Dashboard Feb-May 2013

looking good!

 

Tesla model S went down?

 

Tesla still on, or above, 20k+ annual sales

Glad to see the Leaf on a 25k annual trend.

Fuel prices moderate, yet moderately priced fuel efficient car sales are rising.

Maybe this is a sensible economic recovery!

Always happy to see growth in Toyoya numbers

Good stuff. Thanks Bob!

 

So many hybrid models, yet so few successes in the market.

 

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The arrival of the Cruze diesel should be interesting. Will it just steal sales from the Germans, or is there an untapped market for diesels? People that aren't in the market for a luxury brand, and are put off of VW for some reason.

 

What's up with PiP? Been out over a year. Those 600 ish sales can't only be due to it in limited states.

Too many non-performers in hybrid marketplace. Obviously liftback is the sweet spot. Still think Honda will be the first to carbon the liftback with a full hybrid Insight. Either they drop the current Insight, or copy Prius full out, 'cause Insight is a waste now.

 

Toyota saw that coming (again) and planned accordingly (again).

Avoiding fallout worked well in the past.

Knowing how much Volt already messed up the marked and how much confusion the Ford & Honda plug-in hybrids would add, I saw the hold back as a good move. After all, it's better to build up real-world data in the meantime anyway... and the first owners are only hitting their first annual cycle now.

 

Dealers don't want to sell it, and some Toyota marketing seems anti lithium batteries which the cars have. Toyota picked a capacity bellow what the average american driver wanted. They can get back on track by better marketing support of the vehicles and a larger battery size in the next generation. Look at the insight lessons learned. Honda cheaped out on the hybrid, thinking people would buy it instead of the prius because it cost less.

I think toyota marketing thought they could cheap out, and people would just buy it because it had the toyota name on it. Plenty of time for them to fix this bad assumption in the Gen IV.

 

Funny how you claim on monday you saw that toyota saw it comming during the game. Guess you forgot to tell anyone about your insights into their insights while you were posting about other aspects of sales.

Remember when you said

That was only a few months ago... no hint of a hidden master plan to keep sales low to gather data
It was blaming it on other things then. Been a whole year an things are not better.


And remember even longer ago when you said..

So do you have any citations to back up your claims that Toyota saw it coming and/or that this is all just part of their brilliant master plan?

 

Oops! Bashing Toyota with its PIP sales numbers because only PIP did not do well?
I don't good numbers from those who did not "cheap out" either.
.

 

when you say 'cheaped out', do you feel they should have put in a bigger battery and charged more, or lowered margin?

 

Recognizing the pattern is pretty easy after so many rollouts. It's actually really nice that they are willing to alter plans based on market conditions, despite knowing some will attempt to paint it as failure.

They like to leave out important detail, like PIP only being available in 15 states and the fact that it's a profitable approach. Some of the bashing is also an attempt to draw focus away from the fact that purpose is so clear. I've seen the goals for Volt evaded on a regular basis.

That's parroting of the spin we hear that Toyota was desperate to deliver some type of plug-in quickly in response to Volt, rather than acknowledging that Prius was designed for greater battery & motor use right from the start.

 

IMO, a larger battery is needed. 40 miles EV per charge seems to be a sweet spot for PHEV, 200 miles for BEV.

 

Larger battery and charged more before tax credit. This wouldn't have cost the customers more. THis is not bashing either. The numbers speak for themselves. The fanbois claimed Toyota's go small approach would greatly outsell the other makers. They definitely had market share going for them. By now the prius phv was to be killing the volt, leaf, and tesla because people would not pay for those batteries, or so the story went. The numbers seem to speak for themselves, instead of crushing these vehicles, the phv is lagging behind. THen there is the excuse that toyota could be selling many more if they sold in other states. Well the states are not preventing them. Austin Energy even reached out to Toyota to try to work with dealers to help sell plug-ins. They did this with all the makers. Toyota said, no thanks, we don't need any help at all. My guess is the national roll out will be on the next generation car.

Toyota has the luxury of loyal customers, and can correct this in the next version.

 

i'm not sure how much more battery they could fit in the gen III.

 

To me, this is not some distant issue. My 2001 Prius is not going to last forever and the next vehicle is going to be a plug in hybrid by someone. It's not an automatic decision to go with Toyota. The entire reason for getting a PHEV is to go completely electric for the daily commute. Cannot do it in a PiP. Can do it in a Volt. Have not figured out what happens in a Ford. And then Tesla is determined to make it irrelevant.

 

But john says the " Prius was designed for greater battery & motor use right from the start."
So how cannot have room for a meaningful sized PHEV battery. The Great John who has inside information toyota planning says it was designed for a bigger battery. If the packed all they could fit into the Gen III and that is insufficient, then it would be a reasonable conclusion that the PHV was just a response to being caught behind, much just an Energi.


The whole point of the battery sized tax credit was to incentivize larger batteries for PHEVs and BEVs. Austin was correct that Toyota could probably have offered a bigger battery and neither the customer or the company would have had to pay more. They margin might have been slightly lower but their actual gross profit would probably have been about the same.