some reason, other voices drowned them out.
    - derekp7 4y ago
      And that right there is why a good CEO can make or break a company. They don't have to be experts in everything, but they need to be good enough to tell which of their experts working for them to believe, or to bring in outside expertise when needed.
      - scaredginger 4y ago
        Completely agree. I think the darker side though is that successful individuals must not only have good ideas, but advocate for their ideas effectively. I still haven't figured that one out, personally
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Amazon was never a bookseller. How a company that was focused on their legacy customer relationship system and logistics operations lost out to a company that was focused on building the future of customer relationships and logistics is a lot less difficult to understand.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Companies can't change their DNA any more than an individual organism can. Kodak was right to avoid digital photography - and in fact they probably should have stuck with film a little while longer even if it is niche. The public perceives DNA switches all the time, but that's an illusion generated by a free market and it's ability to plug in new sources of value (and unplug old ones) relatively seamlessly.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    If Kodak were still making film today, hipsters would be all over it just like vinyl records.
    - lytfyre 4y ago
      The remains of Kodak does make film today, albeit in fewer varieties than they once did, and with far less production capacity. Any yes, people are all over it to the point that the most popular varieties can be difficult to find in stock, and prices have climbed significantly from a few years ago.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      There's people now trying to recreate the Polaroid instant film technology and keep it alive. Even when those cameras were current, the pictures they made looked like crap.
    - llampx 4y ago
      Go to any fashionable flea market and you will see old film cameras for sale, usually by a dedicated seller who can also sell you film.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    Yes, a companies DNA can be quite an obstacle to survival in changing markets, but that sounds like a cheap excuse for bad management. The reality is rather: nothing stays forever. All technology markets are in a consistant change and you always have to adapt your company constantly, if you want to survive or even prosper. One good exampel is Apple. They were a computer company which was doing well again after the return of Jobs. Then came the iPod. And revenue exploded. But when the rumors of a phone appeared, a lot of people would comment: no, they won't do that as that would eat into their cash cow iPod. But we know how this ended. They released the iPhone, grew multiple times the size the company was and eventually even stopped making iPods. Back to Kodak: they did invent the digital camera, but at a time it was way too early for being a product. But more importantly, they did bring some important digital cameras to the market in the late 90ies, the first usuable DSLR were Nikon/Canon cameras equipped with Kodak guts. They started the professional digital camera market. Without Kodak, it might have happened years later. And at that moment, when the writing for film was clearly on the wall and they actually had managed to kick start its killer, they dropped the ball. Good management would have seen that they could "protect" film sales only on a per-quarter basis, but it was a dying business. They should have used the billions of cash they still had, to gain a solid foothold in the digital camera business, perhaps even outright bought Nikon, which was limping for a while. Or invest strongly in all the adjacencies of digital imaging, which they did far too late.
- sbcdz 4y ago
  >This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film. There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt. Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)
  - silisili 4y ago
    This is all correct, but kinda shifting timelines. For example, if Kodak had been first to digital, that doesn't mean they'd have had to give up any film at all. And since they were first, they could have set margins where they liked. Whether it would have survived and thrived...who knows. As others have pointed out, computers weren't commonplace back then. Digital cameras did get commoditized, nearly 30 years after Kodak had invented it. So obviously, by today they'd had to have move on. High end sensors, glass, heck even cloud computing, something akin to Google Photos... there's no telling where they could have been if they'd have leaned in early. That said, you point out the sensor market is 15 billion today... and Sony has about half. This is way, way more money than Kodak makes anymore. Today Kodak is at about a billion revenue per year.
- melagonster 4y ago
  they can't do this, their company is a chemical company, changing is almost impossible.
- newbie2020 4y ago
  Toyota is different. They’re also making EVs… they’re just not _only_ making EVs. If EVs really start to take off on their own, Toyota will already have multiple offerings to fill that gap
  - mhneu 4y ago
    Toyota just released their first EV and it was developed in a collaboration with Subaru. https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2021/06/29/at-last-toyota-and-subaru-ready-their-first-electric-vehicles-for-a-2022-launch/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2021/06/29/at-last-to...
    - lastofthemojito 4y ago
      It's not their first EV, there have certainly been others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod But it is the first one where they're aiming for mass adoption.
joshl32532 4y ago
Yeah, why would Toyota want to go all in on EV and lose the ICU/Hybrid market lead that they worked so hard to accomplish? And ICU/Hybrid are still dominating sales worldwide. You see those who go all in EV are usually those brands with not much to lose (like Volvo). It's not like they're not going in EV, they are just doing it at their pace (which is slow typical of Toyota). Tesla already got the first mover advantage. Kia/Hyundai/Ford etc are fighting for second place. The gap between second and the rest won't be as large as Tesla vs second.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Tesla has already lost the lead in sales. BYD (Chinese brand) took over for the lead for Plug-in EV sales this year. Tesla's has decreased over time and will likely continue to decrease. Kia and Ford aren't really in the picture (among top 5 sellers). Volkswagen, SAIC and Volvo are selling more EVs than Hyundai. https://insideevs.com/news/601770/world-top-oem-ev-sales-2022h1/ https://insideevs.com/news/601770/world-top-oem-ev-sales-202...
- w0mbat 4y ago
  > Yeah, why would Toyota want to go all in on EV and lose the ICU/Hybrid market The same reason Apple went all in on the iPhone and dropped their lucrative iPod business. You drive your car on the road that takes you to the next level, not the familiar one that's heading off a cliff.

