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Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

This is a maybe 1.4B per year thing. That's... not huge.

What IS incredible is that Toyota HAD the absolute lead in EV. Their hybrid power trains had everything needed, they literally had power mgmt, battery, electric motors etc.

Then they went absolutely crazy over hydrogen - which I always hated. The cycle is terrible currently (from production to power on road).

The mind boggles a bit to imagine what might have been for them if they had just moved forward on hybrid, plug in hybrid, full EV path. They could have blended that mix more and more until full EV. They had most of the pieces it seems including production capacity.

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I own a Corolla Hybrid which gives 57 MPG combined and am pretty happy with it considering I got it under $25K. Now Toyota knew that their Hybrid electric systems are working great as they are a leader in it and selling millions of such vehicles over the years and still they have not trusted the electric batteries enough and went on Hydrogen fuel cell side. Very perplexing to me!

My, possibly mistaken, understanding has been that the deep dive into hydrogen was a broader National level push in Japan.

If I’m not mistaken, the idea I believe was that if they settled on and developed hydrogen infrastructure, that would power not just cars, but also heavy machinery, etc that other parts of the Honda/Toyota/Mitsubishi/etc conglomerates could use.

This might be it, but it bled over into their internal efforts and they got too focused on the political side and less on what would work for customers.

Politicians like hydrogen because if you ignore all the crap to get their (drilling for fossil fuels, separation, energy use in compression, transport, capital costs of building networks etc) you get that picture of water out of a tailpipe. The physics of it remain very poor.

There’s a gas field in disputed area in East China Sea, which some says could produce hydrogen at scale, and energy self sufficiency had been an ambition of the country for … some time. There’s no equivalent oil field or Uranium deposit.

Most of the clean hydrogen production schemes I've seen are pipe dreams or scams, but happy to be shown something here.

As a point of ref we have relatively clean electricity generation already (hydro, solar, wind, nuclear) depending on what you count.

Any indication how close to production this east china sea resource is? How willing China is to let Japan develop it or is it already well developed? Again - these are often pipe dream type ideas.

It’s not happening, and there’s zero reason China is willing to give in, but sort of remains as an ambition. Yeah pipe dream is probably spot on.

I think it has more to do with external independence/isolationism, than about environments theme, carrying over from the century before. I don’t understand why the government just go double down on nuclear fuel cycle concept but maybe there are too much political complications in it.

@numpad0 Is it the Chunxiao gas field [1] that you’re thinking of?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunxiao_gas_field

Same understanding. Is there any credible report about this? It seems like a nation-level scanadal. Singlehandedly may have created a trillion dollar market cap for Tesla.

Exactly this.

The prius was AMAZING.

Their other hybrids also great. They had aero down, ev engines down, power management down.

It's so weird to see them fight EV's so hard for so long.

It's a safe bet some top brass in the company was playing a visionary with hydrogen.

It was apparently a push by the Japanese government.

One may wonder where the Japanese government got this idea from..

One of the arguments is that if battery production is limited it's better to spread the batteries out over a larger number of vehicles.

For example, the RAV4 Hybrid has a 1.6KWH battery (and NiMH to boot), the RAV4 Prime (plug-in with 42 miles of EV range) has a 16KWH battery, a similar Model Y has an 75 KWH battery.

My next car is a hybrid Corolla (current is a regular one). I live the damn things. Hopefully the hybrid is offered as a hatchback as well.

> considering I got it under $25K

Doesn't this answer the question? Batteries were and are still too expensive.

First Prius with Hybrid system and electric batteries launched in 1997. So if Toyota would have followed its Kaizen/Continuous Improvement philosophy to improve electric batteries for last 24 years, they would have been way ahead in electrification especially battery tech and efficiency. That's the point.

> Their hybrid power trains had everything needed, they literally had power mgmt, battery, electric motors etc.

They don't have what they would need in the battery dept - and the battery is the most important part of an EV. The Prius has a NiMH battery, which has lower energy density than Li-ion and other newer chemistries.

