Will you buy an electric or hybrid car next?

[1NJParent]

@coolguy40

I don’t trust Chinese made batteries.

The way things are going, we may not have a lot of choices. We may not have noticed it in this country, but apparently, Chinese made batteries (and EVs) have dominated recently in their home market (the world’s largest) and rapidly increasing their market shares elsewhere. There’s an article in NYTimes that touched some aspects of this trend in its Shanghai Auto Show coverage:
China’s Car Buyers Have Fallen Out of Love With Foreign Brands - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Even the maneuvering for choice display locations at auto shows like the one in Shanghai has changed. Until the last several years, Chinese automakers vied to put their displays close to multinational brands like Mercedes-Benz, in the expectation that Chinese car buyers would flock to the multinational brands and might see the local brands along the way.

But now, it’s Chinese electric car brands that other companies want to surround on the showroom floor, said Bill Russo, a former chief executive of Chrysler China. “You want to be closer to them — the Chinese companies have the hottest battery electric vehicles,” he said. “Foreign automakers don’t have the same halo now.”

[coolguy40]

I’ll hold out on gas engines until the Second Coming.

[Creekland]

I’m still hoping they can get this one into production. Time will tell. We have one reserved if they do, but not one of their “extra investment” first run promotion.

Aptera Motors

[bluebayou]

I road-tripped in Toyota's new electric SUV. Its painfully slow charging and...

[Sweetgum]

Toyota really dropped the ball on EVs. I would never buy one from them. They had to recall the BZ4X because the wheels literally fell off. Great on hybrids but just abysmal on EVs.

[jym626]

As an aside, toyota’s app and electric key is glitchy and much poorer quality than Tesla’s

[1NJParent]

For reasons I don’t understand, Japanese (and Germans) are great with the hardware they build, but not so good with the software they build.

[thumper1]

Looks like the Jetsons car!

[Creekland]

I really hope they get into production soon. They’re getting there. When my son sent me a link to it I didn’t quite know what to expect. When I watched the video I knew I wanted one. I think it looks cool and it would mean no gas stations or electrical needs at all for my local driving - just solar. When we go on many of our trips we’re well within the mileage it can handle for a day. We opted for 600 miles and the camping package, plus higher ground clearance.

It’s the first car I’ve ever “reserved!”

[BunsenBurner]

I’d love to see their calculations… somehow, I feel very skeptical about a small solar panel’s ability to carry a 150-lb human and all that metal and rubber plus the battery.

[Creekland]

They have prototypes out on the road, so I’d think their calcs would be coming from those. The solar part will only get one 20 miles per day. The rest comes from electric charging.

Around here I rarely drive more than 20 miles in one day. It’s 5 miles to school (one way). Less to the grocery store…

On a trip the rest of the miles would come from the battery. Charging could be coordinated at our stops (relatives or destination).

[BunsenBurner]

Sadly, the Nikola fiasco demonstrated that with prototypes, the saying “trust but verify” is still very much applicable.

I wish them well.

[Creekland]

Which is why I put “hope” in my posts. Nothing is a done deal yet - nor have we spent a lot of money with a reserved vehicle.

[tkoparent]

Toyota did really drop the ball on EVs. They were very focused on true hybrids like the Prius as a transitional technology but it turned out they didn’t have as much time as they (and the Japanese government) thought. We just moved to France a month or so ago and, after evaluating all the EV/hybrid options, decided to buy one gasoline-powered car and one EV = a Peugeot e-208GT that is actually a lot of fun. The “mild hybrid” and plug-in hybrid options just didn’t make sense to us. We are also adding solar panels on the house that will probably cover at least half our electricity consumption. The battery for the solar setup will be Chinese, but the solar panels are US-made. Not sure about the battery in the car.

[BunsenBurner]

The Toyota EV reminds me of the scene from Back to the Future where Doc looks at a failed circuit…

Back To The Future 3 - Japan

[bluebayou]

Toyota – and the Japanese government – was all-in on hydrogen fuel EV. They spent billions on hydrogen research and they are still investing in it. As a result, they are way behind on battery EV’s.

[1NJParent]

Here’s an article today in The Economist about how the Japanese automakers are losing the EV race:

The green floors of JATCO’s Fuji Area 2 factory hum with quiet confidence. Diligent inspectors appraise the gears and pulleys that make up the Japanese auto-parts maker’s transmission systems. Robots stamp parts and flip them onto production lines. For decades, JATCO like the rest of Japan’s vaunted auto industry, has perfected carmaking. Japan has been at the forefront of the industry, pioneering just-in-time manufacturing and leading the development of hybrid cars. But the next big evolution—the shift to electric vehicles (EVs)—has become a source of angst. “The EV shift will be a big transformation, there’s no denying that,” says Sato Tomoyoshi, JATCO’s CEO. “Our company will have to change drastically.”

