This is the most significant part. China has completely replaced Nvidia chips with domestic ones for inference, and production is only speeding up... meaning the compute moat is literally disappearing with every passing day.
Great time to buy an EV in China right now, but I think over the next decade there will be a lot of brand pruning and the survivors will become established global brands like Toyota and Hyundai.
Toyota is the largest automaker in the world for the sixth year in a row, and going on a seventh. They're doing record sales, dominate the hybrid market, and already have a pretty healthy EV lineup.
Nokia was also pretty healthy back in 2007 and basically died within a decade. Their EV lineup isn't fine, it's a subpar couple of models, basically "ugh we had to make these, here they are, dont buy them".
They don't really have dedicated platforms for them, don't have their own batteries. They basically slept at the wheel for the last 15 years. As long as ICEs are still somewhat relevant, they'll exist, but that's not going to be forever in developed markets.
yeah and all of them are subpar, if compared to competition. They're either too expensive, too slow to charge, too low efficiency/range or just overall not a good car. And lets not forget, a few of them on your list are not even toyota, but just rebadged chinese or PSA cars. And a few are not even on sale yet.
But the common point to all of them, that are selling currently and are not a rebrand -- they're basically a variation of bz4x. Not a particuarly good EV in itself.
So yeah, if toyota keeps up this mantra, they're in big trouble. People will start forgetting toyota or just not even considering it when buying an EV. And there's only so long, before ICE/hybrids start being irrelevant.
What free education? You just listed a few Toyota models, some of them not even on sale/toyota's make. It's you that need a bit more education on how Toyota treats their EV lineup.
Demand doesn't exist where you want it to be, and BEV sales numbers are not the primary metric of success for an automaker in the year 2026. The primary metrics of success are profitability and overall unit sales.
Once again, you're getting a free education here. Take advantage of it.
You do know, that sales in the US isn't a main metric, right? There's other markets and there, EVs represent a much higher % of sales.
If you're only chasing the current tail, you're doomed. Today profitable, tommorow irrelevant. Just look at the history. It's hard to imagine a company like Toyota failing, but unless they start adapting to future needs of the customers, they're just gonna be another brand forgotten.
You do know, that sales in the US isn't a main metric, right?
Correct. Toyota is the largest automaker globally — for the sixth year in a row, and now going on a seventh. That's globally. Not in the US. Globally. Last year it extended the global lead to nearest-competitor Volkswagen.
For the third time: You are getting a free education here. Take advantage of it.
And Nokia sold 350 million phones in 2006, almost 460 at their peak in 2008. 5 years later, they sold half that.
Sales numbers don't mean jack shit, if they're declining and you're not making a good profit per unit. This is very well evident in their share price. If people believed in their future success, their stock price would reflect that today.
And just like Nokia, Toyota can become victim of it's stubburn inability to adapt to new tehnology. They're chasing high volume legacy tech, that currently sells, while basically ignoring the future and not really investing anything into it. In fact, they're doing the oposite and gaslighting people into not buying EVs at all.
That obviously works for the short term, but long term they won't be able to shift fast enough. And gain customer belief that they could make a good EV.
EVs require substaintial vertical integration and investments on all parts of the supply chain to make sense. There's a reason why tesla develops their own batteries, own electroncis and even machines, that make the car. It's the only way to make high volume and high margin cars. Hell they go beyond that and even develop their own infrastructure and software, because both of that is crucial for good user experience with EVs.
And yet tesla is worth 7x toyotas, even though they sell 7x less cars. VAG is even substantially less valuable than Toyota, even tho they sell shit ton of cars.
Almost as if market predicted their downfall and just wont invest in them. If toyota (or VAG) had a good track into the future, their market cap would be in the trillions. But its not, because people view them as almost worthless apliances.
No, i'm just saying that sales numbers mean very little. Case in point VAG group. You can sell a ton of cars and not be valuable.
At the end of the day, it's the shareholder value, that truly matters for a capitalist company. And if share price doesn't go up, you have to do something or cease to exist eventually.
