Comment by hnav
17 hours ago
Toyota is the leader by profit, has been selling cars with batteries and electric motors for 3 decades and simply doesn't want to pile into a crowded space where you effectively have to be dumping your product at cost to have a chance of success.
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.
> 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.
I think this might be more like a TSMC situation where the rest of the world is always behind.
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.
Yeah that's nonsense. Toyota is behind on a number of technologies. They are still making cars, but its the old style of cars in every aspect. They haven't done the integration of technology and the car the way Tesla or China has.
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.
Yeah, my Toyota BZ is great.
Nokia was the leader by profit until they weren't. They even experimented with hydrogen powered phones!