So far, Japan and its carmakers are lagging in the race towards EVs, the industry’s fastest-growing product area. Battery-powered electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) accounted for around 13% of all cars sold globally in 2022, up from 2.6% in 2019. In some markets, including China, the share is some 20%. But in Japan, it was just 2%. The firms pulling ahead in the EV race include newcomers, such as Tesla and China’s BYD, and established giants like Germany’s Volkswagen. Yet Japanese carmakers are not among them. None is in the top 20 for global EV sales, even though Nissan and Mitsubishi released some of the world’s first EVs, more than a decade ago. Toyota, the world’s largest car company, sold just 24,000 EVs out of 10.5m total sales in 2022. (Tesla sold 1.3m.) Sales of Toyota’s first fully electric model, an SUV called the bZ4X, had to be paused last summer due to defects that caused the wheels to fall off.

Critics worry that this early stalling on EVs could cause the wheels to fall off the Japanese auto industry as a whole. Some see parallels with semiconductors and consumer electronics, industries where Japanese firms were initially dominant, then missed important trends abroad and ended up losing out to nimbler competitors. A similar decline in the auto industry, which accounts for nearly 20% of Japan’s exports and some 8% of Japanese jobs, would have massive economic and social implications.
…
Japan’s slow start on EVs stems in part from its earlier successes—or as Mr Sato of JATCO puts it, it is a classic case of the innovator’s dilemma. Industry leaders hesitated to embrace a new technology that might undermine areas where Japan leads, such as standard hybrid vehicles, which combine an internal combustion engine (ICE) and an electric motor powered by batteries that capture energy from regenerative braking (rather than charging with outside electricity, as with PHEVs). Engineers at Japanese firms that fine-tuned complex hybrids were also unimpressed by EVs, which are simpler mechanically. “Within the industry, there are still a lot of people attached to the engine,” Mr Sato says. Executives worried about the implications of the EV shift on their vast network of suppliers like JATCO, given that EVs require fewer parts and widgets than ICEs. Carmakers assumed eventually switching gears to EVs would be a cinch: “The logic was that when the time comes, we can easily shift from hybrids to EVs,” says a former executive at a large Japanese car company.

Japan also made an early wrong turn with hydrogen, another emergent auto technology with the potential to be carbon-free. Toyota, Japan’s biggest and most influential carmaker, bet that hydrogen fuel-cells would become the leading method to electrify cars. Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister from 2012 to 2020, championed policies to make Japan a “hydrogen society”; in 2015, Toyota delivered its first hydrogen fuel-cell sedan, the Mirai, to Abe himself. While hydrogen may come to play a big role in decarbonising hard-to-electrify sectors, such as steel production, or fuelling long-haul trucks, it has so far turned out to make little sense as a technology to electrify light consumer vehicles. Even in Japan, which has built a fair amount of hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, Toyota has struggled to peddle the pricey Mirai: the company has sold a total of just 7,500 fuel-cell vehicles in its home market.
…
As Toyota’s experience with the bZ4X suggests, designing and building top-of-the-line EVs may not be as simple as the Japanese firms assumed. “They were so overconfident that once they decide to do it, they will dominate the EV market,” Mr Murasawa says. “But their offerings have turned out to be old-fashioned.” Creating EVs that appeal to consumers requires putting more focus on software, while Japanese firms traditionally prioritise hardware. While they gear up, Japanese companies are already losing loyal customers. Japanese brands that “built a legacy” in America have been “caught flat-footed in the context of 2022”, concludes S&P Global Mobility, a research outfit. As the study notes, consumers switching to EVs in 2022 were largely moving away from Toyota and Honda.

How Japan is losing the global electric-vehicle race | The Economist

[BunsenBurner]

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/u-s-car-brands-will-benefit-most-from-electric-car-tax-breaks/

“Only 10 vehicles will initially qualify for tax credits of $7,500, less than one-quarter of the battery-powered cars on sale in the United States. But those 10 include many of the most popular models and accounted for two-thirds of electric vehicle sales before the new rules took effect.

Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, the bestselling electric vehicles in the United States, will qualify for the full $7,500 credit, with one exception, according to a list published by the Treasury Department on Monday. The least expensive version of the Model 3 will qualify for only half the credit because its battery is made in China.”

[DroidsLookingFor]

PSA: Tesla lowered prices (again) on the Model Y today

[ucbalumnus]

@DroidsLookingFor

Tesla lowered prices (again) on the Model Y today

If you want to know how Tesla car prices have changed over time, here is a Tesla car price history spreadsheet:

Tesla Car Price History

(Note: it is not private for reading, although it may take some time to load.)