Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

You mean American consumers. Toyota still has to consider the rest of the world while America is basically a shrinking market now.

View on HN

The US market is still large enough for Toyota to build several models that are sold only in North America. The Japanese market is also slowly shrinking due to demographic changes.

The US is roughly 30% of the world’s car spending, and if Toyota made a car only for the rest of the world, it would be more expensive than a competitor’s platform which is sold in EV and non-EV forms everywhere. An EV is still more expensive than the equivalent ICE and it would be even more expensive if it doesn’t share a platform.

An EV built on a dedicated platform doesn’t become more profitable than the shared platform version until it sells about two million copies. That’s because it costs $1B more in fixed costs for a dedicated EV manufacturing setup. If that car isn’t going to sell that many, it’s not worth making dedicated. In Europe EVs are still outsold by ICE 4 to 1. Even if I did sell two million copies, all you have done is recouped your $1B, not made any more profit than if you did the shared platform.

The cheapest car available in Australia is now an EV, and it's an EV-only platform.

https://thedriven.io/2026/09/16/australias-cheapest-new-car-...

That’s because that car is made in China and has already sold 1.45 million copies, many heavily subsidized elsewhere. So it has recouped its development costs. EVs are simpler and cheaper on a per-unit basis, only the development costs are more expensive. And BYD uses the same platform for a bunch of other subsidized EVs, too.

So, in other words, it's cheaper.

it doesn't matter what reason it's cheaper - consumers only care that it is.

I don't get why it matters that it's made in China but if you don't like that you could buy a European made Dacia Spring for around US$15,000 on the road.

1 in 3 new cars sold in the UK is electric and that number is growing. Spurred by the growing price of fossil fuels I think it's a safe bet it will be higher next year too.

It was 30% in the early 2000s, now it’s around 24%. Hence what I meant by falling. By volume it’s even worse: China is basically allowing many people in the developing world to own cars for the first time, as well as fuel them without expensive oil imports.

Yes, the famously meaningless US consumer…

Not meaningless, just less meaningful year over year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com