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Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

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Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#71

Post by oblio »

germinalphrase wrote: post #42
clouddrover wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volkswagen makes 10 million cars a year and they're pushing hard for EVs now. The main difference between Volkswagen's and Toyota's situation is that Toyota is still in a good position to meet fleet emissions requirements globally because they've been selling hybrids for so long. But Volkswagen needs to pump out EVs now to meet their fleet emissions targets. Fleet emissions fines are simply dead money. You're much be…

“ Toyota has to sell EVs at scale eventually because new car ICE vehicle sales bans now and into the future…” The EU is pushing that 2035 date. Are other countries following?

The EU is about 450 million people with above average disposable income for global levels.

I'm not sure if other countries are following, but they will :-)

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#72

Post by clouddrover »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #67
chinathrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am currently getting rid of the car and going back to ICE because my whole experience was a painful joke. Can you elaborate?

Charging - Expensive and epic waste of time. Ionity leading the way with 0.79EUR/kWh and still you are there for 40 minutes and that's charger which can give me 150kW on start of charging. Slower chargers, like stupid 50kW? Yeah, 2 hours charging and they are wide and far. 20kW and weaker chargers? You are playing lottery with compatibility buddy. Yes it is there, yes it is on, but it does not like your car. What's t…

> when it lead me to charge to Freshmile

Try A Better Routeplanner and configure it to plan routes which prioritize your preferred charging providers:

https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

You'll probably have an easier time of it with ABRP.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#73

Post by jillesvangurp »

rr808 wrote: post #31

Lots of people saying Toyota missed the boat on EVs. I'm not convinced the technology, infrastructure or battery supply is ready for true mass production of EVs. Toyota makes 10 million cars a year, they'll be selling good EVs soon enough to put Tesla to shame.

The thing is that if Toyota wants to be a leader in this space, they should not wait for this to happen but be making it happen. The reality is that they have not been doing that. And others have.

If they wanted to be a leader in this space, five years ago would have been late to start putting in place the strategy, infrastructure, supply chains, etc. you need to build EVs. They did not do much five years ago other than insisting that they did not need to. And really, ten years ago would have been better, that's when Tesla started looking like a serious company and making concrete plans for scaling their business.

I don't see Toyota shipping EVs in volume any time soon. The new CEO is likely to have been tasked to actually start making this happen. But it's not going to happen overnight because they haven't built any factories yet, they haven't secured any battery supplies yet. They've built a few proof of concept / compliance cars that they are struggling to build in meaningful numbers and that they've had to withdraw from the market because of construction issues repeatedly. When they do start doing this, they'll have a little learning curve to master.

So, the new CEO has his work cut out.

As for being convinced about scale, the market volume is now millions of cars per year. Soon tens of millions. Tesla is a market leader with a target of getting to 2 million cars per year this year (up from 1 this year). And their cars are now the #1 best selling cars in many markets. They have really juicy margins on their products. It's a proven market with high margins and high volume at this point. Tesla is not alone in this market and there are quite a few other manufacturers also starting to move some serious volume. Any of those have what Toyota does not have: volume, scale, and proven products being sold as fast as they can be produced.

The technology is there. The infrastructure is there and rapidly expanding to keep up with supply and demand. New battery factories are being announced and opened all the time. We'll soon be measuring the collective output of these factories in twh per year rather than the hundreds of gwh per year it is right now.

Toyota if it wants in has a lot of catching up to do.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#74

Post by sokoloff »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #20
neoromantique wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there though? Toyota is never perceived as a luxury brand, it is associated with quality, reliability and maintainability. Something that you can hardly say about Apple.

Apple doesn't prioritize reliability because that's not what their subset of upper middle class consumers want in a phone. Toyota doesn't prioritize cost or feature/performance parity because that's not what their subset of upper middle class consumers want in a vehicle. They both make products that are about as high as you can go in their respective market segments without getting into pure luxury and conspicuous co…

I don't know if Apple prioritizes reliability in their phones, but that seems to be an outcome of whatever they do prioritize.

My family's four iPhones are: 2 iPhone X (Nov 2017), 1 XS Max (Sept 2018), and 1 13 (Sept 2021, only bought in order to hand-down one of the X to our kid). Those phones are 5, 5, 4.5, and 1.5 years old. Each of the 3 older phones was bought used when the next phone generation was released. Across our ownership, I've replaced two screens and three batteries (two were needed and one was "while I'm replacing the screen, it's easy and would be needed soon"), all DIY.

I doubt we'll replace any of these phones in the next 2 years. The iPhone 8 is still getting software updates to iOS 16, so I expect the X will keep getting updates for several more years.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#75

Post by Vvector »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #67
chinathrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am currently getting rid of the car and going back to ICE because my whole experience was a painful joke. Can you elaborate?