funstuff007 4y ago

> few drive more than ~25 miles/day Where do you get that stat?

adventured 4y ago
It's more like ~35-40 miles per day in the US (which will tend to be higher than in other countries). "The United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration said that the average driver traveled 12,724 miles in 2020. That’s down from 14,263 average annual miles in 2019. The 2020 average equates to 1,060 miles per month per driver, or about 35 miles per day. By comparison, the DOT said the average annual miles was 13,476 in 2018." https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year/ https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
tzs 4y ago
It sounds plausible at least. The average per year in the US is around 14000 miles according to the FHA, which would be a little under 40 miles per die. I'd expect the distribution of individual amounts driven to be such that the median would be lower than the mean, but a little searching has failed to turn up any details on that distribution.
- funstuff007 4y ago
  > I'd expect the distribution of individual amounts driven to be such that the median would be lower than the mean True, but there can't be that much skew--there's only so many hours in the day.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    I drive 0 5-6 days a week. I also drive 2000 miles to FL and 600 miles to St Louis etc etc. Somehow I put 32k miles in my EV in 2 years despite WFH with no commute
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    There are some people who drive for work (eg. traveling salespeople, rideshare & delivery drivers, most tradespeople) and then there are others that drive to commute to an office for 8 hours. Rideshare & delivery drivers might be on the road for 8+ hours/day, tradespeople & traveling salespeople for 4-5, office workers for 20-60 minutes, with a skew toward the lower end of that. That's a pretty skewed distribution.

missionlocal1 4y ago

$20k is still too expensive of a car for a lot of people in the US, and for most outside the developed world. Toyota is just keeping that population in perspective.

stu2b50 4y ago
That's what the used market is for. You're not getting a new economy sedan for under $20k MSRP in normal times, let alone the weird market right now.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  But 2nd hand ICE cars don’t have to worry about a degraded and very expensive lithium battery and certain models are proven to last a long time. These things may work, but I don’t want to spend the money to be the one that finds out.
  - fshr 4y ago
    > These things may work, but I don’t want to spend the money to be the one that finds out. Then don't? There will be millions of people testing it for you.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    no, instead 2nd hand ice cars have to work about a degraded and very expensive engine. an EV battery is likely to last somewhere around 200000 miles (https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/evs-offer-big-savings-over-traditional-gas-powered-cars/ https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/evs-offer-big-sa...), and over that period require essentially no engine maintenance compared to gas cars which between oil changes, break pad replacement (which EVs avoid due to regenerative), and all the other things that can go wrong with an ICE have an extra roughly 500-700 per year of additional maintenance cost.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      My car should easily last 200K - 250K miles. At least data shows that my model should easily hit those numbers. My yearly maintenance is 250-325USD per year. Occasionally you need to replace the brake pads. And a few other things come up sure. But over 10 years I’m only looking at 5KUSD unless something horrible goes wrong. And I could probably get it cheaper. At my level of fuel consumption I’m looking at another 4K over 10 years. I can’t find an up to date quote, but in Australia, the Tesla 3 years service plan for a rear wheel drive Model 3 was 1.75 times the cost compared to the standard service for my car in 2018. Non Tesla EVs do better. And some are half the price or less than what I pay for annual servicing. But I still have to cough up 3-4 times more money 2nd hand. So potentially a 2nd hand EV based on current prices will start to be cheaper in 8ish years. Not including the loan I’d have to take out to pay for the thing.

rowanG077 4y ago

This is so patently false it's scary. There is an enormous demand for a cure for cancer, dementia, heart disease etc. Yet they haven't even close to materialized. There is an enormous demand for room environment super conductors yet it isn't fixed. It's all sunflowers and rainbows to think like you are thinking but it's just not reality.

