You were making a claim that Toyota won’t overtake the Korean manufacturers in the US anytime soon. I’m sharing data that shows that Toyota is already on the cusp of overtaking them by the end of this year, and might even overtake GM for #2 within a year after that.

EV sales are still unfortunately less than 10% of new car sales in the US. It’s still early days for the US market, so being slow to market isn’t going to be a significant disadvantage.

I’m saying that you’re holding up Korean brands as some kind of dominant sales leader, and they really aren’t. For Q2 2026, Genesis (396), Hyundai (14,274), and Kia (7,348) add up to 22,018 EVs sold.

Toyota (11,826, up from 3,639 a year before) and Lexus (3,358, up from 2,325 a year before) is already more than halfway caught up at 15,184 for the quarter, and Toyota is now actually launching EV models that have the same model names as established, successful ICE/Hybrid models. The EV Lexus ES is cheaper than the gasoline powered counterpart, and the Highlander will launch the first EV under an established big-selling model name.

At this rate, I expect Toyota to outsell Hyundai/Kia in EVs maybe within a year. Before this next generation Corolla EV even launches.

energy storage (e.g., batteries)

Energy storage isn’t batteries.

The phrase “e.g.” means “for example” and is used to describe a subset of the previous term. It doesn’t need to mean the exact same thing.

We can say things like “humans consume resources (e.g., fresh water)” and that would be a valid sentence.

Plus it’s fair to expect that in the next 10 years, the vast majority of grid scale energy storage worldwide is going to be electrical batteries. Gravity storage just can’t compete except in very limited geographical and geological circumstances.

Up-front manufacturing expertise matters, but I really do think that Toyota has relevant expertise in some other areas that, as you mention, Chinese manufacturers haven’t yet proven themselves.

First, ongoing maintenance and parts support is really important. There will be collisions. There will be wear and tear. The parts supply chain and maintenance/repair documentation remains an important part of a manufacturer’s ongoing reputation for quality. As newer automakers mature, we’ll see where each one shakes up in the overall rankings for ongoing support of 5, 10, or 20 year old vehicles.

Second, an interesting thing is how automakers refresh updates by model year or even model generations. Does launching a new generation move things smoothly as the older ones are sold off and the newer model starts to show up? Interestingly, Toyota has a gap developing right now as it moves the Highlander from ICE/hybrid to full EV, with an unexpected delay in production of the new assembly line, so that it might have no Highlanders available for sale for a few months. That’s the kind of challenge that different automakers will need to deal with. Tesla refreshes its models slower than a lot of traditional automakers, and that might make a difference in long term competition.

And one big advantage Toyota has over most traditional automakers is that it has the suppliers and supply chains for millions of batteries and electric motors per year. They’re smaller capacity (usually less than 5 kWh for hybrids and less than 10 kWh for plug-in hybrids) than a typical full EV battery (usually 50-100 kWh), but things like regenerative braking and electric motors are well within their engineering expertise.

Another big advantage that Toyota has over startups is its very deep pockets where it can draw on its current profits and revenue to take the time to get things right, without relying on external financing from investors. They have the financial runway to afford to make a few mistakes on the way.

Korean auto brands have already flooded the US market

Hyundai/Kia new EV sales in the US in 2025 was about 108,000. source

Toyota sold about 248,000 new Corollas in North America in 2025. source

Or, put another way, Toyota sold over 2.5 million new cars in North America while total EV sales in the US were about 1.3 million.

There’s plenty of room for new entrants to compete in the US EV market, and probably Canada.

Also, Toyota is committing to competing globally against the Chinese automakers. They’re building out a new factory in Shanghai to produce the EV version of the Lexus ES, an electrified version of one of their best selling sedans (and also a major part of their EV strategy in North America).

They have more time than any traditional automaker to get it right, because they already have the current profits to be able to build things out. They’re late to the game, but this competition will still play out for decades.

Tbf a lot of fuck you money people are also relatively frugal and not stupid enough to buy a Bentley, especially for their own car.

Many are, some aren’t. The typical Bentley owner spends a lower percentage of their incomes/wealth on automotive expenses, anyway, because the people rich enough to buy one tend to be so rich that no car can really make a dent in their finances.

Here’s a direct link to the white paper, instead of this low quality repost summary.

The analysis models that if 2024 law had remained in effect (the 2024 baseline), that consumer behavior would have shifted things up to 48% EV market share for new vehicles in 2030, but that the policy changes will reduce that number to about 39.4%.

They modeled consumer behavior based on EV adoption in 2023, looking at how their EV purchasing decisions were influenced by vehicle price, local charger availability, local gasoline prices, local electricity prices. Based on the very high gasoline prices of 2026, the widespread availability of chargers, both public and private installations, and the shrinking price differential between EV and gasoline vehicles, the model predicts that a substantial number of new car buyers (already relatively affluent compared with the general population) will choose new EVs.

I don’t know enough to critique their consumer behavior model, but that’s what they did.

And I’m saying that this particular issue is completely inconsequential. Based on worst case scenario assumptions (fully discharging a 15 Wh battery down to 0% every day, waste heat equal to 100% of the charge, all electricity from coal), you’re only using a 5.4 kWh per year, or about 2.5 kg of coal, about 4.6 kg of CO2 emissions.

That’s about 170g/6 oz of beef (27 kg CO2/kg beef). Commit to eating (or wasting) one less burger per year and you’ve made up for the worst case scenario, calculated using unrealistically large assumptions.

Or that’s 1.9 L/0.5 gallon of gasoline. Drive 25 km/15 miles less per year.

