Toyota is just bitter they backed the wrong horse. Their blatant lies and lobbying have ensured I’ll never buy one of there cars again.
Also this is just wrong, Toyota has right now on the market competitive battery electric cars. But Toyota is a mass-market budget car marker and so faces way different challenges than luxury automakers selling to the already affluent who own their homes, and live and work in areas dotted with superchargers. Toyota, Honda, and GMC are stuck with solving the problems for the 90% of car users.
Personally, I expect that if you banned the sale of new ICE cars today or in the near future it will completely destroy the new car market and screw the used car market even more than it already is right now. I feel like people forget how little control the typical American has over their living situation. If you live in a cheap rental with street parking and need your car to commute to work you're just stuck waiting.
There are drawbacks to both and advantages to both.
BEVs work well for small and city vehicles, hydrogen for large transport vehicles and off-road type stuff.
Best of all, if we use two, three or four energy sources for our stuff instead of just one, that spreads the load on earth’s resources.
(Meanwhile, keep buying fossil fuel cars please)
It's especially hard to swallow when that advocate is Toyota, largest fossil fuel carmaker in the world.
> BEVs work well for small and city vehicles, hydrogen for large transport vehicles and off-road type stuff.
They don't "hate" each other's tech. The entire conversation has up until this point has centered exclusively on light duty passenger vehicles. In that segment it's been clear for a long time that BEVs are the better technology.
If there are any resentments from BEV advocates it is due to the way hydrogen fuel cell tech has been used as a way to slow down the electrification of light duty passenger vehicles.
Only recently has the conversation started about where hydrogen makes more sense (trucking, aviation, and perhaps most importantly, long duration renewable energy storage).
> Best of all, if we use two, three or four energy sources for our stuff instead of just one, that spreads the load on earth’s resources.
BEV and green hydrogen use the same fuel source: electricity. Electricity is the magic sauce here, since there are a bunch of ways to generate it.
You see the same thing everywhere. Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux, Android vs. iOS, PC gaming vs console gaming. Whenever there's a technical choice to be made, there will be people who argue that their choice is the "best" choice or the only right choice.
However I think these absolutists are actually the minority, you just tend to see them more often in forums like HN. I suspect the vast majority of people don't really care.
FWIW I'm a hydrogen fan but just bought a BEV, so I can assure you that people like me do exist.
The silver lining is that refusing to cannibalize their own product lines will cost them big - and soon. I suspect they’ll end up as a case study for MBAs.
“Toyota” for me is a byword for venality, cynical anti-social exploitation, regulatory capture and gerontocracy.
EV's may introduce new challenges for the grid, but when a country is unable or unwilling to fix that then all those batteries could also present an opportunity to balance that same grid using software.
The problem that they do not mention is that they have huge investments in engine manufacturing that are useless for EV's. EV's are much simpler technology, the only hard parts are batteries and software.
Switching too fast will make their existing manufacturing capabilities worthless, and this is what is really threatening them. That is also making EV's "expensive" to build for them (but not for Tesla, or anyone building new factories).
I think that anyone in a developed country buying an ICE car now is already throwing money out the window: a few years from now nobody will want it anymore, depreciation will be very high.
Far from universally true. Many developed countries do not have widespread access to charging stations, especially in rural areas.
I'd buy an electric truck if I could go camping and tow a boat for a weekend without refueling, but as far as I can tell that's not possible yet.
None of these argue against EV cars. Instead, these issues will control the adoption rate.
It’s a common form of idiocy - “we can’t build this thing because it’s not built yet” is a fallacy that deserves its own name.
Anyway, the magic of capitalism is that other people will build it and Toyota can retire if that’s what they want to do.
But I would not pledge to avoid Toyotas. Their quality is second to none, by a large margin.
But their early patents have run out, so there's the possibility of other brands building effective hybrids now. Though Hyundai/KIA have made strides in the Big Ass Starter method of hybridization.
It seems the older models before 2017 should be avoided and after 2018 they are really good. And currently Toyota get quite a lot of extra milage.
I looked at Mazda and Honda and hybrid adds a lot of extra cost to those compared to Toyota. But bit worried about the original commenters comment that he would never buy Toyota again.
Is there something wrong with them?
The larger issue is that Hybrids were jumped over for no reason.