Tesla has made significant in roads to global battery production capacity. Looking up the reasons given by Toyota for their lack of BEV offering I didn't see much that looked very convincing, do you have a source you can share?
I can't find the quote and I don't know if it was the CEO Toyoda or some other exec, but it basically said what I've written. And your statement here reinforces that--Tesla is the biggest player by far in the EV battery supply market and they haven't made anywhere near 10 million vehicles. So where would Toyota have sourced the batteries?
Your quote seems reasonable enough so I'll take it as a statement in and of itself without attribution. So fair to say production and sale of 10M vehicles would not have been easy. As for the question of battery sourcing, if a start up in Palo Alto making luxury EVs can become the biggest player in the EV battery supply market then why couldn't Toyota who has for a long time been THE top automaker by sales? They are obviously very different companies and the risks which Toyota would have needed to undertake would probably not sit well with Toyota shareholders (part from one that are also Tesla shareholders).
Startups have the ability and expectation to take risky and unproven approaches to market problems. Some people here seem to forget this unique value. When a startup (or Elon Musk for that) tries a new idea its more about why they'll fail and no one else has done it rather than what are the practical challenges they face and
how can they over come those challenges and how likely are they to succeed in over coming those challenges. It often becomes a pissing contest of trying to be a "skeptic" and take down a blurred company+problem rather than take an object view of
the problem and how/if that particular company can solve that problem.
It's degenerate behaviour that just makes people pissed off at a constructed "con man" (strawman) and degrades one's objective and "real" view of the world.Not all startups are good nor are all startups destined to save the world. Most are probably doomed to fail for a variety of reasons but not all of them (in my experience very few) are "cons" or other bad faith. Nikola comes to mind as a recent example of a real dodgy venture for what could otherwise be a good solution and there was good discussion previously pointing out problems with Nikola using the technical information people were able to garner. When people start pushing misinformation, usually due to lack of fact checking, usually parroted from poor sources (like Sky/Fox News) and then those "facts" are accepted in the discussion without challenge that hugely undermines honest, constructive and truthful discourse.
It's fair to try weed out the cons and fakes but predicating arguments on misrepresented information or outright lies helps nothing ...and that's why I felt the need to post. (same with that
BS Common Sense Skeptic Video posted a few days ago and that
BS documentary)
The topic Elon Musk definitely has issues with both rabid, delusional fans and rabid, delusional "skeptics". The many combined reasons this is has occurred could warrant a discussion on it's own (here's
one reason and
some others). A good discussion should present "real" facts without the emotional energy and take an objective judgement... in my opinion
Edited for emphasis.