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Comment by KLexpat | Hacker News Reader

Toyota is in a much better position than E.U. or U.S. manufacturers, except for Tesla.

In the early 00's, the EU introduced emmissions regulations focused on Carbon, which didn't take sulphur into account. That's why Volkswagen and others like Mercedes focused so heavily on small diesel turbo engines, and explains the 2005-2010 or so diesel vehicle boom.

American manufacturers mostly just made big gas sonking vehicles running on petrol

Japanese manufacturers developed the Prius and other hybrid-electric products and were early to the game. Remember that the Toyota Prius Hybrid Electric vehicle was released in 1997. 1997! They currently sell four million units a year of Prius alone, and definitely have the knowledge + capacity to mass produce EV's

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I think the bigger risk is in the self driving component. If Tesla or another company pull this off, catchup could take 10+ years for other companies.

All else remaining equal who will buy a car you have to drive when you can avoid it, not least to add taxi, trucking and delivery service fleet purchases.

In addition as this market progresses I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace so quality of system will be huge. Not many are going to buy the cars that have 3x the accidents or too many famous mess ups.

Batteries are important but if I was an auto manufacturer the self driving component would keep me up at night.

> I think the bigger risk is in the self driving component.

What self driving component? TFA is about batteries.

If you mean, self driving is a bigger competitive advantage, and that's a bigger risk to Toyota/Japan Inc... well, no.

Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up. The total addressable market is over 100M vehicles per year, and self driving isn't going to be a factor in most people's purchase decisions for at least a decade. (More cars are sold in Asia than in the USA.)

> I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace.

Accidents are reduced by advanced vehicle safety systems: "self stopping", not self driving. Those systems can be fitted--even retrofitted--to any vehicle. [Edit: and they are being fitted to more and more vehicles.] This is one of the most sad and tired arguments for self driving.

I've always been bearish on self driving tech ever being adequate, but you bring up a point I haven't heard before, how many people actually want their car to drive itself? I mean I love radar cruise in a traffic jam, but having to drive my car actually is not a problem.

If my car could drive itself on the interstate highways, I'd gladly take days-long road trips. Let it drive itself while I work or sleep.

Not ideal for the environment, admittedly.

> Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up.

Tesla’s CAGR on number of vehicles produced from 2014 to 2020 has been 55%.

> “To put this number in perspective, Microsoft first broke $3 billion in sales in fiscal year 1993, generating $3.7 billion in revenue. ...Six years later Microsoft did $19.7 billion in revenue, which was a CAGR of 32.1%.”

Sustaining 55% CAGR for 6 years after hitting $3 billion is mind-numbing face-melting software monopoly level growth beyond what even M$FT achieved in its glory days.

It was thought this level of compound annual growth was simply just beyond the realm of possibility in the automotive sector, let alone the EV automotive sector.

Obviously this is what we all want to hear. I just think there should have been iterations on the Prius by now that kept pushing what it means to be an EV. Fuel efficiency and MPG should no longer be in our dictionary.

Explain Toyota's fascination with hydrogen fuel-cells. I loved my 2000s era Prius for what it was. I have lost any hope Toyota can catch up with Tesla now.

Battery tech wasn't that good back then. I think the consumer electronics battery boom (i.e. putting batteries in cellphones, laptops, etc) has advanced the tech considerably. Not my area of expertise though

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