Electric Vehicles

I hate that slate is backed by Jeff Bezos I'm sure he'll find a way to fit some spyware or ai in there. I really can't see him backing it for altruistic reasons

Unfortunately it looks like their pricing is creeping up into "regular EV" territory. I like the concept and hope I'm wrong.

I do like the Slate, and I ordered one immediately, but I so wish they made a car instead of a dumb truck with terrible aero and a bed I'm never going to use.

I know there's a SUV package but certainly that will add a huge premium to the price. I'm pretty sure the "mid-20s" is the "entry" price and bottom-dollar to get eyeballs and then all the upgrades will be crazy overpriced.

Chinese EVs are cheaper because the components are made in the same country, often in the same city, and perhaps in the factory down the street. Transporting stuff costs money and forward-thinking industrial planning can reduce these costs.

Yup. A huge part of the cost is the batteries, the electric motors, the sensors and controllers that manage charging and discharging.

Looking around at home battery backup solutions, for example, simply having the same storage capacity as an EV (50-75 kwh) can cost almost as much as an EV itself.

Jackery has add on batteries for about $1000 for 5 kwh, Ecoflow and Anker Solix cost $2000 for 6 kwh.

At those prices, a 60kwh battery pack in an EV basically represents $12,000 to $20,000 in battery cost alone, plus a whole system around charging it and using it for an electric motor, and then a whole car around that.

It's not a perfect comparison, but it does show that the actual material cost of what goes into an EV is primarily the electric drivetrain and battery.

My GluckGluck9000 has a huge touchscreen which only knocks off 100 miles of range while I’m gooning

Conservativism is a disease for any society.

Yes, it is essentially a contagion on societies and it is growing like crazy right now. We must understand this threat for what it is.

Too many people look at the US and think we are uniquely stupid when the difference is our conservatives are more empowered and worshipped than in other countries. It is a dangerous mistake to think there aren't rightwing fascist ignorant assholes who want to turn your country into a place like the US no matter where you are, anywhere on earth.

Japanese automakers put their fingers in their ears and went “na na na na!”

Katamari damacy?

Or like Blockbuster refusing to adapt, and also not buying Netflix for cheap twice when they had the chance. Or Kodak literally creating the digital camera...

At the same time, the sentiment common in this thread way overstates things. Toyota is continuing to make profits at this very moment, and has the cash on hand (and future profits) to be able to afford to pivot slowly.

If the future is all battery based EVs, there's no reason to believe that this particular company won't survive the transition. They have the supply chain already in place for batteries and electric motors, and have been public about batteries being supply constrained so that they believe that building hybrids with smaller capacity batteries is a better use of that existing supply. It's a self-serving position that one should be somewhat skeptical about, but they're such a huge company they have to think about scale in a way that smaller manufacturers don't have to worry about.

They've been talking a big game about not wanting to make the switch until battery tech and volume gets up to its standards, but they can actually afford to wait. They talk a big game about waiting for solid state battery tech, and while other companies can't afford to wait another 3-5 years for mass production to catch up, Toyota actually can.

And, even before then, Toyota is slowly pivoting to EVs anyway. Their plug in hybrid lineup targets some of their most popular models (Prius, Rav4). On the all-electric front, the bz is available today, and the EV Highlander and the EV Lexus ES are going to be competing side by side with the hybrid counterparts (with the ES selling at a lower MSRP than its hybrid counterparts and the Highlander expected to do similar). They can afford to actually test the market to see whether sales volume data informs how they allocate production resources to EVs versus hybrids.

I expect they'll survive. They probably won't find their way back to #1, but there's plenty of reason to believe they'll still be selling lots of cars profitably in 10 years.