Toyota Owners Jump Ship to Tesla

well since they don't sell many hybrids, i'm not sure about that.

 

In fact, they’re still considerably ahead of most companies in “electrification” in the broad sense of the term. And I in particular at least certainly don’t view Toyota as bad guys.

But I still want to see, and potentially buy, BEVs from Toyota, in part because I don’t want to buy BEVs from VW, Ford, Hyundai, and a few others who do have them.

 

same here. but i cannot guarantee if they made one, that i would buy it. just like i haven't bought a prime, there's more to the purchase decision.

but i don't consider them behind because they don't make one, i consider them smart.
800 toyota owners jumping ship to tesla does not a market make.

 

So they can market an astronomically priced FCV that you can hardly fuel anywhere but not a similarly priced BEV? Enough with the corporate apologist drivel!

 

they can market a bev, they choose not to.

 

There's no excuse other than bullheadedness. The FCV made no business sense domestically (short of the credits being milked, which would equally apply to a BEV). In the home country of Japan, that is the only argument that holds any credibility after the nuke closures.

 

Their choice of marketing a FCEV instead strikes me as very iffy.

 

follow the money.

 

Don’t follow ya there...?

 

toyota is getting millions (billions?) in help from the u.s. and japanese governments.

 

US? As in Federal? CA would not surprise me...

 

or california. i'm not an expert, i think @austingreen might know.

 

(Yes, I did mean “CA” as in the state-name abbreviation, not the country-name abbreviation. ).

 

Not liking long-term real-world study from special rollout programs, as Toyota has with their FCV development, is something you'll just have to learn to live with. Too bad if you don't like that approach. That's what research requires for product diversity. Think about how many other products an automaker can deliver. So what if the testing platform is a personal vehicle. Geez!

It's not like they won't also be offering a variety of plug-in vehicles too.

 

GM made that same choice. They certainly don't market Bolt. You know why? It's because they don't expect Bolt to be profitable until the next-gen offering. In other words, it's a double-standard... at a minimum. Look at VW. Look at Ford. Look at Honda. Look at Hyundai.

The only real competitively priced EV is coming from Nissan. They are the only ones currently trying to take on the true competition... traditional vehicles... and it's quite a challenge... but sadly, just one vehicle.

Toyota is staging to pull that trigger, ending the reign of traditional vehicles by having a viable alternative already in place for a wide array of choices.. Going from hybrid to plug-in hybrid is quite realistic. It also sets the next stage at the same time, creating a large base to take that next step to EV.

We've seen this impatience & short-sightedness quite a few times in the past. Those who don't like the "boring" path to success with just disappear after awhile, overwhelmed by those that embraced change in a form the masses would accept.

I do applaud those who help pave the way, but at the same time get really annoyed by how much they neglect everyone else. They show no interest for those who simply want reliable transportation that's safe & affordable. Those ordinary consumers don't care about squeezing out a maximum return.

Know your audience.

 

Certainly you can see that the magnitude of the hydrogen-fueling-station infrastructure required to support consumer FCEVs is simply never going to happen when the alternative is to plug in pretty much anywhere there’s an electrical outlet?

Now, yes, buses or trucks, possibly; totally different problem. Consumer vehicles though? No way. Not gonna happen.

 

This is at the bottom of the chart.
"2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV electric car U.S. distribution plan by state, Oct 2016-Sep 2017"

 

Aha! Obviously I didn’t see that. Thanks.

Yeah, I sure as heck thought it was already sold in all states.

 

When Ford announced they were getting out of carmaking my first thought was that the price of oil was probably about to go up- after all, Ford has reduced or abandoned production of fuel-efficient vehicles just before a surge in fuel costs 3x in the past 40 years. Why not another?

But then it occurred to me that maybe they just predicted a horde of Chinese electric cars arriving shortly, and decided that they wanted to retreat to the safety of their strongest truck models.

I've been scratching my head over the fuel cell thing for a while. It sounds nice, but where are we going to get the hydrogen? That is a serious question- you can electrolyze it from water, but it's much cheaper just to run natural gas through a steam reformer.