The (non-plugin) Prius can get by with the NiMH battery because the battery is only used for regen braking energy capture and acceleration at low speeds, not for high amounts of energy storage or power output. For those it uses gasoline and the ICE engine.

Yep. Interesting that a 3rd party has developed and released a LiFePO4 battery pack for the Prius [0]. It is cheaper than the OEM NiMH pack. I'm on some Prius forums and it has been interesting to see the amount of detail owners get into, from replacing cells in their OEM packs, to upgrades, to eeking out every bit of performance. Toyota had a huge advantage with their brand and some fanatical customers that they totally blew by not going full EV.

[0] - https://projectlithium.com/products/prius-lithium-replacemen...

The Prius had a NiMH battery. Current production Priuses (Prii?) almost all* use lithium-ion batteries, from the 2016 model year (fourth-generation/XW50) on.

* A subset of fourth-gen Priuses, those equipped with all-wheel drive, went back to NiMH for better cold-weather performance.

Latest Toyota's Ni-MH density is 1000Wh/L that outperform latest Li-ion. Maybe Wh/kg isn't good for BEV but maybe fine for HEV and possibly PHEV. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890676

The toyota I desperately want them to sell is a plug in prius - pre-2018’s fugly makeover - with a decent LIon pack, let’s say 30kWh, with the more recent PiP’s max EV speed of 80mph.

The hydrogen distraction is baffling.

Hmm, perfect is the enemy of the good and all? I have that... er, 'made-over' Prius, the Prime PHEV, and while its puny 8.8kWh LiIon battery could certainly be bigger, it's enough that 75% of all my driving is electric-only.

I’m driving the 2013 Plug-in Prius (UK name for the Prime I think ?) with the 4.4kWh pack. I get 25% EV.

Maybe 20kWh would be enough to get it to 90%+ for most people ?

That, in my opinion, is pretty close to problem sorted in terms of decarbonisation of transport. Toyota could have had it in the bag by now.

I agree - most drivers only need to get around town for commuting and errands most of the time (and batteries bigger than 20kWh take a long time to charge without a dedicated charger at home).

The original Plug-In Prius is quite different from the Prime[1] though, the original was spun off the Gen 3 Prius, the Prime is even a little farther from the Gen 4.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_Plug-in_Hybrid#XW...

Hydrogen was a cynical distraction to give legislators something to push 'in the future' while allowing car manufacturers to continue with business as usual.

(Of course, governments the world over leapt at hydrogen and clung on for dear life because it was the only renewable vehicle tech that preserved the current fuel distribution model and so allowed them to keep supporting road infrastructure with fuel taxes. They saw the legislative advantage, physical efficiency was nothing to do with it.)

Toyota had something special back in the 80s and early 90s and it seems like they lost it. Was there some key innovator high up in the company who retired some time around then?

Additionally, now China companies dominating massive Li-ion manufacturing for EV, like solar panels (despite their energy still heavily use coals). It's natural that other governments don't want core industry to rely on them, but still climate change is a thing so they discovering alternatives.

One tiny detail about Toyota. They didn’t chronologically move to hydrogen after their initial forays into electric. They always explored both, with most of their efforts on hydrogen.

So imagine if instead of concurrently trying to make hydrogen happen while their side-gig of hybrids managed to completely corner the market, they went all in on electric. It would be a very different car market.

This. Not sure why OP think they went all in to hydrogen at all.

Just like every other car manufacture they couldn't quite put the numbers together on how Battery EV will work without a ridiculous amount of investment or bet. It is worth remembering they are primarily a car manufacture, not battery manufacture. Now things have changed not only because the path is clearer, and numbers are easier to do with less risk, ( big enterprise are risk averse ), but more importantly Investors loves EV. It doesn't matter if you have no concrete plan to make profit out of EV, your stock price will rise, and this has an effect on management, board, banks, cash flow, all sort of things.

