…things need to change, or Toyota, the world’s largest car company by sales, “will not survive.”
…If Toyota feels like it’s losing ground, then the ground is probably moving.
The problem isn’t just one thing, either. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. Chinese automakers are gaining ground quickly and setting a new standard for manufacturing costs. Software is becoming a core part of cutting-edge vehicle. Tariffs are still a thing. The auto industry has seen more upheaval in the last few years than it did over the last several decades…
Toyota has always had extremely strict quality standards…But that could soon change.
The brand is implementing something that it calls “Smart Standard Activity.” This is meant to slash…quality standards…Toyota believes it will lower the price of its components…
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
– Wayne Gretzky.
So, they’re going to just make cheaper gas cars to compete with EVs?
Drivers want affordable electric vehicles. If you still cant do that profitably, you have no business being in the automobile industry.
I bet if someone just came out with some simple cheapish electric cars without all the fancy bullshit then their sales will increase. Stop screwing over your customers and maybe they’ll replace their 15 year old cars.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this: https://www.slate.auto/en
Stripped down, simple, no touchscreen bs, and the vehicle is customizable through their website. Pricing and ship dates are going to be announced next week if I remember correctly.
Unfortunately it looks like their pricing is creeping up into “regular EV” territory. I like the concept and hope I’m wrong.
What “regular EV” has pricing in the mid-twenties?
I hate that slate is backed by Jeff Bezos I’m sure he’ll find a way to fit some spyware or ai in there. I really can’t see him backing it for altruistic reasons
Ah damn, I didn’t know that goblin ass bastard was involved. Welp, not wasting my time with that.
If the car fits your needs, don’t let the dude sway you from it. You’ll find it to be pretty exhausting to find something that fits your desire perfectly without any issues.
The important thing is to support EVs to help normalize them and drive them forward. I’m sure your ideal EV will be out there eventually, maybe that company feels it’s risky to do so right now.
Hate to tell you this but all car OEMs are run by goblin-ass bastards.
Maybe he’s just backing it to make money? 🤷♂️
I do like the Slate, and I ordered one immediately, but I so wish they made a car instead of a dumb truck with terrible aero and a bed I’m never going to use.
I know there’s a SUV package but certainly that will add a huge premium to the price. I’m pretty sure the “mid-20s” is the “entry” price and bottom-dollar to get eyeballs and then all the upgrades will be crazy overpriced.
Yeah, the percentage of buyers who will actually shell out only that base price would be small. I want a non-enshittified car too, but I also want basic conveniences like power windows and a minimal sound system. I don’t think a lot of people would also rawdog the exterior and will pay for the wrap.
Honestly I wish they would just install the wiring, and then let the owners decide if they want to connect them.
Cutting features doesn’t cut costs as much as you might think.
LED strips are very cheap. Going back to real buttons costs more than touchscreens, not less.Chinese vehicles are so much cheaper for lots of reasons. From cheaper labor generally, to actual under the counter government subsidies.
Chinese EVs are cheaper because the components are made in the same country, often in the same city, and perhaps in the factory down the street. Transporting stuff costs money and forward-thinking industrial planning can reduce these costs.
Yup. A huge part of the cost is the batteries, the electric motors, the sensors and controllers that manage charging and discharging.
Looking around at home battery backup solutions, for example, simply having the same storage capacity as an EV (50-75 kwh) can cost almost as much as an EV itself.
Jackery has add on batteries for about $1000 for 5 kwh, Ecoflow and Anker Solix cost $2000 for 6 kwh.
At those prices, a 60kwh battery pack in an EV basically represents $12,000 to $20,000 in battery cost alone, plus a whole system around charging it and using it for an electric motor, and then a whole car around that.
It’s not a perfect comparison, but it does show that the actual material cost of what goes into an EV is primarily the electric drivetrain and battery.
Jackery, Ecoflow and Anker are all going to be crazy overpriced because they spend all their money on marketing. That’s why you see them absolutely everywhere.