yonaguska 4y ago
There is an enormous demand for a cure to cancer, but why should it be pursued over enormously profitable cancer treatments? I'm just being pedantic though, I agree with your point.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
Some of the techno-optimism on this site would get you laughed out of the room in some academic circles.
zdragnar 4y ago
To be fair, most of the problems are not technical but scale. We know how to build stronger grids, and how to produce more electricity, and how to refine lithium. We haven't got a clue what to do about dementia or room temp superconductors or cold fusion. That said, I am also quite a bit more pessimist than OP that we will see a full conversion in the near future. It will be a long, and quite possibly painful, process.
- anikom15 4y ago
  Integrating things at a certain scale is a technical problem.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    It's really more about production than integration. We simply don't have the supply volume or production capacity on hand to rapidly replace existing ICE cars. Things are improving, but overall cost is going to stay high until lithium battery and other costs come down. Then, you have the issue of rolling out updates to grids. There's a variety of options, all well technically understood, and little movement in many areas. California, for example, ought to have buried a lot of its electrical lines. Construction work during droughts seem like a good way to start a wildfire, as is installing new overhead lines.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

I refuse to buy new and my current car cost me $15kAUD. Which is 10KUSD (ignoring supply chain issues for a while). My previous car was an older generation of the same model and lasted over a decade. My current car should too. And upkeep is fairly cheap all things considered. 20K isn’t economy. Half that and make sure the car still runs for over a decade with reasonable maintenance costs.

andrewinardeer 4y ago
Now include the AUD1.80/L fuel costs into the life of that car.
- tenpies 4y ago
  And yet the cost of gas is cheaper than the current electric equivalent in many European locations at this point. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63029226 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63029226
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    where by cheaper you mean slightly more expensive if you compare to public charging stations that are the vast minority of charged miles, and 9x more expensive than charging at home.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Last I checked it was a fair bit easier to put up 4 solar panels and an inverter than build your own oil refinery. $1000AU worth of panels, a $200 charge and a $1500 battery will give you 30km or so a day. Pays off in about 4 years vs $1.80/L even with very optimistic fuel economy. if you park at home then the price halves. If you can put the panels where you park that goes down to 1-2 years.
- alvah 4y ago
  "Now include the AUD1.80/L fuel costs into the life of that car." While remembering, of course, to include AUD0.30-0.60/kwh for charging the EV (or AUD$6-$12/100km for a typical EV).

jrsj 4y ago

It might happen but it might not happen as quickly as they would like. Recent geopolitical issues have substatically harmed supply chains for EVs. There's a reason Tesla has abandoned their plans for a mass market vehicle and are instead sticking in the $40k+ vehicle business. Many of Toyotas competitors have de-emphasized investments in their ICE products to pursue EVs that they can't produce in large enough volumes for longer than anticipated. Toyotas strategy is going to work well at least in the mid term.

ip26 4y ago
Tesla gave up on the mass market vehicle because they can sell every Y and 3 they make. That has been going on since before the supply disruptions.
- dangrossman 4y ago
  They weren't making very many of them before the supply disruptions. They made and sold a total of just 367,500 cars globally in 2019. Toyota does that every two months in just North America. Today, Tesla announced a miss versus forecasted sales/deliveries last quarter, and lowered their forecast going forward.
  - ip26 4y ago
    The point is, Tesla choosing not to pursue the mass market is no reflection on how viable that market is. At Tesla volume, they are better off devoting their production capacity to the upmarket. The upmarket has better margins, so you sell there until you saturate demand.
    - KerrAvon 4y ago
      - recursive 4y ago
        I mean, that's true. But there's nothing to excuse here.

Ferret7446 4y ago

>There will be $20,000 economy EVs The mindset of the group of people that think $20,000 is economy (and that it "will" definitely get done) reflects everything that is wrong with a lot of recent ESG propaganda and policies. That is, ignorance of the state of most of the world outside of rich, first class bubbles.

Denvercoder9 4y ago
New ICE cars are also $20K these days. That's also unaffordable for a lot of people, but they don't buy new cars.
- bluedays 4y ago
  The problem is that EV cars have a finite lifespan on the most expensive component of the car... the battery. It is not modular despite being composed of several individual cells, and often you are not allowed to work on it yourself. Once the battery is dead that's it. You either pay 3k or bust.
  - eropple 4y ago
    This is true, but an EV that needs a battery swap is still carrying along a ton of mechanics that, compared to an ICE vehicle, are likely to be in generally better condition. People used to do powertrain replacements on used cars, after all. (Maybe still do? The used cars I see are generally in better mechanical shape these days.)
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    3k? That’s a Prius salvage battery. EV batteries won’t get replaced in 20k cars anymore than engines are. You total it out at that point.
    - admax88qqq 4y ago
      Engine replacements are complicated. Many specific parts. Battery replacements may be much easier to complete.

