I'm talking about falling far behind competitors in EVs. Which they have. EVs are the cars of the future, and they're flailing around wasting time on hydrogen instead.

Hydrogen fueled cars are also electric. They are not that far.

No way. Hydrogen cars are chemical. The trickiest part about an EV is the battery pack, and hydrogen cars don't have 'em. Plus all that investment into hydrogen fuel cells is 100% non-transferrable.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicles have a large battery, larger than the ones in a Prius.

The Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle has a small battery, only 1.2 kWh.

https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2023/features/

And story has it the small battery is the reason for the pathetic performance. (9.1 seconds 0-60 speed, which is minivan levels).

The fuel cell can't produce electricity fast enough to power the engines for proper acceleration and the battery doesn't have enough buffer.

The Honda Odyssey minivan can run 0-60 mph in under 7 seconds. So I guess the Mirai is worse than a minivan. But maybe good enough for a city car.

This is totally incorrect. A fuel cell is a type of electrochemical cell. A fuel cell car has an electric motor just like a conventional EV. We often use the terms “BEV” and “FCEV” to differentiate them.

> Hydrogen cars are chemical.

FCEVs are chemical in the same sense that BEVs are, because a “fuel cell” is, like a battery cell, an electrochemical cell.

The only real difference is that the “fuel” and “waste” are inside a battery, but come from and go to the outside in a fuel cell, which means that an FCEV can be fueled (and exhausts) like an combustion engine vehcile, despite being fully electric.

Yes, thank you, that was the distinction I was trying to get at, not quite using the right terms.

> Hydrogen cars are chemical

So are batteries too

Toyota has had the Prius (and other hybrid) models for a long time so they have competency in building electric motor plus battery pack powered vehicles. I don't think its going to take a long time to get full EV's coming from Toyota. EV's don't need any futuristic design or gimmicky features either so don't waste time trying to innovate there. Get a Corolla out that has a 200-250mi range with decent ways to manage/monitor power and they will likely outsell others.

> I don't think its going to take a long time to get full EV's coming from Toyota.

They're already a decade behind where they could've been. The main problem is not that it won't take them long to start, but that it's been so damn long already and they've wasted all that time and haven't even started in earnest yet. Market share takes time to earn and they've given competitors a huge lead for no real reason at all beyond their absurd fixation on hydrogen.

I guess I disagree about being a decade behind and them needing to "start". I'll agree that they are behind. If they take their current car designs and adapt them for 4 electric motors + larger battery pack and discard ICE then they might not be very far off time wise. Its not like they need to come up with electric motors or battery designs, those are mostly just solved problems. Supply chain of battery components is likely the critical path. Toyota shares many designs, parts, etc. across platforms so I think its less work than "starting" from a blank slate as you may intend.

I think Toyota is making a Solid-State Battery too, and putting millions into it. This means it won't ever explode, is what I gathered when I read about it.

Their bz4x shows har far behind they are (not to mention wheels that fall off)

"If you ignore the parts of the business that are far behind, they're not far behind"

My speculative hot take on the reason that Toyota did not jump on the EV bandwagon and stuck with PHEV/Hydrogen is that much of it's operations are financed indirectly via low cost Japanese bank loans encouraged by Japanese government. These loans probably have an underlying perhaps unspoken component which nudges them toward business models which employ Japanese workers.

The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely would face a difficult time getting financing to build an EV charger network in foreign countries.

Hydrogen fuel theoretically would just be an adaption of the existing petrol gas station infrastructure so the existing players/gas station networks would just need to switch over.

Now that ElectrifyAmerica is more "a thing", Toyota can start shifting strategies.

VW and US car brands could move faster since they were required (VW) and had government support (US car brands) to finance the US EV network. The Korean autos switched earlier as they were probably more hungry than the Japanese incumbents.

There's also the game theoretical play that being the only major petrol based auto producer could lead to pricing power if the transition takes longer than expected.

While this is a common refrain, as driver on my 3rd EV “charging network needed” a bad, bad misunderstanding propagated by people who dont drive EVs.

I charge my EV at home. I’ve charged my EV on someone elses charge (because i needed it, not because I got a better parking space) maybe twice since i moved to an EV with a 180 mile range. Heck, even with my “first gen” EV with a 63 mile range, I charged at home 95ish percent of the time, and those days are behind us now.

$2k to run a 240v external outlet, $500 for a charge station, and you’re set. Apartment dwellers still have issues, but thats simply because govmt/demand hasnt insisted yet.

> The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries.

This could be solved today by using Tesla's Supercharging network, or at least their NACS[0] connector in the North American market. I know that auto makers don't want to rely on each other for _reasons_ but siding with Tesla would give them an instant charging network and completely solve the problem in one go.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...

Interesting - yes going forward now that they seem committed to EV. That would be a pretty unique partnership - and require a lot of trust on the part of Toyota.

I think of a car company- except tesla - to be like a massive container ship or similar

Think Titanic

I think most car companies underestimated how easy it would be to 'go electric'

Let's see how many power players inside Toyota try to drag down the company to try to salvage some dignity of the hydrogen guy