Featured 2023 Toyota bZ3 Sedan Leaked

sorry guys

 

In the end that won't amount to much... Let's face it, it's an end of an era for auto manufactures. Car buyer's are finally being offered the option to never again have to spend money on gas and you'd have to be special kind of dumb to think people aren't going to want that.

Yet automakers can't simply flip a switch at the factory and start making electric cars. And when you're talking about only 1 part in an electric car to every 4 parts in a gas engine the profitability of their part making business is put into freefall until they can retool or replace their factories and if there's a major financial crisis like 2008 on the horizon many of these automakers won't survive.

 

i think they have a few years yet to get their act together. will some be left in the dust? that's the nature of things.
even government mandates get thrown to the curb sometimes as administrations change

 

The lie is Toyota isn't actually saying that. It's a narrative, portrayal from others to make Toyota appear anti-EV. Reality is, Toyota has stated growth will not be as fast as enthusiasts hope. Such an inconvenient truth really upsets those wearing rose-colored glasses.

This is the low-hanging fruit situation, prior to the adoption S-curve upward. All seems to be going well, but that trends really only reflects those not facing acceptance challenges. In other words, we're still in the early-adopter stage... a limited audience. Recent confirmation of that is becoming undeniable. As soon as tax-credits vanished with the IRA signing, so did a statistically significant number of orders.

With all the rhetoric from BEV purists, none of this is a surprise. They want a united front against ICE, but can't even agree on public infrastructure issues. Lack of agreement slows adoption. Having someone to blame is a sign of that struggle. They chose Toyota as the scapegoat.

 

Your apologist rhetoric is delusional and without reference... We know exactly what Toyota is saying and who the politicians are that they're funding and I'd like to encourage everyone to sign the petition to show your support for exposing the planet destroying activities that Toyota is leading:

"Toyota is one of the world’s top lobbyists against laws to protect us all from catastrophic climate breakdown. Only oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron are doing more lobbying harm! Maybe oil barons don’t care, but Toyota bosses hate it when news about their lobbying gets out." https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/toyota-go-green-and-stop-lobbying-for-fossil-fuels/

 

Actually Tesla makes a profit on their EVs but the others ... not so much. Since the non-Tesla EV makers are dependent on the same suppliers, they have bid-up their cost so profits remain even more elusive.

Bob Wilson

 

Toyota is a master at squeezing out profit from low-margin sales, finding a means of avoiding price hikes. Tesla keeps raising prices... with an unfortunate outcome of being trapped in the premium-vehicle category. That's why seeing something below $30K from Tesla continues to remain a "some day" hope and we see BYD fighting to fill that void now. Their partnership with Toyota adds an interesting twist to the opportunity.

 

The new Toyota management suffers from the 'MBA disease' that Sandy Munro rails against. Symptoms include abandoning their earlier collaboration with Tesla; pursuit of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and; anything but BEV in the USA.

Bob Wilson

 

So, Toyota is going "backward" on the naming of the BEVs introduced? bZ4X first, now bZ3.

OK, I see a pattern. bZ2 is waiting to be introduced, then bZ1 after that. When They reach bZ0 (zero), they stop the BEV productions.

 

New?

Toyota Announces Executive Leadership Changes - Toyota USA Newsroom

 

really?

Toyota Is Again Slamming Electric Cars: The Market Isn't Ready | Torque News

https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/toyota-says-no-ev-demand-try-selling-one-wheels-dont-fall-off/

Toyota VP Says Demand Is Lacking For US To Hit 50% EV Target By 2030

.

 

The expectation for our market is larger, bZ5... possibly a SUV with third row seating.

 

Correct.

"Toyota VP Says Demand Is Lacking For US To Hit 50% EV Target By 2030". Toyota said no such thing. This is exactly like when Toyota made a statement about lithium batteries about 6 months after Volt was first revealed. It was about cost. The price was far too high back then for a lithium-based battery to be competitive. Antagonists saw an opportunity to take advantage of the statement made by claiming it was related to fire risk, portraying Toyota as afraid when in reality there was no such connection. It was about profitability. Since people wouldn't bother looking up what was actually said, they were able to exploit laziness & assumption. That happened again recently, but this time from a website publisher. They can attract lots of participation, in this case 285 posts, by misrepresentation. To add to that, they used an image of a person with their head in the sand for the articles promo-image. It's propaganda, a blatant effort stir attention by feeding the anti-EV narrative.

Due to my unfortunate timing (9 minutes after the 48-hour cutoff), I wasn't able to rebut that nonsense. This is what I tried to post when the writer attempted to reinforce his position with more propaganda: That information was cherry-picked back in 2019, since it depended upon data from 2017 and ignored what had changed following that. 5 years later, Toyota has eliminated two ICE vehicles in this market, replacing them with hybrids only models (Sienna & Venza), rolled out a hybrid model of their most popular worldwide vehicle (Corolla), introduced a new hybrid (Corolla Cross), and upgraded their high-demand hybrid (RAV4) to a plug-in model. Now, they are rolling out a new BEV nameplate featuring several vehicle types. Feeding narratives doesn't help, like that outdated link and this article. There wasn't a "no demand" claim; it was about not being able to meet 50% by 2030. There's a fundamental difference between none and falling short of a goal.

 

The naming isn't that different from what others use. The number is an approximation for size. A letter denotes the car is a SUV. BMW uses X, Toyota is using Z.