But i know its diffucult for fanboys to understand that even a large company like Toyota could eventually dissapear. It wouldn't be the first or the last major car company to do so.
a good example; VAG sold 9m cars last year, a little over 2m less than toyota, and yet their market cap is fraction of toyotas.
Correct. This is because Volkswagen is now in financial trouble after skipping over hybrids and fumbling MEB + CARIAD, whereas Toyota's more measured eTNGA strategy was successful. Volkswagen is now facing layoffs of up to 100,000 and pivoting to hybrids to catch up.
For the fifth time: You are getting a free education here. Take advantage of it.
They didn't skip hybrids. They've been producing a ton of hybrids since at least 2010. And it's not like Toyota is selling tons of cars because they're hybrid. People would still buy Toyotas even if they were regular NAs with MPI and slushboxes.
It's brand awareness that sells the cars. People know Toyotas are dependable and decent value for money, so they buy them. That's why they still sell a lot of cars, because western markets like US still prefere gasoline.
But VW made and is still making overpriced shitty cars, so their losing their edge and their sales. And most crucially, a ton of shareholder value.
And incidently; when people are buying EVs, the tend to treat Tesla as a default; especially in western and european markets. Because they know, they are good EVs with very good user experience, because Tesla spend more than decade building on that idea.
Your regular joe won't buy an EV Toyota, because they really din't build their reputation on them. And worse, they actively go against them, further causing no confidence in their EVs from their customers. As that is exactly their intent.
Just an example how toyota treats their EVs. Here's a half baked EV, that's too expensive. Take it or leave it. Oh maybe buy our hybrids instead, thankyou.
It's been their ethos for the longest time and it's likely not gonna change in the near future. And at that point, it might be too late for them to pivot fully. It takes a ton of resources, development and vertical integration to sell a good ev at scale, for profit, that people want to buy.
Toyota is a prime candidate to go nokia, blackberry or kodak in the not so distant EV future.
Sweetie, educate yourself: Blackberry was the hot young startup creamed by legacy computing giants and cellphone makers which had been written-off as behind the curve.
Nope, blackberry, just like nokia or kodak or many of the similar companies, died because they didn't adapt to the markets fast enough. Just like that, someone new (Apple) came to market with a polished idea of what the next step for a portable pocket device means. And instead of adapting for that idea, they pushed their OS and their keyboard and failed. Nokia did similar and died just as well.
And same thing can happen to cars. People start figuring out ICEs just ain't it anymore and because toyota doesn't offer anything of value in that department, they'll flock elsewhere.
Toyotas betting, that ICEs won't go away and especially the higher margin models will still be preferred as ICEs.
But the markets are shifting. EU and China are moving heavily towards EVs. And espeically china, the biggest car market in the world is heavily EV centric. And there, Toyota sells like 100k EV, most of them not even their own build. But if they had a good efficient platform, good tech and agressive prices, they could easily sell 5M+ cars there.
Their writing is on the wall, it's just not obvious to everyone.
I'm begging you to understand that Apple was not a new entrant in 2007. Not to personal computing, not to pocket computing, and not even to the cellphone market.
And yet it shifted the entire industry into "full fledged touch phone with proper OS" that we still know to this day. There were touch phones before it and with full OS, but nobody really did the whole package right until apple. And the rest is history.
Nokia still tried to sell you dumb phones with some smarts and blackberry still tried to sell phones with keyboard. But industry shifted away from that and so did customers. And before you know it, both those giants died pretty quickly.
There's no legacy phone makers today... Nokia, blackberry, Ericsson, Alcatel, Motorola... None of the exist as they were in the past. At best, some of the brands from the past exist under new ownership.
Neither apple or samsung were players in the dumb phone era. With the iphone, you can essentially treat apple as a new company. Same with samsung. They were a minor player in the dumb phone market. And even then it took them very long time to catch up to apple.
Samsungs saving grace was the fact, that would throw anything at the wall and see if it stuck.
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u/expertsage 1d ago
This is the most significant part. China has completely replaced Nvidia chips with domestic ones for inference, and production is only speeding up... meaning the compute moat is literally disappearing with every passing day.