Although I am skeptical of Solid State Battery, I would have thought a conservative company like Toyota would have went with conventional Li Battery with Silicon Anode type.

A lot of their current models are available as hybrids with great efficiency. I drove a new venza hybrid last week and it got low 40s mpg!

They aren’t as behind as you’d think given that a hybrid still makes more sense than an ev to a lot of people. A reliable hybrid that just works is what people need. More so with their adaptive cruise control.

Could they have done better? Sure. It’s hard to say different given their size and culture.

Also, GM had the EV1 years before …

40 mpg is what you got 15 years ago in Ford Focus 2 Wagon 1.4 tcdi.

Venza is a much larger vehicle.

2007 Ford Focus Wagon/Cargo volume 35.6 ft³, 73.7 ft³ with seat area

2021 Toyota Venza/Cargo volume 28.8 ft³, 55.1 ft³ with seat area

Well then. I stand corrected.

Yeah but then you are driving a shitty underpowered diesel.

The real question would be :

Why aren’t the euro manufacturers building hybrid diesel powertrains? A small modern Diesel engine coupled to an electric motor would certainly provide more mpgs.

I feel pretty well placed to answer this as in my country most cars are diesel, my summer project has been fixing an old diesel engine, and I drive a Prius :-)

- Diesel engines are more complicated than petrol engines. You have a high pressure fuel injection system and turbo(s), which both need significant maintenance approximately every 150,000km. If you don't you'll end up burning excess fuel or oil (that's what happens when you see a diesel vehicle with plumes of black or white smoke under acceleration) which is obviously not good in terms of pollution. If you leave it, eventually your engine will blow up (the turbo will leak oil into the intake air leading to hydrolock, or injectors will put in too much fuel wearing down the cylinder). Compare this to a petrol engine, where maybe you need to replace the spark plugs, and if you don't the worse that could happen is misfires or the engine simply not starting.

- Diesel engines emit a lot more NoX emissions than petrol which needs complicated filters in the exhaust to remove. DPF filters are usually removed after 150,000km because they end up clogged (causing loss of power, higher fuel consumption, and can damage the engine). You can't actually buy new replacements - I don't know why - and 'regeneration' doesn't really work, so they are usually just cut out. In Europe NoX is regulated by the engine class (e.g. Euro 6) when it is manufactured, not during regular emissions checks, so this doesn't cause you to fail that. AdBlue is slightly better, but there are already devices you can plug into cars to disable the system, which many people (and companies) do.

- Diesel engines don't operate well when cold. All modern engines have glow plugs (electric resistance heaters) which heat up the engine block when you turn on the ignition. I imagine this wouldn't work well with a hybrid system where the engine doesn't run as often.

- Diesel engines have a much higher compression than petrol, and use compression to ignite the fuel. This means the cranking power needed to start the engine is a lot higher. For parallel hybrids (like the Prius) this shouldnt be an issue, as the same motors for driving are used to crank the engine, but I imagine it may be more tricky to make that transition smooth compared to petrol. Same when the engine cuts off, as you don't just cut power to the spark plugs to stop it.

- Diesel engines are only usually available in larger sizes because it's not economical to produce a 1.0 litre diesel engine. This would mean a diesel hybrid would be more expensive than a petrol hybrid, and would probably need a larger engine bay.

- Petrol hybrids usually use the Atkinson cycle which is more efficient and provides more torque towards higher RPMs. The electric motor provides the high torque at low RPMs so it works well together. Diesel engines typically provide higher torque at lower RPMs, and need a turbocharger to provide any useful torque at higher RPMs, so it's the opposite of what a parallel hybrid needs. I'm not sure if there are any alternative cycles for diesel engines that would work better for a hybrid.

- After VWs scandal I feel diesel has lost a lot of political clout.

