Toyota is the leader by profit, has been selling cars with batteries and electric motors for 3 decades and simply doesn't want to pile into a crowded space where you effectively have to be dumping your product at cost to have a chance of success.

While most others are wasting money on failed forays into the EV market, Toyota has quietly made their entire fleet (modulo trucks) hybrid.

At this point anyone can design a chassis to accommodate a skateboard battery and some drive motors. The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs. Admittedly this is a biggie, but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.

That does beg the question though, if none of the major non-Chinese manufacturers are focused on EVs did they all entirely miss the boat or do they know something the Chinese don't?

Its absolutely possible that they did all miss the boat, but even the stats just in this thread point to a drop in EV sales and economic challenges with regards to price and demand. The Chinese keep prices low with very low labor costs and subsidies from a totalitarian government, our goal isn't and shouldn't be to compete with that on price.

Toyota didn't just spend (past tense) too much time with hydrogen, they're still going with it trying to take a "multi-path strategy" that includes hydrogen engine development.

I'm not sure where they think the market for this exists in sustainable numbers.

It's a shame Nissan didn't lean harder into EVs since the Leaf is a great little car, and they were releasing them since 2012.

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Are you a time traveller from 2010? SUVs are already the most popular kind of car all over the world. That ship has sailed.

That's certainly a way to view the data, but it's a way that ignores the trajectory of the technology and sets up The Big Three for complete failure.

The Big Three have not figured out how to make compelling EVs, without a doubt, but it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the leadership's product choices and failure of implementation.

Meaning that the entire industry will be pushed farther and farther behind in the race, only to be completely disrupted.

This will happen far slower than the transition from Palm to iOS-style phones, because the lifetime of cars is far longer than phones and are far larger investments, but the trend is inevitable. EVs are superior on so many different fronts that there's ~0 chance that gas and diesel engines persist except for a tiny fraction of future market share.

US manufacturers are trying to delay the transition as long as possible, which only ensures their own doom.

California is the world’s fourth largest economy, so this tracks. Whether or not flyover country gets EVs is immaterial to the overall US situation. They can pay forward curve petrol prices if they so choose (“freedom!”), or find a suitable EV if that is a more suitable choice for their needs, unless federal policy returns to assist with purchasing. I am hopeful, concerning recent regime change, that federal EV incentives come back to enable folks to buy affordable EVs (because we should be optimizing for affordable zero emission mobility for all, imho), but only time will tell.

Wyoming‘s population of 600k people is less than one percent of total US population, for example. Californians buy about half that number of EVs per year (~300k-400k).

It's interesting to try to work out what the civ-style "dependency tree" of viable electric cars has been. It requires at the bare minimum high energy density light batteries, which were a spinoff of the cellphone revolution. As well as high efficiency digital power control, which while not impossible in 1970 would have been larger and heavier without modern SiC semiconductors.

Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.

Well, perhaps, but the time for the followers in the field to push on EV manufacturing capability has been the past 5-10 years. And the US majors are all followers, not leaders. About two years ago they all put out press releases saying "we are not seeing EV sales so we are pulling back on manufacturing" meaning "we couldn't figure it out and are scared so we are abandoning our future."

With the strangle hold that these industries have on getting the government to bail them out, we are in a really bad position on the national level. We have let bad politics and weak management override good economic decision making.