Gatsky 4y ago

I think you are ignoring an important part of this question, which is what is going to happen in India and Northern Africa, where most of the population growth will take place over the next 50 years. I don't think these countries can afford an 'economy' EV, or widespread infrastructure to support them, certainly not in the near term. India is certainly making some encouraging moves [1], but your comment seems quite too optimistic and Western-centric. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58977080 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58977080

ajross 4y ago
These places aren't buying new cars at all, though. Nor do they have the "infrastructure" (paved, lighted and signaled road networks are not cheap!) to support a passenger car network like we have in the west either. They are getting by on used/surplus vehicles and lots of spotty access already, and nothing about an EV would do anything but help that process. Electrical grids are much (much) cheaper than fuel distribution in total, and even more so in remote areas.
- Yeahsureok 4y ago
  > These places aren't buying new cars at all, though. India ranks 4th worldwide for new car sales and will likely take 3rd place in a year or two.
  - ajross 4y ago
    The subject was rural India lacking the infrastructure for EVs, which was a ridiculous point. Obviously there's a market for EV's in Bangalore and Delhi, that's not really much of a discussion. The upthread commenter (who I think is the one you're arguing with, not me) seemed to want to have a carve-out for "EV's can't succeed because of undeveloped regions".
- hadlock 4y ago
  Have you traveled outside of Europe? Things have... changed dramatically since even like, 2015 in B/C tier cities even in South America. I suggest you travel some more and reevaluate. Somewhere like Medellin or Islamabad in 2022 is almost unrecognizable compared to 2000. The third world you grew up watching in 1980s-era national geographic documentaries is absolutely gone, you have to go way off grid to find something like that now.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

How much money was in 3D TV? Battery powered vehicles will ends up in same bracket as 3DTV. Impractical gimmick.

lowken 4y ago

Toyota has looked at the tea leaves and feels Hydrogen is the future. I think they are correct.

ikiris 4y ago
Any other stocks you like we should short? Lots of things could work. The logistics of hydrogen make it laughable as a mass replacement for gasoline as an energy fuel for mass market.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Hydrogen has by far the best subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, though. Funneling money from taxpayers to corporate coffers via government subsidies has proven a winning strategy in many other industries.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Cynically, Hydrogen subsidies today are simple greenwashing of traditional Oil & Gas subsidies and still are benefit the same corporate coffers. Most hydrogen production is a side project of the oil & gas companies and a "by product" of refining operations.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      I'm pretty cynical by nature, but I don't think that's what's at play here. The IRA's hydrogen production subsidies explicitly don't apply to hydrogen produced from fossil fuels; it has to be from zero-carbon production chains. Moreover, the IRA has upended the economics of the hydrogen market - with the subsidies, electrolyzed hydrogen is now cheaper than methane-derived hydrogen. [1] There's also significant subsidies for hydrogen storage technologies, hydrogen vehicles, and hydrogen fueling stations. Personally I'd take this at face value: the point is that hydrogen has the potential to decarbonize a lot of industrial & transportation uses of fossil fuels, and so it's attempting to build up the necessary technology and infrastructure to make this practical. There are always side effects when you throw massive amounts of money at a problem, so I'd expect some boondoggles, but at least the intent of the law isn't a boondoggle. [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/the-ira-will-accelerate-electrolyzed-hydrogens-future-heres-what-that-me/632925/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/the-ira-will-accelerate-ele...

standardUser 4y ago

"There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B." It's called the Nissan Leaf and it's been available for years!

rtlfe 4y ago

> few drive more than ~25 miles/day I hope a lot of these people (assuming they're not willing to go car-free, which would be ideal) will switch to low-speed electric vehicles. They're much cheaper than standard cars, take up less space, and are far less dangerous to other road users. This one from Polaris is $15k, and there are off brands for much less. https://gem.polaris.com/en-us/e4/ https://gem.polaris.com/en-us/e4/

rxyz 4y ago
That polaris is basically a golf cart. Who wants to drive a golf cart on public roads?

