All of Toyota’s electric vehicle patents are now royalty-free

That actually sounds like an interesting and positive side-effect, or am I missing something here?

That said I'd kill for a diesel electric truck, love the torque and smoothness of our EV.

I wonder if it is instead possible to have a universal battery installer. A universal battery pack that serves the same purpose as what you suggest, the size of a small engine + petrol tank.

One that is cross compatible with all electric cars. (the hard part) maybe it can be a section in the boot itself. So when not in use, it is simply boot space. (will be easier to be universally. Compatible too) as long as there is a power in the boot.

You pick one up from a store and as long you return it to another store inside of a few hours, you are only charged the cost of electricity + battery rental.

This is why the series hybrids don't really make sense. If you have to add an engine to generate electricity then it needs a fuel tank, a cooling system, an exhaust system, etc. By the time you add all of that stuff, you might as well just use that cost and weight to put in a bigger battery.

There is no technical reason you can't use an arbitrarily large battery to get arbitrarily long range, it's just that the incremental cost exceeds the incremental benefit for most people, so the current EVs are targeting the much larger number of people who don't actually need that much range. They're also supply constrained on battery production right now, so targeting the niche that requires a very large battery doesn't make sense yet.

This is somewhat what I would expect to eventually see out of a pickup or something that competes with a Chevy Suburban. You have a large vehicle, so plenty of room for batteries in the floor, which you also need to get reasonable range when transporting heavy loads. But then if you're not transporting a heavy load, the same batteries provide much more range than a vehicle which is trying to be spry and sporty.

(A software company has copyright. For a manufacturing company, patents serve as the primary method for exclusivity on their designs.)

I used to work at IBM and having your name on patents was one of the most important things in order to rise through the ranks. Past a point, you could not go higher without some significant activity in the patents realm. There were many patent groups, many talks about it, there was a 'patent score' that people had in their email signature etc. You were also rewarded financially for each one.

In my humble opinion, this was a bunch of corporate bullshit. I've interacted with many people who had an impressive amount of patents and I was always disappointed. Their average patent was something along the lines of: a different way to use the browser history, a color-based way of handling support tickets, adding a list of blacklisted websites to a broswer or similar. It's hard to remember them because they were all unmemorable. Nothing was of substance or something worth being implemented.

No one wants to be making electric cars until everyone is making electric cars.

Everyone wants to make electric cars, but no one wants to step out in front.

Now that we're seeing Tesla succeed, I suspect the bit is being flipped, and a lot of companies are trying to convince each other that we should all jump into making electric cars now.

Opening up patent libraries lowers the barriers for others. It's grabbing the hand of the kid next to you before you all jump off the dock together to go swimming. It doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the landscape, but it makes it easier to get started.

"If the number of electrified vehicles accelerates significantly in the next ten years, they will become standard, and we hope to play a role in supporting that process."

https://www.ft.com/content/3557f3da-55d7-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c...

Also, if the industry follows your lead, you always stay in front.

They're confident of two things: the move will encourage further players in the space, and they'll compete well against those players.

The Toyota Prius does better than many other cars in environmental impact:

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117018_2018-toyota-pri...

> and have ultra complex maintenance like any ICE car.

The Toyota Prius is reckoned to be one of the cheapest cars to own and maintain:

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/02/most-and-le...

https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expe...

The maintenance and reliability just doesn't seem to be a problem with the Prius.

That’s just factually and obviously untrue. You can tell by looking at the MPG figure. Any vehicle that burns more gallons of gas per mile proportionally farts out more emissions per mile.

My 2013 Toyota Camry hybrid is 6 years old now, gets 38-41mpg, and I have never charged it. It is a rock solid vehicle and I have never had to perform maintenance on any of the hybrid parts. They just work. Toyota has a reputation for producing low maintenance vehicles using last year’s technology. If the battery eventually wears out later on and I don’t fix it, it’ll get less MPG and be more like every other carbon farting car on the road. Believe it or not, the car produces more electricity from regenerative braking than it uses up so the battery is usually mostly full all the time. The bottle-neck is in the electric motor’s low top-speed. It switches from electric to gas if you ever go over 40mph and back to electric if you go under 40mph.

There isn’t a big need to be so cynical with hybrids. They’re quite amazing and incredible to watch and use.

I would like to take an old car and install a small battery, a small engine, and a big electric motor. Because if you are all engine you need a big thirsty engine, and if you are all battery you need a big heavy battery, but if you just need power for say 10 seconds of acceleration, you can have a small battery, and if you just need a big enough engine for the average power usage, you can have a very small engine, and if you have a powerful electric motor, you can still accelerate quickly.