| > VW haven’t taken Tesla market Sure. Tesla used to be the biggest BEV maker in Europe and now they're not. That's a lot of sales Tesla didn't make. > Companies like Toyota, Nissan and Honda could go either way but I’m not seeing promising signs of them taking the inevitability of EVs seriously. Toyota sold the most cars in 2020 and has been setting sales records in 2021: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Toyota-s-strong-sal... The idea that Toyota is somehow going away any time soon is faulty. > No, the Leaf isn't serious. The Leaf is one of the best selling EVs in the history of EVs. > The thing about Tesla is it’s hard to overstate the technology lead they have over rivals—particularly in terms of manufacturing costs through aggressive part simplification & count reduction Fantasy. The reality is Tesla is raising prices again and again: https://electrek.co/2021/07/22/tesla-tsla-increases-model-3-... Meanwhile Volkswagen is reducing prices on the ID.3 and ID.4. The cost savings of the common MEB platform enable them to do so. It lets them price models under the limits of government subsidies: https://www.electrive.com/2021/07/05/vw-drops-i-d-prices-in-... Volkswagen has built EVs to sell at competitive price points. Whatever happened to that $35k Model 3? |
Nobody is saying Toyota are "going away". They will remain a major auto-maker, but I doubt they'll be in first or second place in 2030. It all depends on how quickly the economy car segment transitions from ICE to EV.
Toyota is a hybrid leader but an EV laggard. Their decision to dip toes into many electrification strategies is going to prove costly and wasteful.
> The Leaf is one of the best selling EVs in the history of EVs.
Despite being on the market for eleven years, it's already a distant second to the Tesla Model 3. Tesla sold more EVs in one year (2020) than Nissan has sold in a decade (2010-2020). And the future isn't looking bright: 2020 was the worst sales year ever for the Leaf.
The Nissan Leaf is much like the Prius was a decade ago, a darling of certain early adopters with near-zero mainstream appeal. But at least Toyota took their hybrid investments and successfully applied them to mainstream vehicles like the RAV4, Highlander and Camry. Nissan haven't leveraged their EV investments, they squandered them.
> The reality is Tesla is raising prices again and again
Tesla have been raising and lowering prices as their costs have changed. Recently the cost of raw materials like steel, aluminium, copper and lithium have skyrocketed.
This is what happens when you don't have a network of dealers: you can't conceal month-to-month manufacturer price fluctuations behind dealership negotiation.
> Meanwhile Volkswagen is reducing prices on the ID.3 and ID.4.
Because they flopped. For all the hype surrounding their launch, ID.3 and ID.4 are outclassed in nearly every respect by equivalent EVs from Hyundai—including range, efficiency, performance and driving dynamics. Teardowns of the ID.4 have shown that MEB isn't even a real EV platform. It was all hype.