newbie2020 4y ago

EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least. If everyone other than Toyota goes completely electric, Toyota is going to be the monopoly automaker in every underdeveloped country and will be laughing all the way to the bank. I’m with the Toyota CEO on this one. If you’ve stepped outside a devolved country for even a few days… I just can’t fathom how all-electric is going to be realistic

schuke 4y ago
I can totally imagine underdeveloped countries where you’ll find a lot of: - Used Chinese EVs which costed around 10-15k USD new. - Used and older upmarket EVs. - Low speed and low range EVs that cost around 1-2k USD new.
Waterluvian 4y ago
In many ways cars are basically a first world item, even today. Go to various urban centres worldwide and you’ll find a majority of other vehicle types.
legutierr 4y ago
> EVs are definitely going to remain a first-world item for my lifetime at least. The largest EV market right now is China, and in India and other similar markets battery-swapping auto-rickshaws are increasingly common. EVs in developing markets won't look like EVs in North America and Europe, but that doesn't mean that they won't be massive EV markets.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  EVs have already hit it big in China now for more than a decade in the form of electric bicycles (the cheap kind, not the fancy > $1k ones we want in the west).
- verisimi 4y ago
  I guess all their coal fueled power stations produce lots of cheap electricity.

supernovae 4y ago

I learned it takes a lot of grid power to extract, ship, process, store and sell gasoline than it takes to just charge an EV… seems that the reduction of demand of fuel would also reduce grid loads.. plus, just charge at night. cheaper rates usually.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
A lot of that electricity is produced by nuclear or burning low grade oil at site and isn't connected to the grid in many regions.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  What percentage of operations behave this way?
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    No clue. It's by no means unsolvable (simply charging at off peak times should suffice in many areas), but it does remain true that electricity that goes to the oil refinery can't necessarily make it to a house. I'd much rather we let people not drive at all if they want to as a way of reducing the strain, as well as allowing LEVs or small electric cars on the road for the people that don't insist that they need to tow a boat and a caravan up a mountain at 20 over the speed limit 200km away with a pallet of plywood to drop their kids off at school.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

20k? EV drivetrains are so much simpler than ICE. The fact you can buy in some market somewhere a 20k ICE car means in equivalent dollars, a 10k EV car is possible once the tech maturity of sodium ion and components and all that scaling happens. We are so used to EV drivetrains being more expensive, we can't think of the possibility of EVs become so cheap, but I predict they will, and with sodium ion batteries at 140wh/kg coming into production next year, along with 200+ wh/kg LFP and LMFP, it's going to h ppen sooner than I would have guessed only a couple years ago. I will agree with Toyoda that a PHEV has a functional place in the next two decades. They were one of the top PHEV companies so they probably have the platforms already, so may as well use them. But make no mistake the arrival of usable sodium ion to me is the game changer for the mass production EV: the napkin math says that 140wh/kg cell density if it is efficiently packed (90% is current cell-to-pack expected ratio) will make a 200-300 mile car. That's no cobalt, nickel, or lithium. And a city car only needs 150 miles of range for the "second/third world" urban centers in some teeny car. 200 wh/kg (cell) LFP/LMFP should be 300-400+ mile cars. That leaves the cobalt-nickel and whatever comes out of initial solid state into exotics, supercars, and long haul trucking. And if those sulfur batteries papers are legit, that will also be dirt cheap and near-solid state densities. But yeah, I think in ten years a cheapo EV will be 1/2 the cost of what a cheapo ICE will be. We'll know when the Chinese invade the US market. Luxury cars and big cars will still be dominated by equivalent doodads costs, but I think possibly in ten years the industry will hit 50% of ICE drivetrain cost.