That said, I am jealous of the Audi A2 1.2l 45kW diesel which has a much lower fuel consumption than my Prius :-)

https://www.spritmonitor.de/en/overview/3-Audi/19-A2.html

Because Atkinson cycle gas ICE has about the same efficiency as a diesel ICE (about 40%), but is a lot simpler and cheaper to produce. Gasoline cost is just one factor. There are also maintenance costs and turbodiesels lose pretty badly there. It is also harder to get emissions other than CO2 low in a diesel engine (you need DPF, EGR, all of that adds complexity and decreases durability).

Not in city driving. I own a hybrid Highlander and in city driving it burns considerably less gas than Ford Galaxy or VW Sharan with a diesel engine, despite being bigger, heavier and more powerful at the same time. I agree that on a highway hybrids are very close to diesels in terms of mpg.

They also produced 2 generations of RAV4 EV's, the second of which they partnered with Tesla on.

Which is insane, if you think about it. Toyota never should have needed the 'help' given their hybrid electric expertise.

It was also Toyota helping Tesla buying $50M of stock and getting some inspiration from the innovative Tesla.

>The mind boggles a bit to imagine what might have been for them if they had just moved forward on hybrid, plug in hybrid, full EV path. They could have blended that mix more and more until full EV.

i think there is a speadsheet somewhere inside Toyota where your "nightmarish" - because it cannibalizes significant share of the current revenue from hybrids - scenario is precisely described. The fear of cannibalization of current cash cow (and related internal uphill battle with the top management milking the cow) is frequently the reason behind seemingly obvious blunders by BigCo-s.

Japanese govt pushed hydrogen as one "fuel" to rule them all, including household heating and cookin

I believe this is it too. Honda also has the equivalent hydrogen powered car and lack of EV's. Occam's razor says they didn't both come to that unideal scenario by chance.

How did Nissan dodge it then?

Nissan wasn't "winning" like Toyota was.

While Toyota was raking in wheelbarrows of easy cash from moneyed buyers Nissan was selling Altimas for bottom dollar to people who were rolling in negative equity from a Dodge Journey.

This is standard BigCo stuff. You get a lead and you lose that lead because you don't jump hard enough onto the next big thing because you don't want to divert resources over the thing you're currently winning with. IBM, Boeing, Ford, Microsoft, they've all been down this road.

Nissan never had that lead so they had nothing to stop them from going into EVs deep enough to grab a good share of the market.

Yeah what I mean it's not the government to blame for Toyota ineptitude.

Or you could argue the government assigned Toyota for Plan A with Hydrogen/FCEV path and Nissan was assigned to the backup Nuclear/BEV route.

Honestly, with Toyota clout the opposite could likely happen: it assigned the government of Japan to promote Hydrogen.

Hm, possibly. Strongest Hydrogen push was like 15-20 years ago. Pivotal change to BEV right now is a trainwreck to current manager classes at the height of their career.

Mitsubishi also invested to BEV by i-MiEV and PHEV by Outlander PHEV. Finally they acquired by Nissan.

Nissan beat Tesla by years with the first mass market EV with the Leaf. In some ways the 2022 Leaf is still a much better value than the Tesla model 3 if you don't need frequent fast charging. The price is a lot lower and the reliability and build quality are excellent.

The Leaf can fast charge and this is now included in all models, but it can only suck down 50KW vs Tesla now being able to draw 100+KW. It also uses ChaDEMO which is a fading standard, though still very common where I live. Apparently there are some converters in the works to let the Leaf charge off CCS and perhaps even the Tesla network in the future, but they'll probably cost hundreds of dollars since apparently a DC fast charge mega-dongle is not trivial.

In other news: there is now a market for dongles for cars. I have seen the future and it has a dongle.

I think people don't really like plug-ins unless its Tesla and has a fast charge. That is all I can think of. Tesla ride quality is also pretty good if everything is going right, can't comment on a bolt or leaf.

Depends on your driving habits. If you are a heavy driver or a frequent road tripper I'd recommend getting a Tesla or at least a car with faster charging than the Leaf.

In Europe they've standardized the chargers.