Toyota says there is no demand, or is an executive vice president speaking at an official event not speaking for Toyota? No Demand For EVs-Says Toyota | PriusChat While new sales for EVs went over 16% in California this year.

Growth will be limited by supply in the short term. It will be more limited for Toyota, because they took too long to secure the necessary supplies.

Tesla is the largest EV seller in the US, with sales growing year after year. They have not had a federal incentive for a couple of years.

Dealers for other brands were using the incentive to justify their price mark ups. People would also cancel their orders if dealers started increases the price by thousands.

What infrastructure can't they agree on? Pretty sure they all agree it needs to expand and improve. The charging standards? There is only two DC ones in left in the US. As a private company, Tesla is free to use their own standard. Going forward, if they want access to public funding, they need to open the Superchargers fully to other brands.

Some of those others secure supplies before today's market.

Are you going to claim Toyota prevents all their dealers from adding on market adjustment price increases? Everybody is raising prices to some extent today.

In terms of physical assets, Tesla is a small to medium sized company. They are limited in production capacity. If demand is high, a business will increase profit. Few companies don't do that. Maybe Tesla will do a cheaper model once they get production capacity up. Maybe they won't have to with all the other companies entering the EV market.

For now, we don't even know if the bZ3 will leave China.

EDIT: put in the right link

 

nice theory - but it isn't the actual history. If it were cost that killed the Volt, every single Volt ever manufactured wouldn't have gotten snapped up. Buyers were switching over to land barges, SUVs and pickup trucks - many of which cost way more than the Chevy Volt. Since the market had switched - manufacturers in general stopped making many smaller cars & sedans in general. Prius C and Prius V going to the wayside at that time.
.

 

I see, copied after Mazda? I like a personalized name for a model... It is easier to remember, thus better brand recognition, at least for me.

 

This is what the executive vice president say as a speaker at a public event.

• I don’t think the market is ready. I don’t think the infrastructure is ready. And even if you were ready to purchase one, and if you could afford it … they’re still too high
• It took 25 years to get to less than 10% (market share) for hybrid — which is affordable, which is done with resources that are available
• The “rhetoric” around electric vehicles is way out ahead of consumer demand
• The consumer isn’t demanding it at that level. The consumer is not screaming, ‘30% or 40% by tomorrow,’

Those quotes came from the source article at Forbes, who was far less biased in their presentation. It was posted Aug 22, 2023, and reported the comments were at a recent presentation.
Toyota Exec Says Lack Of Consumer Demand Makes U.S. Goal Of 50% Electric Vehicles By 2030 A Long Shot

Despite the high prices for EVs, most manufacturers aren't having a problem selling everyone they make. With currently having limited production, producing higher margin models makes the most sense for a business. The 2023 Bolt EV though has a lower MSRP than the Spark EV when it came out in 2013. It is also lower than the Prius Prime.

He is using past performance of the hybrid market to predict EV demand even though the EV segment has been out performing the hybrid one since the beginning. He is also using a strawman of high current demand to dismiss future high demand.

Did Toyota disavow these statements?

If this is an older presentation being portrayed as recent by Forbes, is there a source of it from the actual occurrence time?

Toyota only replaced one ICE model with a hybrid one in the US. The original Venza, a Camry crossover, was cancelled years ago. The current one is a new model. A question many have asked is why did it take Toyota so long to make hybrid models hybrid only, or introduce more hybrid versions of current models? When I joined here in 2005, people were already asking for a Rav4 and Sienna hybrid. Toyota is pushing hybrids as a better emission solution, but took their time rolling it out. The VP talks about slow hybrid segment growth, but maybe Toyota's roll out schedule is partly to blame for that.

How did Toyota mess up the 4Z intro so badly? More importantly, how many would they have been able to produce in 2022 and 2023 if they haven't messed up?

Yeah the VP was asked about a goal 50% sales by 2030, but then talks about the nobody asking for 30% to 40% tomorrow. Meanwhile, EV sales in California are over 16% this year.

I prefer actual names to alphanumeric codes too. Lincoln has been moving back to names.

 

That was fact. Enthusiasts did indeed spin what Toyota said and cost was why Volt died. GM could not figure out how to spread the technology they had created, because it was too expensive. Better design provides more opportunity. Quite unlike GM, we didn't see Toyota cram in as much battery as possible to achieve "vastly superior" range. Toyota focused heavily on efficiency too, beating GM in both HV and EV categories.

As for your claim about snapping up Volt (cost), it was a tiny non-SUV sold at a loss (price). For that matter, Bolt was sold at a loss (price) too. That's fine if you can leverage the technology, spreading it to a profitable platform later. GM didn't though. They were about conquest, not changing the status quo. Their dealerships thrived on ICE guzzlers. Meanwhile, we see Toyota pushing a paradigm-shift, making their dealers embrace change. It's too slow for enthusiasts, but it is genuine progress forward. ICE models are getting phased out.

Toyota has taken the time with their bottom-up approach. That makes enthusiasts (top-down supporters) so upset, they have turned Toyota into an antithesis. There's no justification for that. Economics has shown us that both approaches can be extremely successful.

 

We are still waiting for the “up” part, so far we just have the “bottom” part

I wouldn’t say upset. I was very disappointed that the company at the lead of the hybrid revolution didn’t seem to be interested in leading the Electric revolution.

No, Toyota did that all by themselves with executive statements, commercials and lobbying.

There is no question that the safe follower role can be extremely successful. Of course, if they follow too late, it can also be quite unsuccessful.