fomine3 4y ago
Even if EV all-in isn't good for some reason, my criticism for Toyota is that they should encourage PHEV more in earlier.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  The age of PHEV should have been 2005-2020. The dumb shits in regulatory should have seen the Prius/Insight in 1997 and been HOLY SHIT ALL CARS SHOULD HAVE THIS AND BE PLUGINs. And yet... yeah nothing that was the Bush Administration circa 2000, haha. Not happening. Now? Why invest in a brand new comprehensive PHEV platform? All existing ICE platforms are "last hurrahs". Like, holy shit ALL ICE PLATFORMS are dinosaurs. They won't invest in new ones, no way, they need ALLLLL that for EV switchover to stand a small chance of surviving the big paradigm shift. No new engines, no new transmissions, no new gee-whiz ICE tech. The last gasp was Mazda's compression ignited gasoline engine, that's probably it. If the regulatory agencies had said in 2000, "in 10 years all consumer cars will be hybrids, ideally with PHEV hybrids, and ideally in increasing all-electric range capability, and we will deliver a good subsidy and a hefty penalty" and moved the entire industry to PHEV, we'd have had a good decade of ramp-up to hybrid platforms, getting everyone used to home charging, had great gas mileage, had 50-80% of consumer daily trips fully electric, and probably had all electric drivetrain components further down the maturity path. But... we don't. PHEVs probably could still make an impact in the next ten years, but there is no way our nonfunctional congress could get that done. Instead, it is full bore on full EVs and people carrying around 5x-10x more batteries than they need for driving. My idea for that is to offer a city car that has about 100 miles of range, and then an optimized aerodynamics "trailer" that is either a battery or a gas generator that extends the range of the car. You could rent them, swap them at exchange kiosks (fully charged/fueled) at highway truck stops, and bam no recharge issues on the car's main battery. That would be cheap EV cars that maximize battery supply. All you need is a trailer hitch and a special charging port on the rear of the car. That inside-out rotary engine would be perfect for a really long range extender that uses synthfuels or fossil, or for long haul semis. Oh yeah, semis would be perfect for a two-behind booster battery. It could have drive wheels to help stabilize in crosswinds, it could have aero shape to help with the "flying wall" effect of most trailers. The trailers could also do hydrogen, although I still think hydrogen is a trojan horse by the petroleum companies.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

There are already cheap EVs, the made by Wuling is only $5k, 75 mile range and top speed of 62 MPH.

neon_electro 4y ago
And during normal used car markets like the one we had in 2015, one could find a used Nissan Leaf, not even out of warranty yet, for $12k. That’s what I paid for my first car, 26k miles on the odometer. Today you’d be lucky to pay that for a Leaf, and if you do it’ll be far more used with far more battery degradation. That’s not a knock against EVs, it’s a product of the car market we have today.

bko 4y ago

Counter example: electronic medical records. Billions was poured into this and I remember it being a big item in healthcare reform. But im still answering the same questions and filling out the same forms every time I go see a doctor. Generally more money and mandates from top down don't work

lotsofpulp 4y ago
All of my doctors use Epic, and I do not have to answer the same questions. When my wife gave birth in the local hospital, which also uses Epic, they had all her info from her primary physician and OB. The kids’ pediatricians also has access to information since birth, and my doctor can see the information from my vasectomy that a different doctor in a different practice performed. All the labs are also easily accessed online, and I can easily login to my account and download them all to Apple Health app in my phone.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  That's a symptom of a monopoly, not the promise of EMR, IMO.

brightball 4y ago

IMO the biggest challenge is the rapid recharge (< 5 minutes). You just think of a college football Saturday where 100k people drive in, tailgate all day and then either stay in a hotel or head back the same day. Often coming from 3-4 hours away. It’s simply not realistic for all those vehicles to need to do 45 minutes of charging. When that gets solved, you’ll see rapid adoption.

moralestapia 4y ago
Further elaborating on that, I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you need to (even partially) charge 20k cars in 5 minutes. That's about one Tsar Bomba of energy.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  It’s a red herring. We don’t need to do that.
  - brightball 4y ago
    This problem specifically is why I keep an eye on the Graphene Aluminum Ion battery technology coming from Graphene Manufacturing Group. Graphene has seemed to be the key to rapid charging while maintaining temperatures for over a decade. The challenge was always getting enough usable graphene at low cost without mining.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  I'd like to see what kind of electrical infra you need to (even partially) charge 20k cars in 5 minutes. That's about one Tsar Bomba of energy. This is too high by 4 orders of magnitude. 100 kWh is a larger than average battery capacity for a contemporary BEV [1]. That's 2000 MWh for 20,000 vehicles charging from empty (modulo charging inefficiencies). 1 megaton is 4.18 * 10^15 joules or 1,162,000 MWh [2] while the Tsar Bomba had a yield of at least 50 megatons as tested [3]. So charging 20k electric cars from empty requires about 0.003% as much energy as the Tsar Bomba released. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

devwastaken 4y ago

The grip of gasoline and corruption of government is severe enough that it is unlikely EV's will be able to scale to current gas vehicle use. 1. Electric charging will never be standardized. Gas is gas. Until we pass laws saying your electric car cannot have subscriptions or non compatability for charging you will always be stuck with specific types. 1. Gas stations are contracted to sell gas. That contract can say "no electric". The stores make money from gas customers. The drive range of EV's would have to run circles around gas to compete, and if it does, they won't be customers anyways. 2. The vast majority of people cannot charge an ev rapidly, if at all. Parking infra did not take access to electricity into account. I know at universities you have to pay extra, and it's just a normal 15A outlet. 3. Ev companies, especially Tesla, are rent seeking. The average consumer cannot afford it. Packages and subscriptions to your own vehicle are a cyberpunk dystopia. We already cannot properly handle power demands. 100% green initiatives lack on demand scaling, especially in disaster conditions. The base cost of natural gas electric generation means it must take up a chunk of overall power gen.

