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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

My guess is Ego. They decided batteries were a dead end a long time ago, and now can’t take the ‘face’ hit so keep doubling down.

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This is also my conclusion, in the same way that if you get into a fender-bender there, you junk the car because it's dishonorable to drive the car after you got into a [minor] accident.

Really? Wow! So different. Although with repair cost and complexity increasing, many more cars are totaled / written off than used to be here in the US. Particularly EV’s.

I heard houses were a depreciating asset in Japan too.

Funny how cultures are different.

I remember seeing ads for $250 Maaco specials as a kid. They'd paint the whole car for that, although I can't imagine it'd be a good job.

A budget paint job on a single panel is up to $750 now.

The reason houses in Japan are such a depreciating asset is due to the population collapse. It's estimated there is a surplus of about 10 million houses.

That and culturally no one wants a 'used' house. They don't appreciate because a buyer is expected to tear down the old one, and so it's just in the way. [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...]

I think it's a stretch to believe that ego is controlling a 300b company. It's an easy 'spectator' guesss, but more realistically whatever their strategy is is likely just being misinterpreted.

I mean, with that kind of cash and establishment you can do some real wacky things publicly that turn profit. A company the size of Toyota could influence public trends enough to make money on the side via profits from share-held groups.

Maybe they have a larger hand in refinery/opec/whatever markets than one would first imagine -- if that was the case then there is plenty of valid 'business reasoning' that would end in the publishing/advertisement of weird products.

Asian firms like Toyota are huge on face - and doing a switch back to batteries would make it very obvious that they (really one specific senior controlling exec, most likely!) lost (tens? hundreds?) of billions of dollars on a bad bet. And even more in lost time and market position.

Never underestimate ego in a situation like this. Hell, just look at what Elon is doing.

Why admit you screwed up (likely costing you your very lucrative position and bringing shame and dishonor to your family) when you can double down and try to reality distort your way out of failure? Sometimes it works!

When it doesn’t, it can bankrupt huge multinationals (or historically even nations occasionally!), but at that point it’s almost always the type of problem that someone else needs to help you solve anyway. Often ones you can even scapegoat foreign powers or domestic enemies with. Win/win.

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