What I particularly like about EVs is their low maintenance. You remove many components that are required with ICE. Regenerative braking makes your brake pads last a crazy amount longer. And now with this ammonia engine we are adding even more components to the vehicle? No thanks. Not to even mention the fuel distribution problem.
With EVs, you remove many of the components that are required with ICE. Hence, it doesn't matter how good you are at making those components and sourcing them from suppliers. Hence, a random startup can do nearly as well as Toyota, with their billions in capital invested and decades of experience.
It's kind of a shame, though, since I'd love to have something with the reliability of a Toyota that also applies that reliability to the EV powertrain. Maybe one of their ex-employees will start something.
They can't fire tens of thousands of factory workers so they're doing absolutely everything they can to keep those production lines going in some way or another.
I personally don't understand why they can't retrain those staff and build other things such as an EV charging station factory. But yeah, I guess they have little imagination or drive to actually solve the problem and instead play with stupid moonshot ideas like this.
The only thing they have left is a great reputation for building ICE cars. Not sure how long that will last though if this madness continues.
* They can't retreat into a niche
* Their bread and butter is efficiency, accumulated through tears and scale effects through decades of experience. That's a pretty deep moat. All that is partially reset with an industry-wide change
* Global copper, cobalt, lithium reserves (new deposits are found but with way lower grades, also it takes 15 years currently to set up a new mine) may be enough for the westernized world; but they are not for the whole world. This means effectively reducing the global market. In other words: they are against de-growth. But IMHO this will happen anyway with oil depletion looming in.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/316786/global-market-sha...
If we're going to reduce car noise, the only option is to make them go slower and move them away from residential areas.