The answer: because Meta has deliberately and intentionally inserted themselves into the social fabric so they can use network effects to surveil you sell your personal relationships back to you. They bought up Instagram and WhatsApp to the same end, then Oculus. Even Carmack fell for the lie. Meta never wants you talking to anyone in any medium without them knowing about it, because it allows them to sell more and more ads, because nobody is going to give up communications with their friends and family.
It's not that complicated. Most people just go where the other users are. They "have nothing to hide". Their thoughtless decisions actively make society worse for everyone else, one user at a time. Even tech people who know the scam throw up their hands and express how impossible it would be to get their kids' soccer parents or PTA groups to abandon WhatsApp groups or FB Messenger for something privacy-respecting. The tyranny of the installed base.
Go to a place that didn't have deliberate large scale society-wide anti-smoking programs. Basically everyone starts smoking at age 15 and never stops. People regularly and typically, en masse, work against their own interests in ways that seem like "not a big deal".
Suddenly, you can't make a doctor's appointment in Europe without a WhatsApp account (and agreeing to the Meta ToS in the process). (Why Europe casually ceded the basic day to day communications of many of its b2c sectors to an American company without so much as a fight is another matter.)
All of the bz* models you listed are Chinese models, and while the Woodland and C-HR are listed on their US website, they aren't really available for purchase (though I did find one C-HR if I'm willing to drive 500 miles to buy it). Obviously the world auto market is greater than the US, but the US is the leading market for Toyota in terms of total units sold, so it's odd to me that if I drive to the Toyota dealership 10 minutes from my house, their game of selling cars only leaves me with one model to purchase if I'm committed to buying a BEV.
China is the biggest EV market, Europe is the second biggest, and North America is third.
For EVs the US will remain lower priority than China and Europe for a while yet. Toyota understands how to sell cars.
It's funny how this thread has gone from "Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines" to "Toyota is not prioritizing small EV markets first".
You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined. That's an odd way to define a small EV market. Funny thing is, in terms of rankings, the US is actually a "small market" when it comes to gas-only cars.
Prior to moving to only BEVs, our family bought several Toyotas (and before that, only Hondas), and I was disappointed to find that I had no options (at the time, and in the 4 years since, between the 2 manufacturers, only 2 have come to market that I can purchase). Perhaps VW and Kia don't understand how to sell cars, but they understood how to sell them to me.
> You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined.
This is incorrect, unless you're viewing the US as a single market but the EU as multiple (which, I mean, ah, you do you, but that doesn't make any sense from an industry perspective). Last year about 1.3 million BEVs were sold in the US (a minor decline from 2024), 1.9 million BEVs were sold in the EU (up 33% YoY). In Europe more broadly defined, 2.5 million BEVs were sold (in practice, the industry largely treats EU+EFTA+UK as one market). In China, 8 million were sold, up about 25% YoY.
You can, ah, perhaps see why the US is not a top-priority market for the industry. In practice, the US _will_ get many of these Toyota models, or some variant thereof, but later. You mention VW, but they, too, treat the US as a second priority BEV market; their electric cars generally come out about a year late there if at all. Hyundai does release in the US at the same time as elsewhere (when they release at all; the Ioniq 3 will not be available in the US, for instance, because the US does not buy small cars in significant numbers).
Nation-based segmentation makes the most sense to me because as I understand it (coming from a US-centric perspective, so I may have misunderstandings) there may be additional friction (fees, regulations, etc) buying from another EU country as opposed to someone in the US buying a vehicle from a different state. In many cases, you don't even have to go to another state; dealerships regularly transfer inventory (with a shipping fee, but not anything at the government level)
The entire point of the European Union is to eliminate all of that friction. Most of the rules and regulations have been pushed to the EU level, just like the USA pushed most of its rules and regulations to the federal level. A car only needs a single type approval granted by a single member state, and it can be sold across the entire EU.
There are of course still some tax differences and importing from another member state might be slightly trickier for a consumer than buying it from a dealership in their own country, but I don't see how that is any different from dealing with different kinds of sales tax in the various US states, or having to transfer your car title to another state.
The European single market operates as, well, a single market.
From the point of view of the manufacturers, the Single Market is, ah, a single market; they only have to get type approval once, and then they can sell anywhere. The only real complicating factor is Ireland and Malta, which drive on the left side of the road (and some niche cars will never be released there as a consequence; for instance Tesla stopped selling Model S/X in a left hand drive configuration a while back, though they now seem to have stopped selling both in Europe entirely, in any case).