I agree. We have a Bolt, and until recently a Tesla. If I were buying again right now, I'd get a Bolt (if there wasn't a stop-sale, at least). When we got ours, the brand-new price was $24K. For 258 miles of range, and basic 50kW fast charging, that's a ridiculous deal. For a Model 3, I'd be into it damn near twice that.

I wonder how this all works out long term for Tesla. From a first principles standpoint, they don't really have much. The Nissan Leaf is a workhorse. But Tesla is killing it these days.

Interestingly, at work we have some DC charging stations. The "Tesla" stations are actually a ChaDEMO Chargepoint station coupled to a Tesla "dongle". So the dongle not only exists, but seems to be very feasible. It just needs to work in the other direction.

Newer Nissans are supposed to use the CCS standard (if Nissan gets its crap together and actually launches the Arya).

Maybe the fact that Nissan is owned by Renault has something to do with it.

No, that is ~$14 Billion per year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/climate/toyota-electric-h...

Totally agree

The ideal model, if I had some power/leadership 10 years ago with some foresight would have been:

- add a plug to the Prius for all-electric mode, get the technology to as many carmakers as possible with whatever negotiated means possible.

- push them to increase the all-electric mode to 50 miles

- once tech was doable, impose incentives/requirements/taxation that required all new cars be PHEV. Especially for trucks/SUVs.

- incentivize home charging and start incentivizing gas stations to have plugs as well as a requirement to staying in business

Given the current supply of cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc, the most effective way to electrify consumer transportation is the 50 mile PHEV. It would have electrified 95% of daily trips for those vehicles, and eliminates range anxiety for the longer trips until the infrastructure is done.

With that and Toyota's lead, the plug in hybrid would have provided practical market "EV" leadership probably through 2030. It is mystifying to me why they dragged their feet to add a simple plug to the system. A massive management failure that ceded not only pseudo-EV leadership, but leadership in the hybrid market.

Toyota may be able to coattail the nascent OEM market for EV components and leverage their status as current #1 to keep afloat, but so many companies are far ahead in the vertical integration for the EV. An OEM component EV will be inferior to vertically integrated manufacturers (Tesla currently, VW and probably GM soon).

I'd guess that the OEM model of ICE drivetrains is basically an extreme optimization of a long-running design. Early ICE companies were probably vertically integrated intheir parts/components manufacturing until specific market competition for components between dedicated OEM manufacturers could eventually beat the in-house teams.

But EVs are a MASSIVE revolution in terms of the core components, and designs are innovating/evolving so rapidly that you can't tie yourself to components. Look at Tesla, they are building their own motors, batteries/chemistries, and even minerals extraction pipelines per battery investor day.

OEM ecosystems only exist once a sufficient number of cars are using a component. So an automotive OEM EV motor won't be competitive with Tesla until several generations of EVs go through the market, and a generation for a car is at least 5 years traditionally?

Almost all the car companies annoucing EV programs/funding aside from VW and maybe GM are just doing the OEM model: we'll get some OEM motors and OEM batteries, slap them onto a traditional OEM ICE platform. And boom, the CEO gets to tell major activist shareholders that he isn't being left behind: please don't fire me like you canned the BMW CEO.

Toyota is likely still stuck in OEM mode. They can't maintain leadership with that mentality, the vertical integration model will win for the next two decades at least, even if solid state closes some of the tech gap with Tesla for the main auto people (which is what they are basically all gambling on)

I agree with the 50 mile PHEV. Before my fully electric car I had a Chevrolet Volt (not the crappy Bolt). It had a ~50 mile electric range (40-60 depending on weather), and then it just turned into a normal hybrid. It was a great car and I almost never had to use the gas on the car. I had to do a few longer distance drives a year and the > 300 mile gas range covered that easily. It's unfortunate that Chevy killed off the Volt. It was a great car and was an excellent transition car for people to go electric but without the range anxiety issues. It got me used to having to charge my car, but without the risk of getting stranded if I wasn't able to for some reason.

