They won’t go anywhere, but their hydrogen program will eventually be a huge write down.
Comment on “We cannot support it:” Polestar follows Tesla out of car lobby over Toyota led campaign
notgold@aussie.zone 6 months agoOffsetting that dominant buyer inclination were record sales of eco-friendly cars, namely battery-electric vehicles (87,212, +161.1%), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (11,212, +88.8%) and the sought-after traditional hybrid cars, still the most popular alternative-fuel options with 98,439 units sold last year (+20.3%). Of the latter, Toyota alone sold 72,815 petrol-electric cars, representing 74 per cent of hybrid vehicle sales across all brands as well as 31.5 per cent of Toyota’s overall sales.
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Toyota sold twice as many vehicles as the next best manufacturer. They dominate the SUV, van, Ute markets. I can’t see them going anywhere soon.
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
zurohki@aussie.zone 6 months ago
Nokia phones and Kodak cameras were huge once. Then technology advanced and they didn’t.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 6 months ago
Upvoting from a Nokia phone
moitoi@feddit.de 6 months ago
Nokia Android smartphones are actually HMC smartphone.
ajsadauskas@aus.social 6 months ago
@moitoi @unionagainstdhmo It's a bit more complicated than that.
So Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for around US$7.5 billion in 2013.
Microsoft licensed the rights to use the Nokia brand for 10 years (but eventually rebranded the phones to Microsoft Lumia).
The old Nokia continues to make commercial communications equipment: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2014/04/25/nokia-completes-sale-of-substantially-all-of-its-devices-services-business-to-microsoft/
By 2015, Microsoft realised it screwed up and wrote down the entire value of the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone business: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2945371/microsoft-writes-off-76b-admits-failure-of-nokia-acquisition.html
Meanwhile, a group of former Nokia employees, with financial backing from Nokia, set up a new company called HMD Global.
Then HMD Global bought most of the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone business off Microsoft for $350 million (including the licence to use the Nokia brand).
Foxconn bought the manufacturing, distribution and sales divisions. Foxconn then signed an agreement with HMD to build phones for HMD using those assets: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-returns-phone-market-microsoft-sells-brand-hmd-foxconn
So when you buy a HMD phone, you're buying from a company that's partly owned by Nokia, managed by ex-Nokia people, designed by the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone division, and built by the former Nokia/Lumia mobile phone division (through Foxconn).
It's pretty much a Nokia phone.
ajsadauskas@aus.social 6 months ago
@zurohki @notgold In some ways, it's also a tech standards war, a bit like VHS vs Betamax. Or HD-DVD vs BluRay. Or Windows Phone vs Android.
Right now, it looks like most of the auto industry is going in the direction of BEVs, just like most of the home electronics industry went with VHS in the '80s.
Meanwhile, Toyota is sticking with hydrogen.
The best technology doesn't always win a standards war. There are some benefits to green hydrogen cars over BEVs, just like Beta had some benefits over VHS.
The problem with one company supporting one standard when the rest of the industry goes the other way is that it can get expensive.
You have most of the economies of scale with the industry-leading technology. That tends to make it cheaper for consumers.
You have a bigger ecosystem of companies and more infrastructure supporting the industry standard.
That means a company that uses the non-standard technology typically has to do more work (and has more costs) to support it.
At this point, Tesla doesn't have to spend a lot of money to roll out its own EV charging stations, because there's a growing ecosystem.of companies doing it.
However, if hydrogen doesn't become the industry standard fuel for cars and Toyota wants to stick with it, then it might need to cover some of the costs of rolling out hydrogen refueling itself.
A company like Apple, which has a large and loyal customer base, can get away with charging customers more to use its own standards.
I'm not sure Toyota does.
None of that in itself means Toyota will go out of business. But it will be a lot more challenging.
zurohki@aussie.zone 6 months ago
As far as I can tell, the only benefit is green hydrogen can be faster to fill as long as the filling station has had a rest between cars.
The disadvantages include some killers: the woeful energy efficiency ensures the cost of driving a FCEV can never be less than three times the cost of driving the same distance in a BEV, and that’s even if someone just waves a magic wand and a trillion dollars worth of hydrogen infrastructure appears out of thin air.
Fuel cell EVs kind of make sense as plug-in hybrids, where you have around 80km of battery range for daily use and use hydrogen for longer trips. You need a lot less filling stations and spend a lot less time using expensive hydrogen that way, but that’s not Toyota’s vision.
Comparing charging infrastructure and hydrogen infrastructure isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison, because charging reuses a lot of pre-existing infrastructure. You can buy and drive an EV with zero charging stations, just plugging it in to an outlet in your garage overnight. In the early days there was a lot of charging from caravan parks and the like. I’ve got a portable charger that plugs in to the three phase outlets you find in parks and showgrounds. There’s no hydrogen equivalent to any of that, 100% of your energy needs to come from a FCEV filling station.
No1@aussie.zone 6 months ago
I get this. But my brain just can’t wrap itself around that you have the complexity and disadvantages of both systems in the one vehicle.too.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Microsoft are the main reason Nokia aren’t what they used to be, Kodak have nobody to blame but themselves.
lordriffington@aussie.zone 6 months ago
Nokia dragged their feet on smart phones and paid the price. The fact that they went with Microsoft when they did start making smart phones almost certainly didn’t help matters, but they were already way behind at that point.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Eh, even today there’s a market for borderline indestructible phones with buttons, I don’t think they had entirely lost the plot.
I do think they’d have caught up fast if it wasn’t for Microsoft.
Bezier@suppo.fi 6 months ago
Nokia’s phone division was very poorly led for a long time before Windows Phone happened.