Charging - Expensive and epic waste of time. Ionity leading the way with 0.79EUR/kWh and still you are there for 40 minutes and that's charger which can give me 150kW on start of charging. Slower chargers, like stupid 50kW? Yeah, 2 hours charging and they are wide and far. 20kW and weaker chargers? You are playing lottery with compatibility buddy. Yes it is there, yes it is on, but it does not like your car. What's t…

If you don't charge at home at least 90% of the time, the EV loses most of the benefits. This will slowly change as more EVs are sold and the charging infrastructure improves.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#76

Post by brobdingnagians »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #73
rr808 wrote: post #31

Lots of people saying Toyota missed the boat on EVs. I'm not convinced the technology, infrastructure or battery supply is ready for true mass production of EVs. Toyota makes 10 million cars a year, they'll be selling good EVs soon enough to put Tesla to shame.

The thing is that if Toyota wants to be a leader in this space, they should not wait for this to happen but be making it happen. The reality is that they have not been doing that. And others have. If they wanted to be a leader in this space, five years ago would have been late to start putting in place the strategy, infrastructure, supply chains, etc. you need to build EVs. They did not do much five years ago other t…

The future has a funny habit of being different than we anticipate. I think this might be one of those cases, but time will tell.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#77

Post by jillesvangurp »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #45
rr808 wrote: post #31

Lots of people saying Toyota missed the boat on EVs. I'm not convinced the technology, infrastructure or battery supply is ready for true mass production of EVs. Toyota makes 10 million cars a year, they'll be selling good EVs soon enough to put Tesla to shame.

I think Toyota's issues will just be supply chain around battery packs. They have already been designing and engineering hybrids for a decade or more. I don't think its a revolutionary change for them to remove combustion engine and accessories and go with all electric motors plus larger battery packs. If anything it might simplify internal designs. I'd rather they flow this through their internal typical processes a…

Only if they can produce it cost effectively and in large volume. This is going to be a learning curve that will take them years.

Hybrid cars are not the same as an EV. Toyota needs to start worrying about their existing revenue not drying up before they can master the same learning curve that other manufacturers have been trying to master (with varying degrees of success).

Corolla like EV platforms already exist. Several Chinese manufacturers sell those in their domestic market for prices as low as a few thousand per car. And several of those manufacturers are ramping up their exports to the US, Europe, and Australia.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#78

Post by Merad »

chasd00 wrote: post #63
pornel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their current offering is "meh" from the EV perspective. It doesn't look like their experience with small-battery low-voltage hybrids gave them skills and experience to execute a good BEV. ICE reliability is a different game than batteries, efficiency, and software game of BEVs. I think there's a high chance that Toyota will be sidelined by EV-first automakers from Korea and China just like US automakers were sidelin…

i cant even imagine how hard it would be for an ICE manufacturer to pivot into EVs. Those decades of engine/transmission refinement expertise? out the window. Imagine trying to organize and pitch a new vehicle without including the powertrain people and, instead, a team with nothing on the road yet.

I think Toyota is in much better shape in this regard than you might expect. Most/all of their hybrid vehicles use an eCVT transmission to drive the front wheels that's radically different from a traditional transmission. And their AWD hybrid models provide the AWD via an electric motor on the rear axle (no connection to the ICE engine) that's essentially identical to the setup in electric cars.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#79

Post by oblio »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #4

> establishing a culture of quality control that helped Toyota evolve into a world-leading automaker. A lot of the JIT stuff that is so common, these days, was revolutionary, when he introduced it. I'm told that many agile techniques also had their genesis in his work.

I wonder if Deming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Japan) contributed to the Toyota Way? A lot of the Toyota Way seems inspired by his teachings.

Re: Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

#80

Post by duffyjp »

ravagat wrote: post #29
losvedir wrote: post #19

I had a Toyota. It was a great car, and a real testament to the engineering prowess Toyoda established. I see very clear, very interesting Innovator's Dilemma vibes, though, in how widely they've missed the boat on EVs. I wouldn't be surprised if we see Toyota lose its dominance in the coming decade. It's sad, since the Prius was such a gamechanger. Maybe the passing of the torch here will let them start to catch up.

I'm still in the camp that they did not in fact miss the boat on EVs. We, globally, are still very far off until EV adoption and probably better off focusing on more important things versus directly on EVs. Also Toyota was pioneer in EVs and I think you've discounted that if you're really looked at it on a bigger view of things

I agree. I have a 2013 Prius C that cost me $20K brand new and gets 50mpg without even trying. My fuel expenses are negligible. The new 2023 Prius gets even better milage and has TWICE the horsepower (99 vs 196).

Before the Prius I had a 2000 Lexus ES with 200HP and I got about 17MPG. The advancement in ~20 years is incredible. Gas savings alone covered more than half of my loan payments each month.

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