Post-Brexit, the UK has its own type certification (and of course it also has the left hand drive problem), and, again, some niche car models may be available in the EU but not the UK. But in practice, for mainstream stuff, the manufacturers tend to treat it as just part of the European market.
The bZ4X was particularly bad. Toyota adopted a combo of NIH syndrome and DNGAF. They didn’t anticipate cold weather. The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold and the resale value of it tanked.
> The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold
Here in Norway Toyota was invited to include the bZ4X in this years winter range test[1], but they declined. Suzuki entered with their eVitara model, which is a "technological twin" of the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
The Urban Cruiser really disappointed in a regular test performed in cold weather[2]. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Suzuki eVitara was by far the worst in the winter range test, with the least range overall and more than 40% reduction compared to its WLTP range, among the worst in the test.
I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.
> it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry
Dodge's Charger EV has been a sales flop [1] and pretty much universally panned by critics as something that nobody asked for.
The Camry and Corolla were the best-selling sedan and compact sedan of 2025 [2]. I think this shows that Toyota is listening to what Corolla and Camry drivers want - something inexpensive and reliable to get them to and from work every day without issue.
Some day Toyota will make an EV sedan. I think their 2026 bZ Woodland [3] shows that they are starting to figure out how make compelling EVs. And Toyota's EV strategy seems pretty reasonable to me overall - their delays to develop a decent EV don't seem to put them under threat from any legacy automakers. They are being threatened by Chinese EV makers, but so is Tesla - so even a huge head start likely wouldn't have benefited Toyota much either in that regard.
The difference is probably philosophical. A (non-phev) hybrid is primarily an ICE car in every way. Building hybrids is building ICE cars with a little extra. Building EVs is different.
Honda and Toyota invested a lot in hybrid tech, they probably want to milk that investment more and the hydrogen distraction kept them from also investing in BEV tech. China was basically starting a car industry from scratch so didn’t have those sunk costs to worry about.
Which revision of the hardware and software is the "good one"? Remember that Tesla claimed in 2016 that all Teslas in production "have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". But that was, of course, a lie:
What Tesla used to claim was "full autonomy" is now called "Full Self-Driving (supervised)", whatever that's supposed to mean. How many times has "Full Self-Driving (supervised)" gone dangerously wrong but was stopped? How many times was supervision not enough:
googling "how many lives has tesla autopilot saved?" produces:
It is impossible to determine the exact number of lives saved by Tesla Autopilot, as "avoided accidents" are difficult to quantify, but Tesla reports that its vehicles with Autopilot engaged are significantly safer than the U.S. average, with one crash recorded for every 6.69 million miles driven in Q2 2025. Conversely, independent trackers have identified over 65 deaths involving Autopilot or FSD as of October 2025.
Key Safety Data and Context:
Safety Claim: Tesla's Q3 2025 Safety Report indicates that Autopilot technology results in an accident frequency nine times lower than the US national average.
Fatalities: Data compiled by TeslaDeaths.com reported 65 fatalities linked to Autopilot through October 2025, with federal investigators having verified dozens of these cases.
Comparison: As of Q2 2025, Tesla recorded one crash for every 6.69 million miles with Autopilot, compared to 1.26 million miles without it, and a U.S. national average of one crash every 702,000 miles.
Dude. That's not evidence, that's advertising. You're taking at face value a claim made by a company that has lied continuously for over a decade about the self-driving capabilities of their cars:
It's not rational to swallow Tesla's lies hook, line, and sinker. If you can't produce independent verification of Tesla's claims then there's nothing to talk about.
MUDs were my introduction to telnet- I grew up a university kid and had access to Wesleyan's minicomputer EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU running OpenVMS. I used it to telnet to CMU's TinyMUD and later other TinyMUDs around the country. I recall OpenVMS's telnet had a problem with newlines/carriage returns so all the text was staircased, so I ended up learning C and writing a MUD client. I still habitually use telnet today even if netcat and many other tools have replaced it.
All of that was foundational for my career and I still look back fondly on the technology of the time, which tended to be fairly "open" to exploration by curious-minded teenagers.
Ah, my grandfather was a ham (N4MDB) and he always tried to get me interested in it, but I had to tell him I preferred the internet (this was late 80's, so few people actually had internet). Later when I read Stevens networking books I learned there was a whole Hawaii-based packet radio (ALOHAnet) , and the UC campuses had intercampus microwave networking for a while as well. I actually still remember him telling me about bouncing radio waves off the atmosphere which seemed like magic to me at the time.
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