Toyota to spend $13.6bn on battery development in effort to win electric battle
ft.com
ft.com
Magical new battery technology will not suddenly mean that you end up winning. Their claims about solid state have been repeatably delayed and a commercial product isn't close, and even if they did bring it out, it would be years before any real numbers were produced and even then it would likely not be competitive for the cheap and mid priced cars anytime soon.
Toyota is living very dangerously right now.
I think this is probably a good call if they want to play the long game. Some places will simply fail to create the infrastructure for EV and that's where hybrids come in the short run. EVs will take off and hydrogen is in theory superior to batteries for range and space, has a huge potential they probably don't want to miss out.
Sure, but so what? India is not dependent on you personally maintaining a hydrogen infrastructure and this narrow-minded “there can be only one way” would not just have us staying on fossil fuels because “why maintain both gas AND electric?” It wouldn’t even have us providing both gas and diesel by the same argument.
All they need it storage and trucks to supply them. Same as gas or propane. Lots of people in the country get their natural gas delivered and it’s no big deal.
Not sure it would be legal in a place like NYC or Manhattan but I’m sure it’s legal in more spread out cities like LA.
It has an even bigger hurdle than that: direct solar water-to-hydrogen isn't scalable (yet) and hydrogen is a petrochemical until it is.
Hydrogen needed a Tesla-like company to strip away everything that made a car a car, and rip away all the legacy at once.
Getting away from ICE requires starting from the ground up, and avoiding picking up too much legacy auto baggage along the way. This is exceedingly hard to do.
Toyota branding their vehicles as hydrogen with the Toyota logo and trying to go it alone was sort of doomed to failure. They had no opportunity to build a buggy v0 of these vehicles with something novel and exciting to entire new customers because they had to convert the average Toyota consumer. They had to utilize the existing dealer network (and get them to buy in), and simultaneously work with governments to build up the infrastructure and work through government approvals.
I see a few of these Mirai's hanging around in California but nothing compared to the number of Model S, Model Y, and Model 3 that I see at every 4 way stop.
That would not have worked. Because a startup could never finance a hydrogen infrastructure like Tesla did for charging. Its simply 10-100x more expensive to do and not practical or green.
Even Toyota and co haven't managed hydrogen infrastructure even in Japan where they had a policy and have been going at it for decade.
Beyond that building the cars is insanely complex, expensive and hard to automate. Fuel-cell mass production is and was even less mature that then battery mass production.
The reason there is not Tesla for Hydrogen because a Tesla for Hydrogen was not actually a practical thing.
Musk himself laughed at a reporter who asked him in 2013 and called them 'fool cells', point out that discussions was not worth it, and the next 5-10 years would clearly show it.