in the australian market theres often comparison between how BYD/(chinese brands) may unseat Tesla (as the scale EV first mover), but I haven't seen what I think is the prize, which is BYD want to take on Toyota as the de facto king of global car making. They want the whole car market, not just EV and are already setup to take that on.
Especially as Toyota seems structurally unable to create a good EV. They produced one completely bare-bones model 30 years ago and never expanded past that. At least they're keeping some knowledge of the parts by having PHEVs, but I don't think they're on the leading edge of anything. Maybe they don't need to be and can buy everything from other suppliers, but they're going to be doing a whole lot less than they currently do and not sure they'll keep their profit margin.
Toyota hybrids are full hybrids however, not mild hybrids like other manufactures, so all you really need is a bigger battery and charger. My 10 year old RAV4 Hybrid (not plug-in) can deliver 160kW just from the electric motors, without the engine. That's 3x a Dacia Spring. They have the technology for motors and control electronics, and they know it works long term without issues.
Most of the European EVs are basically just electric city cars, unable to drive long ranges due to small batteries and limited fast charging. And most of them after 100,000km will need a new battery. Doesn't really fit in with Toyota's 'long term reliability' stance.
I can't blame Toyota for waiting for the technology to mature before they go all in on EVs. Plus they do have the bz4x / RX which are full EVs you can buy today.
> Most of the European EVs are basically just electric city cars, unable to drive long ranges due to small batteries and limited fast charging. And most of them after 100,000km will need a new battery. Doesn't really fit in with Toyota's 'long term reliability' stance.
Australian cities must be enormous for this statement to make any semblance of sense.
Not that big, but absolutely enourmous distances between them. The inter-city highway infrastructure is lacking in EV chargers, but it's getting better.
"Most of the European EVs are basically just electric city cars, unable to drive long ranges due to small batteries and limited fast charging"
The top 10 most sold European EVs in Europe in 2025 were the Skoda Elroq, VW ID.7, VW ID.3, Skoda Enyaq, BMW iX1, Audi Q4 e-tron, VW ID.4, VW ID.Buzz, Audi Q6 e-tron and Volvo EX30. All but the iX1, the ID.Buzz and the EX30 you can get with >300 miles range. All but the iX1, the Q4 and the EX30 you can get with >150 kW DC charging.
Whether any of these is a city car depends on your definition; to me a city car is something like a Toyota Aygo. The current version, the Toyota Aygo X, has an overall length of 3700 mm. The shortest car in the top 10 list from earlier is the Volvo EX30 at ~4200 mm. I think being 0.5 m longer than an Aygo disqualifies even the Volvo from being a city car.
That's why I said they're not necessarily out of the running, like Mazda or Subaru. But that technology isn't quite right; it's two motors, connected to a planetary gearset and in a conventional location to a gasoline engine. They're still thinking "engine here, transmission there, differential in this part" and not working on "how can we reduce cost if we don't have one prime mover that gets really hot". Their motors aren't the most efficient technology and so they aren't learning as much as their competitors are who are shipping lighter, more-powerful motors.
And they could still be right. The future could be 100-mi-EV PHEVs with ever-smaller engines and they'd be the best at it. But I think BYD will prove that wrong outside the USA.
I've been pondering this, especially given that Japan is not an oil-producing country, and concluded: it's the internal politics of the engine group.
That is, the people who design engines and run the engines division have sufficient heft within the organization that they can prevent a good car being made that doesn't have an engine in it.
It's sort of worked out for them as they have a big niche in the taxi market, and other high milage users who've not taken the EV plunge yet. If you want the most efficient vehicle that still uses petrol, buy a Toyota.
To me it feels like Toyota have over-committed to parallel hybrids, because they did them first and best, and are now unwilling to move on (to EVs and serial hybrids) even now that it's past time.
the AI umbrella has been helpful to my BigCorp to justify more machine learning work, or discrete optimisation and scheduling problems
agentic ai which is a huge buzz in enterprise feels more like workflow and rpa (again) and people misunderstanding that getting the happy flow working is only 20% of the job.
I (still!) have an uncle who had a similar mindset, broke his leg half way through a race and only realised when he stopped at the end, that he couldnt walk any further
finally when they had to (successfully) defib him during a race, that shook him into assessing his health not running for the sake of running
There's a mindset with distance runners that I have seen over and over, just sometimes way too much of a generally good thing
especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.
In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.
I somewhat resonate with this. Working in mature industries where competition has condensed down to larger players with enormous scale and embedded product distribution, don't need to compete _much_ on innovation or product, just on price.
I don't think specifically AI has done this compared to a broader view of constant stream of digitilisation of every departments function.
Orgs don't need grads to learn the ropes from the bottom and make their way up the career ladder, when the ladders might only be 3-4 rungs high now.
When seeing the approach to how Elon/DOGE applied themselves to air traffic control after the incidents, I'm not falling into the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This group is just incompetent and going to re-learn all the mistakes within each domain that led to industry getting to where it has through a series of hard won lessons.
One would hope so.. they've already begun blaming things like "DEI" so I find it unlikely. It will probably be decades (if ever) before the lessons are relearned and implemented.
the existing systems deliver the international standards for air traffic management that needs to move in sync for all parties, ATC, Airports, Airlines, Manufacturers and Regulators. Technology suppliers to each of those parties where they differ will need to be involved in anything material.
there are many systems involved to manage different parts of flight, are built to spec and integrated deeply across all the parties
even if the systems are old in some cases, they deliver the agreed standards, so updates need to be agreed via organisations like ICAO or IATA and rolled out via a predictable timeline through a managed change process
this is all integrated with human processes, such as for the flight deck
Having been through similar processes with family, scouring medical journals and trials for the answer as if its stack overflow, you're in a period of high stress I think I can understand that may have led to the authors perspective and expectations shaping the narrative here.
I'm absolutely not criticizing the author. I can understand how you'd latch on to any little signal of hope in this kind of a situation.
Hell, I'd go so far as to say that the oncologists who are saying this stuff probably think they're doing the right thing, and are just trying to give desperate people something to hang on to. It's difficult. But it's still necessary to make it clear what these trials are.
the australian economy digs up dirt from the ground and sells it for a lot, it covers all our issues. theres a lot more that could be said, but it fundamentally comes down to that
Having played counter-strike on dial-up '99 and not having unlimited internet time, the bots - Botman, PODbot, NNBot and many others using neural nets was ground breaking then.
The goals of those niche bots were certainly different but in some ways the recent hype doesn't surprise me as much having experienced that period too.
I reflect that the limited internet then drove innovation in offline play that had really stagnanted till recently, I'm looking forward to the first game that really pushes the limit with their NPCs using some of this new tech