mertd 4y ago
Tesla is the only incompatible brand. All other brands use standard plugs. The standards are different in different regions but that's fine. I'm not driving from California to Japan with my car.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Also, Tesla was mandated to use the (CCS) standard in Europe recently, has voluntarily switched to the standard in Asia, and claims they will voluntarily do it in the US when they've hit certain sales goals/gross margin levels.
gruturo 4y ago
>1. Electric charging will never be standardized. Gas is gas. Until we pass laws saying your electric car cannot have subscriptions or non compatability for charging you will always be stuck with specific types. Ehm, it's already standardized, or 90% there, in most of the world. In the US it's basically just Tesla, and they announced they'll also conform. And tbh when they invented their own standard it made sense, it's just no longer necessary. >2. The vast majority of people cannot charge an ev rapidly, if at all. Parking infra did not take access to electricity into account. I know at universities you have to pay extra, and it's just a normal 15A outlet. I need rapid charging along highways but not really in a parking - even the slowest available single-phase charger (apart from using a standard wall plug) gets you 41km range in 1 hour in a model 3. That's not quick, but you're likely parked for at least 2 to 3 hours (university, concert, shopping mall, restaurant, movie theater) - if not overnight/a full work day - so that minimum of 82km is already more than what most people drive in a day. We just need cars to have a decent (350km+) range to start with (range anxiety is a thing, efficiency in winter drops significantly, highway driving consumes more, batteries age and lose about 10% over 8 years) so that missing 2 or 3 charges in a row doesn't ruin anybody's day. >3. Ev companies, especially Tesla, are rent seeking. The average consumer cannot afford it. Packages and subscriptions to your own vehicle are a cyberpunk dystopia. Tesla is indeed very pricey and their promise of 35K dollars was not really met, even though it existed (with some caveats) for some time. But we're starting to see decent (not crippled with a comically small battery) models from other manufacturers and we'll hit the 20k threshold for an OK car very soon if we haven't already done so, and then 15k, and then 10k (maybe not in the western world but I'm sure China and India will manage - with cars which are actually safe and which make their buyers happy). Don't judge the entire market by looking at Tesla. They got there first, we owe them this revolution, but they're no longer alone in this space. But don't judge it by looking at Toyota either, they were asleep at the wheel, completely missed the revolution and are now busy coming up with some bullshit to explain it's best for everyone.

philwelch 4y ago

I really don't see the L here. Plug-in hybrids are essentially more capable EV's, Toyota makes them, and if they bet wrong on EV's, it's not going to be difficult for them to convert production from plug-in hybrids to full EV's. On the other hand, if Toyota is betting right and everyone else is betting wrong, it's going to be a lot harder for other companies once they lose the know-how to make ICE cars or hybrids.

theshrike79 4y ago
Plug-in hybrids have two power trains you need to service. They are an excellent gateway drug to full EVs, but not the ultimate solution. They're also pretty good for special use vehicles, a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is pretty much the best EV-ish vehicle if you need to tow a bigger load for long distances without shelling out 100k€+. And you can still drive on full electric around the town cheaply.
- Fradow 4y ago
  Honest question: what are the service intervals like for the ICE part of plug-in hybrids? Considering they are unused most of the time, I'd expect very infrequent maintenance, and even some parts switching from X years to lifetime. Edit: a short Google search [1] shows that for actual cost, plug-in hybrids have the same cost per mile than EVs, which is half the cost of ICE cars. It makes sense to me because batteries are a lot smaller/cheaper, the ICE doesn't get used all that much, and there is regenerative braking. [1] https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids-and-evs-cost-less-to-maintain-and-repair-finds-consumer-reports https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids...
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Toyota's hybrids are wonderful, dunno about other brands. The Prius engine is a good gateway drug to full EV ownership, you'll learn that the amount you press the accelerator doesn't correlate with the engine RPM at all. The car picks whatever it thinks is efficient to move the car, any extra is stored into the EV system.

astatine 4y ago

EVs = Tesla is probably the biggest misunderstanding many people have. EVs are about the energy source for propulsion and not about the smarts (real or claimed). A car with10 year old features powered by electricity is a perfectly usable vehicle without needing any of the glamorous things that tesla adds.

