> It's a shame __________ didn't lean harder into EVs
Nissan seems to be scaling back their EV push in the US, though — but not in Europe, as far as I know.
Nissan is also making EVs for the Chinese market, which are not being exported anywhere else.
I'm not sure where they think the market for this exists in sustainable numbers.
It is genuinely insane how divorced SV is from actual people and reality.
And that SLS launched first isn't surprising it started to get 2 billion $ a year funding long before SpaceX had any money to invest in such projects.
And what matters for a rocket isn't 'first to orbit' that's only how idiots compare rockets. What matters is first 10 or even 100 flights.
And as for R&D, fine do R&D, but you still have to produce what actually sells. The simple fact is, hydrogen cars, either fuel cell or ICE are rounding errors. They have been rounding errors for decades and have made essentially no progress despite 50+ years of continuous government funding and R&D.
They are not just doing R&D, they have literally spend marketing money demonizing EVs. They have encouraged and leaned in to all government lead efforts to delay the EV industry. They have lobbied for regressive legislation. To act as if 'all they do is some nice R&D' is pathetic.
Toyota has not done like Tesla and invested in infrastructure, like hydrogen fuel stations. Because they know this is delusional and will never happen. Their hope has always been that government is going to build all the infrastructure for them, and pay for their R&D. They have been grifting government R&D money for literal decades. Even while with just a fraction of that money the EV industry was established. They have been lobbying Japans government for decades and have used that to prevent more beneficial R&D and infrastructure investment.
And Toyota is barley even selling these 'diversified portfolios'. Go and actually try to buy a hydrogen ICE or hydrogen fuel cell cars. In literally 99.9% of the world you can't buy them.
Hydrogen is a pipe-dream propped up by government budgets and anybody that believed in its wide deployment in 2000 was a moron, anybody that still believes in it in 2027 is straight up delusional. So if anybody is divorced from reality its you.
While most others are wasting money on failed forays into the EV market, Toyota has quietly made their entire fleet (modulo trucks) hybrid.
At this point anyone can design a chassis to accommodate a skateboard battery and some drive motors. The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs. Admittedly this is a biggie, but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.
the iphone is an outlier imho, and i dont think EV will replicate this.
The manufacturing capacity of batteries in china will continue to be a dominant force, and prevent competition in other countries from really setting up properly.
Not to mention the chinese EV giants have the R&D budget to be the ones to discover new chemistry.
China will have a critical mass of research, scientists, manufacturing, engineers, and the right government buy in to stay ahead because there's so much demand.
They are surviving because of massive scale but they are losing ground.
> The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs.
So the only thing they need is the hardest part of the supply chain. At Toyota scale building that supply-chain is fucking gigantic. It takes a decade to build that.
All the battery companies already have large multi-year of-take agreements. And they are not building massive new capacity without new demand.
> but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.
We haven't seen new form factors in many decades.
As for chemistry, everybody is working on that. Toyota has burned billions and achieved nothing.
Yes new chemistry are constantly coming in, but the reality is, each new chemistry innovation needs a decade or so to scale. And it mostly builds on existing supply chains and suppliers.
Take a look at things like silicon additives, they have been talked about for a long time, and it has been increasing. And it will continue to increase, but its not a magical pill that makes all existing battery factories obsolete.
Battery companies sell their new state of the art batteries to their long term partners first. And those partners are the first to learn of new innovations.
Tesla is stuck with a cylindrical battery supply chain because they built that out. Basically their undoing since their cars are crappy enough where they need to compete on price alone. They give away their margin by buying 3p prismatics for their bottom end offerings. So being first can and does burn you badly.
Its absolutely possible that they did all miss the boat, but even the stats just in this thread point to a drop in EV sales and economic challenges with regards to price and demand. The Chinese keep prices low with very low labor costs and subsidies from a totalitarian government, our goal isn't and shouldn't be to compete with that on price.
Lower labour costs per hour can be balanced against lower cost of living for workers.
Industrial Policy Spending for China’s EV Sector (subsidies) have dropped from $13,800 USD per vehicle in 2018 to $4,700 USD in 2023 and are less today in 2026.
How do these subsidies compare to US subsidies to the fossil fuel oil and gas industry?
The oil industry is irrelevant here and feels more like a whataboutism deflection. We can debate the oil industry, based on your comment we'd likely agree on much of it, but that's a separate discussion.
Happy to be wrong here, but my timeline would have expected US subsidies in those industries to begin somewhere around the 70s give or take a decade, as both industries consolidated heavily.
The company would not exist as it does today without such funding.
That's.. completely sensible? Don't we all want a world with lower carbon emissions?
Whether we want lower carbon emissions, whether carbon emissions is the only metric that matters, whether moving from ICE vehicles to EVs, etc are all interesting topics in their own right.
Xiaomi YU7 is $30k new, and much nicer than a Model Y. Never subsidized.
And they do have plenty of flaws to call out, though living in the US today I don't want to throw stones in a glass house...
I'd say Koreans are probably the closest to the Chinese, but Japanese manufacturers have fallen behind. Toyota spent too much time with hydrogen. Nissan? Honda? Mazda? None of them have a solid lineup of electric vehicles.
I appreciate Toyota's hybrids, but that is not the future and every model year that they try to delay, they are missing out on developing the technology, experience, internal expertise, and platform refinement.