Some of the good Chinese brands are selling 5kWh for ~$800. And even that has a markup that these Chinese auto brands won’t.
I do wonder how much it would cost to build a code-compliant, UL-certified/listed system for home battery backup at 50 kwh, with a system that knows to balance things between cells over many charge/discharge cycles.
I gotta imagine a lot of the value add of the established names is that they actually operate in the U.S. (even though all 3 companies I named are Chinese owned). That’s not just about marketing (even if it is true that having U.S. operations helps significantly with marketing), but the cost of certifying for different third party safety standards, and having assets/operations that bring them within reach of U.S. courts and regulators.
Like Amazon undercutting dipers to take over and then raise the prices. China is doing similar on the scale of nations. They want to be the next US in 50ish years. They’re using economics to do it.
China is intentionally undercutting the rest of the world in clean energy tech, to establish a global monopoly. They see how important it will be, and want the world to be dependent on China for its energy.
That sound too virtuous. They’re heavily investing in lots of different emerging technologies in order to dominate them, yes. Creating cost-efficient energy storage is wildly profitable.
But don’t you see? I need my car to cradle my balls. They just didn’t do that in the old cars.
My GluckGluck9000 has a huge touchscreen which only knocks off 100 miles of range while I’m gooning
When did your mom get a huge touchscreen?
Walked right into that one lmao
Like slate trucks? I do wonder how that company works out.
I’ve been looking at Slate, def. one to follow. Until something EV and truck like shows up, alas, the ancient 'yota will stay on the road. And regardless my bike is my main transpo on the daily basis.
Sales would increase but profits would decrease, which is all they care about. That’s why they do it.
Maybe appeals to some but I like being able to connect and change charging schedules and connect and pre-condition the car either hot or cold so it’s nice when I jump in. I like the HUD as well. Android auto is good but I would be okay just running a phone in a mount for mapping.
One of the biggest complaints from Aussie Volkswagen (and subsidiaries like Cupra) ecar owners owners is a lack of connectivity :)
Have a BYD here in Austrialia I 70% charge off my solar panels, 10% off public chargers and 20% using low cost tariffs after midnight… Don’t really care if China is monitoring me, it’s my Government monitoring me that concerns me.
But prior to this I was car free for 5 years living in the city, now in a rural areas and Australia is car brained that’s there’s only one bus a day (which I take when I can) and I cycle as well, like I have today
This only works if the market isn’t being strangled by governments.
Toyota fucked themselves over by having super rightwing leadership who were willingly blind to the ways in which being super rightwing makes you a dumbass.
☝️
Everyone has seen the way forward, the Japanese automakers put their fingers in their ears and went “na na na na!” for years. Now Korea and China are way ahead.
Conservativism is a disease for any society.
But how could they foresee something like EV, especially chinese ones, which were years in the making??!!
Japanese automakers put their fingers in their ears and went “na na na na!”
Katamari damacy?
Conservativism is a disease for any society.
Yes, it is essentially a contagion on societies and it is growing like crazy right now. We must understand this threat for what it is.
Too many people look at the US and think we are uniquely stupid when the difference is our conservatives are more empowered and worshipped than in other countries. It is a dangerous mistake to think there aren’t rightwing fascist ignorant assholes who want to turn your country into a place like the US no matter where you are, anywhere on earth.
Feeling it over here in Canada…where even the Liberals are Conservative and the Socialists are centrists…
Never let people in your country forget that there is nothing special about their nationalism and their particular flavor of rightwing xenophobia. It is all the same product just with a slightly different shitty label plastered on depending on where in the world you are.
Rightwing ideologies that traffic in dehumanizing groups of people are all violent, they ALL lead to the same place the US is rocketing towards.
I think one of the best ways to fight violent rightwing ideologies obsessed with exclusion, austerity and seeing everything through a zero sum framing no matter what, is to loudly point out to everybody around the periphery of these ideologies that they haven’t stumbled on a new idea, the words they are saying are the same broken record playing in the US and elsewhere.
