Toyota is first and foremost a car company. Top notch car, fifth-rate tech.
"Taking the skin off the Model Y, it was truly a work of art. It's unbelievable,"
"It's a whole different manufacturing philosophy," while another added, “We need a new platform designed as a blank-sheet EV."
2. Toyota is behind. Check what the Chinese and Germans are doing. Though you can't really do that since most of those cars aren't sold in the US.
Volkswagen had a market share of ICE cars of ~20%, for EVs it's now closer to 1%. EVs are way easier to build and a lot of Chinese companies are doing it successfully. They are offering cheaper EVs. They are selling in Mideast/Asia and now start to enter Europe as well.
None of these cars is particularly bad - while I'd still take the Korean EVs before anything else today, the Chinese are coming. German manufacturers only produce premium level cars few people can afford and they produce them badly. ID.3 is too expensive for its segment and too much of the car just doesnt work well.
>What stands out most is Tesla's integrated central control unit, or "full self-driving computer." Also known as Hardware 3, this little piece of tech is the company's biggest weapon in the burgeoning EV market. It could end the auto industry supply chain as we know it. One stunned engineer from a major Japanese automaker examined the computer and declared, "We cannot do it."
https://www.thedrive.com/news/44068/over-10-percent-of-tesla...
The downside, of course, being that most of their offerings appear quite, uh, boring.
Upside? Anecdotally, my 26 year old Toyota Land Cruiser (With 300k miles on it!) has cost me less in workshop visits and parts over the 140k miles I've owned it than the missus' 2016 VW Passat has over 30k miles of ownership. And the Passat isn't a bad car at all. Has the Land Cruiser beat on fuel economy, though.
The subsidies the government introduced over a decade ago to incentive sales were pretty cray. They even exempted electric cars from road tolls. (This has been removed) has boosted the sale of electric cars enormously- Norway has the most e-cars per capita in the world. At least last time I checked.
As a result, I have a lot of friends and coworkers that own Telas. Nearly all love them and would not trade.
However, the build quality is subpar. Nearly all have had their car in the shop at least once. The rather extreme lack of spare parts has been a big problem for the owners. I think this has been improved for a while but I am not certain. Some had to wait months for a spare part needed to fix their problems.
Primarily it has been water leaks, parts that are not "fitting together" right in interior and exterior. The second is the touchpad control system. I have wondered if this could in part be due to the extreme cold we have every now and again.
But like I said the owers are still in love with their cars and would not trade it.
The newer Supras and now GR Corolla also seem pretty exciting to me. Toyota is also (one of) the last manufacturer still making mid-sized trucks with manual transmissions.
And which "tech" is top notch with Tesla, self driving? Their marketing is more than just incredibly good so.
What has changed is the technology behind controlling those cars. On that front, it surprises me in absolutely no way that Tesla, an information technology company, does business in ways that the car industry can't even dream of.
But ok, only software is tech, got it. So when exactly is mechanical engineering no longer a STEM discipline? Seriously, that take is simple hybris of the software crowd, and totally ignoring all the hardware tech all of us use all the time. But ok, a while ago the only measure of car quality was chassis panel fitting (if there ever was a truely German over engineering nonsense, that is it), now it is the feel of the car entertainment system. To each generation their own marketing abuse of technology I guess.
So only new technology is technology? What a daft definition.