roamerz 4y ago

There is only a sliver of society that is demanding EV’s. I have a normal amount of friends, hundreds of acquaintances and work associates and guess what? Not one of them is demanding EV’s. The government on the other hand is doing it’s best to lure me with incentives and scare me with high gas prices. So what society are you talking about that is demanding them?

seydor 4y ago

but there is no "enormous demand" for EVs. Some (small) demand is manufactured by huge subsidies. There is also a subset of the upper middle class that does it for environmental/prestige reasons, but that's also small

philshem 4y ago

> There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B. https://ev-database.org/car/1705/Dacia-Spring-Electric https://ev-database.org/car/1705/Dacia-Spring-Electric

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

heh... you talk about >"There will be $20,000 economy EVs with crappy everything but still go A to B." but you know? https://tiagoev.tatamotors.com/ https://tiagoev.tatamotors.com/ tata tiago ev is a $10,000 ev that launched a FEW DAYS AGO. Sure it wont have all features of tesla but it is still ncap 5 stars so its not a death box and will be sold hopefully by thousands

ls15 4y ago

While demand for EVs is certainly growing and in some areas a total switch may be already possible, there still is an enormous critical demand for ICEVs in the world. There are areas in the world where people drive long distances by car, but the homes don't have electricity yet. Especially in non-Western countries. Nobody in their right mind would buy an EV there. It may look differently in 10 or 15 years from now, but this is the reality today and this is one of Toyota's markets. They are the maker of the Land Cruiser and the Prius. There is a reason, why the Prius is so wildly popular all over the world. It is capable of driving long distances anywhere, but it saves money at the same time, while it almost never breaks down. Toyota is not ignorant at all. They realize that now is the time for gradually transitioning to EV, but not for making a sudden dogmatic switch to EV, while ignoring what people actually need. The logical outcome of this though process is the hybrid car. And then the plug-in hybrid. And then the EV - at some point in the future.

Balero 4y ago
Where in the world do people drive long distances in a car, but don't have electricity? And do many people actually live there? For example the desert might not have power lines, but it doesn't have many people either.

pif 4y ago

Believing that money can change geology, and physics and chemistry laws, is idiotic at best.

lambda_dn 4y ago

Until you can charge from empty to full in under a few mins and get 700+ real range miles EV's will remain a niche product. It's just not worth the hassle of have to plug your car in any chance you get like an old iphone. 2030 is around the year I think they will become an intelligent buy.

fragmede 4y ago
Lol who's driving 700+ miles (10+ hours?), taking a few minutes break, then driving another 700+ miles? I mean, I'm sure there are people out there that do that but even semi truck drivers don't drive that much thanks to federal regulations. Even you actually do drive that much, I'm guessing you know people who don't. An EV that gets 300+ miles to the charge and can be charged (at home!) overnight will do just fine for them. Waking up with a "full" "tank" of "gas" every morning really makes you rethink range and range anxiety.
Balero 4y ago
700 real range miles? Why are you holding electric cars to a higher standard than most petrol cars? The average car driven realistically (cities, towns, rural roads, and motorways) gets about 300-500 miles from a full tank. Why do electric cars, which you have specified to have to charge in minutes just like petrol cars, need to have double to 50% extra range? More broadly, having to go 700 miles is a niche issue, I don't drive a lorry/flatbed etc. I drive for more than 3 hours maybe two to three times a year. The vast majority of people are in this situation, in the US, in Asia, in Europe, everywhere. Getting 300-400 miles range and charging in 20 minutes is what is needed. The blockers are initial price, and charging infrastructure.

pritambarhate 4y ago

> There will be $20,000 economy EVs Tata Motors launches $10,000 electric car in India to further its lead https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tata-motors-launches-10000-electric-car-india-2022-09-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tata-m... Here is a walk around of the car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RCXDsfVniY&ab_channel=AutocarIndia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RCXDsfVniY&ab_channel=Autoc...

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

There’s huge demand for solutions to problems people have, not huge demand for specific technologies. People don’t want EVs specifically. People want cheap reasonably clean ways to quickly get from point A to point B.

wlecometo 4y ago

> Toyota is just stubbornly refusing to take the L on their 30 years of research into this. I don't blame them, but I'm not them, so I'll call it how it is. no Toyota is just not buying the "all in" bet on EV, and they keep researching on other alternatives such as Mirai with fuel cells; the article is quite clear on that. this imho makes Toyota more reliable than other manufactures who are running at making only SUVs with shitload of batteries just to please the market, greenwashing and not innovating at all.