More realistically, we’re probably talking 80% charge per night, 80% efficiency, and an electricity mix that generates the US average CO2 emissions of 0.384 kg/kWh. That cuts it down to 3 Wh/day, 1.1 kWh/year, and about 0.42 kg of CO2.

That’s 16g of beef, or 0.17 L of gasoline.

The real impact comes from changes around the bigger uses of energy. Focus on the things using many orders of magnitude more energy, within your control: transportation, climate control, food choices. Consumer electronics are less than a rounding error.

Reaching for a cable costs a second more and would save around 10000 tons of coal per year (based on your calculation) if the equivalent of coal power plants were reduced by the same amount.

You can’t have it both ways. If you’re counting the energy consumption of 8.3 billion people consuming 15 Wh, 365 times, then you’re also talking about “a second” for each, or 3 trillion seconds, or 95,000 years of time saved in exchange for that coal.

If everyone in the world population of 8.3 billion wasted that much energy per year (5.4 kWh), that would represent a global increase of 44.8 terawatt hours.

Global energy use was about 177,000 terawatt hours in 2025 so that represents about 0.025% of total energy use.

Consumer electronics, especially mobile devices, just don’t use any significant amount of energy worth talking about, and has basically no effect on overall demand. Making them half as efficient wouldn’t be noticeable on any scale.

For comparison, a liter of gasoline contains 8.9 kWh of stored energy. There’s probably a lot more to gain by just getting people to drive something like 5 km less per year, rather than trying to squeeze just a little bit more efficiency out of their phone chargers.

For phones, though, the absolute amount of energy is so low that a high percentage loss doesn’t actually mean that much. A typical smartphone battery is about 15 Wh, so charging it literally every day for a year consumes 5.4 kWh. Doubling that won’t make a noticeable difference to your energy consumption, the heat released in your home, your electric bill, etc.

That’s why small device chargers are engineered without much regard for efficiency. For that specific application, having long flexible light cables is better than making sure it squeezes every bit of efficiency out of it.

For cars, though, even a 10% loss can make a difference.

They should make it so that private aircraft get the same mileage allowance as private cars, 76 cents per mile this year.

Ethiopia is special in that they have immense hydro power capacity, and are building more. For them, energy independence means electrified transport, rather than powering transportation from imported fossil fuels.

Most of that oil would’ve burned anyway, just a little bit at a time, inside a combustion chamber, after being refined and distributed somewhere.

When an oil pipeline or well catches fire, it burns in a spectacularly dirty way, but the net CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is actually reduced from shutting down that facility so that it can’t process and export as much oil anymore. Meanwhile, the logistics and pricing effects probably destroy demand, so that the world as a whole burns less oil afterward.

Now they cost 4 times as much

Pricing on cars with similar features and performance have been going up slower than general inflation, but as you mention they keep increasing the features/performance of the base models.

When I was really getting into cars in the 90’s, it seemed like the base models of economy brands were pretty barebones. But over time what previously was optional became standard: air conditioning, automatic transmission, power locks/windows, floor mats, a decent car stereo, cruise control, etc.

And the things that used to differentiate luxury brands/models just became standard over time: traction control, good acceleration/handling, clear coat over the paint, rust resistance. In the 90’s, it was still possible to buy a vehicle that took more than 10 seconds to accelerate to 60mph (~100km/h).

And of course, a bunch of safety stuff became standard in large part because of regulation: airbags, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, backup cameras. And fuel efficiency has gotten much better on the engineering side, for any given level of performance and vehicle weight. Emissions have similarly improved by regulation.

So cars have gotten so much better, while basically getting more expensive slightly slower than general inflation. So it’s hard to compare apples to apples between decades.

This is the US average transaction price. So someone who buys a new $150,000 car will get averaged in, same as someone who buys a new $30,000 car. The weighted average shows what people are actually buying but doesn’t say much about what is available. Most new car buyers are less price sensitive (if they were looking to save money, they’d be buying used), and the richest people are overrepresented because they buy new cars more frequently. Someone who buys a new car once every two years will have 5 transactions counted into this metric for every 1 transaction by someone who buys once every ten years.

CleanTechnica is a garbage source. It consists entirely of reposts scraped from elsewhere on the internet, except summarized poorly by people (or possibly LLMs) who have barely more than a surface level understanding of the topic at hand. I don’t understand why it has the popularity it does.

We’re talking only about the portion of the population that:

Doesn’t own a home of any kind. Doesn’t rent a single family home. Doesn’t rent a townhouse. Lives in an apartment without charging infrastructure.

Rather than trying to build things from first principles, you can just look at the studies that have already been done. This government study estimated that about 2/3 of households had access to dedicated parking spots.

Apartment access to charging infrastructure is so dependent on the specific property that it’s hard to generalize across all of them. Plus, throw in the fact that some have access to chargers at work or at their regular grocery store that it’s functionally pretty similar to having access to chargers at home.

I know someone who just moved into a rented garage where their assigned spot doesn’t have any access to electricity (not even a normal outlet for level 1 charging) but where the ground floor has a public L2 charger in the same building, so that they can charge “at home” with a little bit of an added inconvenience of needing to move the car when it’s done, so that they can leave it for others.

Gen 1 was incandescent, provided light but was hot and costly. Gen 2 was florescent, not hot, less expensive but had some nasty chemicals inside. Gen 3, now with LEDs are cheap, cool, and clean.

Imagine sitting out the use of electric light bulbs from 1900 until 2010, just in the hopes that one day they’d be better.

News flash: your “gen 1” light bulb was better than kerosene lamps from the beginning.

Even looking at per capita carbon emissions, the 70’s were the peak for the US, Canada, UK, and Continental Europe.

We’ve made huge gains in efficiency in the past 50 years.