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I wouldn’t either as the global leader. Car sales are brisk and majority of Toyotas lineup have hybrid that can meet mpg goals and keep their dealership network happy.
Investing heavily into EV means they will suffer heavy losses going into EV as a high volume mfg.
Both GM and Ford are losing millions to sell a a small EV lineup. The battery pack would cost more than the sum of other parts and sell the car at loss.
It's interesting to think that a hybrid can be cheaper to build and/or more profitable than a seemingly more simple electric-only vehicle would be.
If this is indeed true, I agree with Toyota's plan. If batteries ever do get cheap enough to make electric vehicles more profitable, it should be easy enough for them to jump onto the bandwagon.
It might be just as likely that batteries could become even more expensive though, due to the rare and precious materials that they are made out of.
Perhaps Toyota knows something. I guess we will see.
The batteries used in hybrid vehicles are less powerful and lighter than the larger EV batteries. A hybrid vehicle does not have a very long drive range on battery power alone, but the smaller battery does not weigh as much as the larger ones used in EV's. This allows for pairing a small engine to it that does not consume a lot of fuel, which in turn increases the drive range. Batteries are quite heavy.
What I don’t get is how dealerships will continue to profit without salesmen getting what they can, and without all of the maintenance an ICE vehicle needs and the business from that need. They must have a plan to compensate for the dealers.
Old news. The issue really is that Toyota is spending $35 billion on development of 30 new EVs that were supposed to be powered by a new Solid State Battery they were developing. But those batteries have proven difficult to get into production, and more costly than they originally said. So they could only be done in smaller sizes, suitable for hybrids.
I don't think the Toyota view is entirely unreasonable... to me it's debatable, what is the right strategy. And while it looks very impressive for the Toyota exec to stand between all those EV prototypes, from my perspective, it's not about how many new models. They don't need 20 new EVs within 3 years. What they *do* need, in my opinion, is just 3 *excellent* EVs within 3 years - that are very competitive in features, price and performance. At least for the Everyman segment that is Toyota's traditional market, they need to at least try to set the standard for all other brands with the value/cost offering to the customer.
You can always add more variants, the thing is to work on actually developing great fundamentals - a great EV platform, so you learn *how* to do things very well and you establish your brand in the marketplace as having something great to offer, and begin taking real-world feedback from the copious sales of your great EVs. They didn't do that in their first pass - instead they developed plans to roll out an entire herd of middling EV models that wouldn't excite customers - bad plan.
Last edited by OutdoorLover; 12-20-2022 at 08:21 AM..
This is a reiteration of what he's said in the past and at this point, it's probably the best thing for them to continue to say this while internally moving a lot more resources towards developing and improving their EVs which they have done increasingly more of in the last couple of years as they realize they are not in a good position. As pointed out earlier in the thread, Toyota's already revised and upped its plans even just in the beginning of this year and then again this fall, and now reportedly talking about doing so again come early next year with each of these including successively greater EV investments. This kind of rapid adjustments of longer-term planning is pretty good proof that at least internally they understand they are behind.
However, externally, because their offerings in the recent past and currently are somewhat behind the competition and it takes time to develop EV technologies, secure necessary supplies, and put them into production, it's probably best for them to at least outwardly maintain that EVs are not a primary focus since they have so little to sale and what they do have is for the most part not very strong offerings. You can see that with their e-TNGA platform underpinning the Toyota bZ4X which has had a fairly rocky start and arguably somewhat below average specs for the price compared to the competition, or their work in China like the very poorly received electric CH-R that's in a market segment that Chinese buyers have been flocking to, but has such mediocre specs for the price that it charts almost no sales despite the massive boon in EV sales in China over the last couple of years. Likely a large concern for them is the amount of resources they've placed in Southeast Asia market expansion, but that looks likely to be quickly eroded as more Chinese automakers as well as the South Korean automakers steadily increase their presence and increasingly with smaller, affordable EVs with which Toyota is unable to compete and will unlikely be able to field something competitive for at least the near future.
Overall, I think a reasonable take on this is that given the number of automakers, including ones outside the US, that are pretty well prepared for selling EVs in the market, the more accurate statement is that Toyota specifically is relatively unprepared for at least the new few years rather than saying EVs aren't ready or that there is limited demand in the market as that limited demand varies a lot from automaker to automaker. Thus far, it appears it's more about supply side issues where the pipeline for making EVs is having a tough time keeping up with demand.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 12-20-2022 at 10:09 AM..
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