I always wonder how the Toyota and Honda of the world will do in the EV switch, when their main claim to fame was transmissions and engines that outlast the overall usefulness of the car.
With evs it seems those concerns are mostly gone, and now battery risk remains, which they currently have no advantage with.
I still think their early investment in hybrids was a great strategy.
If you look at the graph to the right on the link below, hybrids are still edging out battery EVs, although the trend lines are definitely in favor of battery EVs long term.
I think Honda will be fine. Toyota has lots of time as well I think as car buyers have a certain amount of brand loyalty.
If it were not for brand loyalty and emotional bias, BYD would probably be storming the world with their inexpensive EV options.
Tesla is in the biggest trouble I think. They have been a luxury brand despite a total lack of luxury. Once everybody catches up on EV range, what do they have? The charging network is the biggest advantage. Perhaps they should pivot to dominating that. Probably harder to avoid regulatory break-up on that front though I suppose.
There is not much battery risk these days though and less all the time. At some point, the problem for car makers is going to be that the batteries last too long.
With mechanical parts, nobody faults you if things start to fail after a decade or two. What will the car market look like when cars start maintaining peak performance for decades?
> If it were not for brand loyalty and emotional bias, BYD would probably be storming the world with their inexpensive EV options.
But they are. [0][1]
They're hitting large double digit % increase in sales every month and are very quickly catching up to Tesla's sales. Brand loyalty only buys you so much time when the competitors are half the cost.
I think Honda's brand is a genuine advantage. They know how to make good cars, and people trust them as a result.
I'm in my 40s, but still only on my second car, which is an old Honda Civic. I plan to drive it until I can purchase a second- or third-gen EV Civic. (Surely Honda eventually plans to make an EV Civic?)
That's somewhat my point. Kia has trouble because engines and transmissions are complicated. Hell, bad CVTs ruined all the good will Nissan had for 30 years.
But once you're making EVs, they seem a lot more reliable, which let's people go for style and function more than just pure reliability numbers.
The Nissan Sentra had CVT troubles too. Does the base Sentra have too much torque?
And if you go by that rule basically every faulty transmission would be excused. Chevy truck 4l60e transmissions suck too... Ohh if they were just paired with smaller lighter trucks with a V6 they'd have been fine!
But they weren't. And that's the failure of the engineering teams that chose them.
Drive units and stuff like charging controllers are just about the same reliability as gasoline engines and transmissions. I think that batteries are probably the most reliable part of the car.
With evs it seems those concerns are mostly gone, and now battery risk remains, which they currently have no advantage with.
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