Call toxic rightwing violent men who pride themselves in projecting whatever identity they identify as The Original or The Superior shitty cheap knockoffs of US rightwing culture. Other them from their own context by pointing out there isn’t any actually unique localized identity to their beliefs beyond a superficial crust. Even if this doesn’t get under their skin, that isn’t the point, the point is to undermine their call towards reducing your societies horizons by pointing out to everybody the horizons those people want are themselves foreign, imposed and twisted in specific ways that don’t take into account your local context at all.
POINT to the US and emphasize that person is arguing for the same ideology that is tearing the US down into poverty, misery and war. Use people’s natural desire to shit on the US as stupid from outside the US to open the door to them seeing their local homegrown version is literally the same stupid shit.
A specific example, invite people into laughing at how stupid some aspect of the US with a joke or comment, then point out that the conservatives in your area look up to the rightwing people that made those choices here in the US and look them in the eyes with a smile.
you’d think they would want to “conserve” the planet, since they cal themselves conservatists. There should be some more apt term for them that would let them know what everyone thinks about them. conservatist doesnt sound right anyway, they dont want to conserve anything just make things worse for everyone else.
Even Vw is ahead …
New vws are the worst and way overpriced.
Not really
What does this mean
How many car models were registered in Germany in February.
That doesn’t mean they’re good
Good. Good riddance to bad rubbish, they actively worked to stop, and then to slow the EV transition. They still make shite EVs.
May they be soon forgotten.
It’s always hard to take these things seriously. We only made 8 billion dollars last year, so we’re really struggling.
At the same time, the sentiment common in this thread way overstates things. Toyota is continuing to make profits at this very moment, and has the cash on hand (and future profits) to be able to afford to pivot slowly.
If the future is all battery based EVs, there’s no reason to believe that this particular company won’t survive the transition. They have the supply chain already in place for batteries and electric motors, and have been public about batteries being supply constrained so that they believe that building hybrids with smaller capacity batteries is a better use of that existing supply. It’s a self-serving position that one should be somewhat skeptical about, but they’re such a huge company they have to think about scale in a way that smaller manufacturers don’t have to worry about.
They’ve been talking a big game about not wanting to make the switch until battery tech and volume gets up to its standards, but they can actually afford to wait. They talk a big game about waiting for solid state battery tech, and while other companies can’t afford to wait another 3-5 years for mass production to catch up, Toyota actually can.
And, even before then, Toyota is slowly pivoting to EVs anyway. Their plug in hybrid lineup targets some of their most popular models (Prius, Rav4). On the all-electric front, the bz is available today, and the EV Highlander and the EV Lexus ES are going to be competing side by side with the hybrid counterparts (with the ES selling at a lower MSRP than its hybrid counterparts and the Highlander expected to do similar). They can afford to actually test the market to see whether sales volume data informs how they allocate production resources to EVs versus hybrids.
I expect they’ll survive. They probably won’t find their way back to #1, but there’s plenty of reason to believe they’ll still be selling lots of cars profitably in 10 years.
Toyota did nearly nothing for E-Cars. So of course they will fall.
It was so frustrating to watch too since they did so much for pushing hybrids. They were the face of the “eco car” and they could have pivoted to fully electric and people would have just gone with it.
Instead they pulled a Sears. Sears had the catalog business down and would have destroyed upstarts like Amazon if they wanted to pivot to online sales, instead they stuck their head in the sand and suffocated.
Or like Blockbuster refusing to adapt, and also not buying Netflix for cheap twice when they had the chance. Or Kodak literally creating the digital camera…
Kodak was at least TRYING to be ahead of the curve. They saw the writing on the wall before either Blockbuster or Sears did.
It is hard for a business to realize that their core product is going the way of the buggy whip or ice delivery companies, but I do think it can be done.
Tobacco figured it out…
For better or worse…
(Definitely worse)
So Toyota’s plan to compete in a changing world is to… copy Chrysler (Stellantis)?
