It doesn’t take 8 years to build a battery factory. Kicking things off with new models that need extra battery capacity and a factory to manufacture them is a larger hurdle than scaling things after everything is in production.
> larger hurdle than scaling things after everything is in production
The relevant data points we have on this are from Tesla. Elon has been beating the "scaling production is the hardest thing" drum. His callouts around the cost of design vs manufacturing are quite interesting.
Now Toyota has been in the at-scale manufacturing game a long time, so perhaps they're just better at this. Either way battery capacity will hold them back for a decade.
The investments we're seeing in batteries (LG, Philips, Tesla, VW) are 10x+ what Toyota is doing. I don't see how this results in Toyota able to ship cars in volume as the transition to electric accelerates.
I don’t mean that one or the other is harder, just that doing both takes longer. If Toyota has a battery pack design and factory layout their happy with then they can “just” copy it which saves time over designing the equipment then factory and then building it.
As to your 10+x comment that’s very true today, but Toyota isn’t selling any EV’s. It’s perfectly reasonable for them to have a conservative adoption curve right now rather than assuming their going to sell 10m EV’s in 8 years and then potentially massively over build capacity. This is especially true if their aiming for true mainstream cars without significant markup to justify more risky investments.
