Okay, putting aside the political insanity for a moment ... I have a Tesla car. I've had 2 free trial periods (1 month each) of their full self-driving capability in the last 6 months. Both were used as data collection + marketing exercises by the company. I tried FSD a couple of times during each interval. My impression: * 99% of the time, it's really impressive. * 1% of the time, it's terrifyingly awful, and could kill someone. That last 1% is hard, it seems, and they don't seem to be making much headway. Elon is delusional in thinking he'll get there soon, unless the pace of improvement changes materially, more or less now. Waymo is doing it, and by all accounts very reliably, but they have way more sensors and I would guess better software. Less flashy public presence, more hard engineering. I'd trust Waymo/Alphabet/Google to drive me around sooner than I'd trust Tesla/Musk and the associated craziness. And I *own* a Tesla (nice car, overall).

... and this "fine" is just a very public way of Russia drawing attention to the fact that the Russian state is a joke. Sad for the 140M or so people who have the misfortune of living in this violent kleptocracy.

Yanis Varoufakis is an unabashed communist, and an articulate sounding idiot. He wrecked Greece for a while - so hey - lets give him air time to wreck other economies too?! sheesh.

The problem for Toyota is that the lifetime cost of ownership of a Tesla M3 is, for most people (depends on driving distance, cost of gasoline, cost of electricity, etc. but this is generally true) *lower* than something like a Camry. So you can buy a pretty basic sedan from Toyota, or - as you point out - a pretty luxurious car from Tesla, and over time, the luxury car is actually cheaper! That spells trouble for Toyota, and is one reason why some car makers (e.g., Ford) don't really make small cars or sedans any longer - they can't compete with either ultra-low-cost vehicles from Korea or low-TCO-though-high-up-front-cost vehicles from Tesla.

https://insideevs.com/news/586195/tesla-model3-rwd-tco-toyota-camry-2021/
(yes, it's a biased web site, but their metrics look reasonable)

Never under-estimate the ability of super-conservative Japanese corporate culture to stifle innovation and lengthen time to market, either. Have you ever worked for or with a Japanese multinational? I have, and it's depressing.

Toyota totally missed the boat on EVs. Well meaning but ignorant leadership.

Now they are desperate to catch up. They won't have a competitive or compelling EVs for years, so they are reduced to pushing lots of fluff about future technology (no demos, no production, no realistic timeline, no product) in the hope that customers wait for them to get their act together rather than just buying a competitor's product and never looking back.

They look more like "walking dead" than "leading OEM" ...

My prediction, which I support with exactly the same amount of evidence that Toyota uses to prove they can make a good EV: Toyota's market share in NA and EU will collapse in the next 5 years.

... they apparently abandoned the purchase: https://siliconangle.com/2022/...

... YouTube should prohibit content creators from being sponsored by states that block YouTube. Sheesh.