No wonder they’re worried for their future.
Other top offenders include Volkswagen, which collects demographic data (like age and gender) and driving behaviors (like your seatbelt and braking habits) for targeted marketing purposes; Toyota, which features a near-incomprehensible galaxy of 12 privacy policy documents;
Hard to care when they’re evil.
https://www.wired.com/story/car-data-privacy-toyota-honda-ford/ - a similar article from Wired. Modern cars are privacy hazards.
Here’s to hoping the whole dealership model crashes & burns as well.
Sorry, a car Is still something I have to look, feel and drive before I shell the moneys.
You can test drive a Tesla at a Tesla showroom. You can test drive a Rivian at a Rivian showroom. You can then buy one of them for exactly the price listed on their respective websites. There’s no haggling with sales people, no negotiating over random features, etc.
Wait, so what do you mean with dealership? Not the kind of shop where you can see and feel a car and then buy it? And you’d need staff anyways.
Do you not understand the concept of a car dealership? You can not buy a car directly from Toyota or Honda or Ford, etc. Prior to roughly 2010 it was illegal in all 50 US states to sell automobiles direct to the consumer. If you wanted to buy a new car you had to buy it through an independent dealership, which is basically a middleman that tacks on various fees, etc. and tries to upsell add-ons.
Part of the way they make money is to not publicize the actual amount you will pay but instead publish the MSRP and their dealership markup. Then they’ll pretty much force you to negotiate that, along with haggling over optional accessories, trying to convince you to finance the car through them etc. So you may not even know the final cost of a new car until you spend hours haggling with them and commit to buying it.
One thing Tesla did right is to get rid of that independent dealership model and sell direct to consumers. You can go to one of their showrooms and test drive a car, and if you decide to buy one you just go onto the website and order it. The price on the website is exactly what you’ll pay. No dealer middleman is adding unnecessary fees just to sell the car to you, and nobody is pressuring you to finance through them etc.
A lot of these legacy automakers have to deal with a supplier network, too. EVs will also need those relationships, but it will likely be with different companies, and cause some friction in broken relationships. The company manufacturing fuel pumps might not have the same future as the company manufacturing wiring harnesses.
I understand the sentiment but it’s also intended to make sure there is a location with parts and people trained to repair the vehicles they sell. The cost reduced alternative may be worse.
Have the consequences of under investing in EV tech and over-reliance on the nonsensical USAmerican economy caught up with the world’s largest car company?
Oh, Toyota will not survive. For a moment there I thought he was acknowledging the existential risk to global civilisation caused in part by his company’s products.
To heck with anyone promoting fossil emissions over EVs.
FYI a cheap stripped down electric car already exists in Europe. it’s the L7e quadricycle. looks like a car, acts like a car, can go up to 55 mph, most do 28 mph, $8700 USD. I live in a Florida retirement community and everyone is driving electric low speed vehicles (golf cars). Mine is an older gas model but gets 50mpg. If it dies I’m definitely going electric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification)#Heavy_quadricycles_(L7e)
Quadricycles are not real cars.
Source: From Europe, and have driven a couple of the “fast” ones, and seen some after crashes. I would not have one if I could avoid it.
Europe has no oil. Your option of avoiding it is now on a 30 to 60 day fuse. You can pay big euros for a real car or buy a bike, but a lifestyle build on other people’s oil is over.
But I’m European … that means, public transport in the form of electric busses and trains. And walking, which I enjoy doing.
Electric cars (and quadricycles) aren’t an environmentally sound solution to transportation.
A valid point. I assume you are still young and healthy. I look at the world from the perspective of a senior citizen in Florida. Although I do walk and bike, there are days when I can just barely make it to the car, and into the doctor’s office. I never expected to be this fragile and impaired in old age. I just look at the rest of the world from my own perspective.
My Mum is 87 now, and can’t walk - she uses an electric mobility scooter to get around
Going with the heroin dealer logic of killing your customers for a quick profit