It turns out that a car that is good for consumers is almost never good for GM. Who could blame GM for scrapping a $20K car with $4K margin or a $40K car with $5k margin when they can use their resources to build a $30K car with $12K margin or a $65K truck with $30K margin?

Innovation is cute and everything. But profit is king.

One thing everyone forgets about the Volt and the timing of it's demise; the end of production coincided with the phasing out of a lot of the tax credits/incentives provided by the govt. For most of it's life it was a 40k vehicle you could get for closer to 33k.

GM likely saw the writing on the wall, people probably weren't willing to pay the full MSRP. Especially when Kia/Hyundai is managing to provide plug-in hybrids for 30k. (As far as quality/fit, I sat in an early Niro Plugin and the interior was something in between the Bolt and a Sonata... but some people care more about price nowadays.)

Whenever I get frustrated with GM killing off another promising project, I try to be fair to them about what their motivations should be.

GM doesn't mind selling a $40k car instead of a $33k car. What matters is volume x margin. You hit on the volume factor. I suggest that GM could have increased their volume dramatically by actually marketing the car. In my opinion they actively discouraged sales. They did not want to sell more of them. I think this points to a margin problem. Every hour of labor and every square foot of production facility given to the Volt was actually hurting GM. Not because the Volt had a negative margin, but because the Volt had a negative _relative_ margin.

If GM layed off every line worker/engineer/artist etc working on the Volt and closed every production facility that manufactured it, GM would have lost money.

But if they repurpose all that into the production of a 1/2-ton truck, they make more money than they do on the Volt.

If they repurpose it all into the production of the Bolt that sells for $40k, they make more money than on the Volt. You can argue that the Volt is 2x or 3x better than the Bolt. But that would be arguing from the wrong perspective. With a little marketing the Bolt should sell as well as the Volt (even at a higher price tag) and provide significantly higher margins. Same volume x higher margin = kill the Volt.

Before my fully electric car I had a Chevrolet Volt (not the crappy Bolt)

Aside from the battery recall, what's crappy about the Bolt? $36,000 for 250 miles of range and the reviews seem pretty good. That said, I was disappointed that they canceled the Volt.

> the crappy Bolt

Bolts are crappy? My wife drives one, and given the cost, I like it more than my Tesla. Before covid pricing, you could pick one up brand new for mid-20s. And they will get back to that level after the bubble pops, because GM is keeping the mediocre range and "fast" charging speeds. For someone who just wants a runabout that can handle pretty much any daily driver scenario, the ROI is unbeatable. That it makes me smile to drive it is a plus.

> Bolts are crappy?

“GM recalls every Chevy Bolt ever made, blames LG for faulty batteries”

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/gm-recalls-every-chevy-...

I think having to recall every Bolt ever made for battery system failure, which is the primary part of the car is “crappy”. The other parts of the car might be fine but the actual battery system has been giving people trouble for years now. That’s why I say it’s no good. The other parts of the car are probably decent. But having to recall every car and swap the battery is a massive failure on GM’s part (and their partner LG).

Upvoted you. Don't know why you have been downvoted, as I agree with your comment 100%

Totally agreed. I don't know why they don't offer PHEV aggressively in 2010s. Possibly shortage of battery is a reason to stick HEV but they should invest for battery at the time.

> Then they went absolutely crazy over hydrogen - which I always hated

I always loved hydrogen, especially if someone comes up with a better way to generate it. The refueling issue and the chemical disaster with batteries would be solved.

It seems more likely that in the time we could get a viable hydrogen infrastructure in place (I imagine decades) that both the refueling and 'chemical disaster' aspect of batteries will have been solved. We're getting fairly close on both counts, I believe.

> It seems more likely that in the time we could get a viable hydrogen infrastructure in place (I imagine decades) that both the refueling and 'chemical disaster' aspect of batteries will have been solved. We're getting fairly close on both counts, I believe.

I would be surprised if they solved the battery issues in less than decades

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