Toyota warns about rushing into electrification | Hacker News Reader

Toyota warns about rushing into electrification

motorious.com

29 pointsnixass122 comments

They’re only skeptics about electrification when you’re talking about battery electric. If you start talking about the horse they’ve spent the last decade backing (HFC) they’ll change their tune.

Toyota is just bitter they backed the wrong horse. Their blatant lies and lobbying have ensured I’ll never buy one of there cars again.

Yep. At least once a week I wish the Chevy Volt had been made by Toyota. I'd adore a PHEV that combined Toyota reliability with enough electric range to get through my whole commute. The Prius Prime is just sad with its 25 mile max EV range that drops to 17 at highway speeds.

They (Toyota) did make the only successor to the Volt - the RAV4 Prime. I literally just made the upgrade and it delivers on the promises the Volt made.

Right, and they've built a whopping 25,000 of them. They build 400,000+ RAV4 annually, so while the product might be good, that doesn't look like a very serious attempt.

I almost bought one of those 25k Primes, but the dealer bundled it with $6k worth of heavily overpriced dealer accessories, $2k for some kind of A/C enhancement that gets you "2-6mpg more!" that sounded very much like snake oil and then added another $5k "market adjustment" line item. I bought a Model Y instead.

Company that backed technology A over technology B because they believed that technology B had fundamental issues stays consistent on their stance, people very angry for some reason, news at 11.

Also this is just wrong, Toyota has right now on the market competitive battery electric cars. But Toyota is a mass-market budget car marker and so faces way different challenges than luxury automakers selling to the already affluent who own their homes, and live and work in areas dotted with superchargers. Toyota, Honda, and GMC are stuck with solving the problems for the 90% of car users.

Personally, I expect that if you banned the sale of new ICE cars today or in the near future it will completely destroy the new car market and screw the used car market even more than it already is right now. I feel like people forget how little control the typical American has over their living situation. If you live in a cheap rental with street parking and need your car to commute to work you're just stuck waiting.

I don’t understand why some BEV fans hate hydrogen so much and some hydrogen fans hate BEV so much.

There are drawbacks to both and advantages to both.

BEVs work well for small and city vehicles, hydrogen for large transport vehicles and off-road type stuff.

Best of all, if we use two, three or four energy sources for our stuff instead of just one, that spreads the load on earth’s resources.

The argument from hydrogen advocates often goes something like, don't bother doing BEV now because hydrogen is going to be so much better ten years from now.

(Meanwhile, keep buying fossil fuel cars please)

It's especially hard to swallow when that advocate is Toyota, largest fossil fuel carmaker in the world.

Toyota is also the manufacturer of the Prius, which outnumbers any other hybrid or BEV model that I see in my day-to-day.

I think it's the same root cause as many problems: the belief that there must be a "best" that is single and absolute.

You see the same thing everywhere. Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux, Android vs. iOS, PC gaming vs console gaming. Whenever there's a technical choice to be made, there will be people who argue that their choice is the "best" choice or the only right choice.

However I think these absolutists are actually the minority, you just tend to see them more often in forums like HN. I suspect the vast majority of people don't really care.

FWIW I'm a hydrogen fan but just bought a BEV, so I can assure you that people like me do exist.

I think BEV will work best for most trucking use cases. Try and debate me without using negative language and you'll understand why the debates look toxic.

> Best of all, if we use two, three or four energy sources for our stuff instead of just one, that spreads the load on earth’s resources.

BEV and green hydrogen use the same fuel source: electricity. Electricity is the magic sauce here, since there are a bunch of ways to generate it.

> I don’t understand why some BEV fans hate hydrogen so much and some hydrogen fans hate BEV so much.

> BEVs work well for small and city vehicles, hydrogen for large transport vehicles and off-road type stuff.

They don't "hate" each other's tech. The entire conversation has up until this point has centered exclusively on light duty passenger vehicles. In that segment it's been clear for a long time that BEVs are the better technology.

If there are any resentments from BEV advocates it is due to the way hydrogen fuel cell tech has been used as a way to slow down the electrification of light duty passenger vehicles.

Only recently has the conversation started about where hydrogen makes more sense (trucking, aviation, and perhaps most importantly, long duration renewable energy storage).

Well I guess I’m generalising from some public Facebook groups I’ve followed but there are regularly flame wars there between the two tribes :)

Hydrogen is often used to make arguments against battery cars and for hydrogen cars (not large transport vehicles, planes, industrial applications with no alternatives, etc.)

Same. I’m a resident of Japan. The interests of carmakers have shaped national industrial and environmental policy here in ways that ensure we - and our kids - will be living with the byproducts of hydrocarbon combustion in our cities and homes for a long time yet - decades probably. Could not be more disgusted, would never buy one of their products. Their cancerous influence on US environmental policy is also well-documented.

The silver lining is that refusing to cannibalize their own product lines will cost them big - and soon. I suspect they’ll end up as a case study for MBAs.

“Toyota” for me is a byword for venality, cynical anti-social exploitation, regulatory capture and gerontocracy.

So you feel that the points raised by Toyota have no merit?

Yes. The affordability issues do not seem to affect Chinese car manufacturers, who are producing EV cars that are quite economical without subsidies.

EV's may introduce new challenges for the grid, but when a country is unable or unwilling to fix that then all those batteries could also present an opportunity to balance that same grid using software.

The problem that they do not mention is that they have huge investments in engine manufacturing that are useless for EV's. EV's are much simpler technology, the only hard parts are batteries and software.

Switching too fast will make their existing manufacturing capabilities worthless, and this is what is really threatening them. That is also making EV's "expensive" to build for them (but not for Tesla, or anyone building new factories).

I think that anyone in a developed country buying an ICE car now is already throwing money out the window: a few years from now nobody will want it anymore, depreciation will be very high.

> anyone in a developed country buying an ICE car now is already throwing money out the window: a few years from now nobody will want it anymore, depreciation will be very high.

Far from universally true. Many developed countries do not have widespread access to charging stations, especially in rural areas.

I'd buy an electric truck if I could go camping and tow a boat for a weekend without refueling, but as far as I can tell that's not possible yet.

Camping is a great EV use case since most camp grounds are wired with electricity for RV'S.

Uhm ... the majority of camp grounds in the USA are run by the USFS and are not wired for anything at all.

Toyota don't want non reliable batteries/electric systems used on Chinese cheap EV (but yes it's innovator's dilemma). Even GM/Kia and LG failed for that.

Their points are not insurmountable and apply even more strongly to HFC. However, Toyota is still lobbying and advertising heavily on HFC, so it is hard not to question the good faith behind their arguments

Toyota's points from the article: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability”

None of these argue against EV cars. Instead, these issues will control the adoption rate.

If you say there aren’t enough charging stations, people will say there is not enough demand. Then you argue against increasing demand because there are not enough charging stations? That’s idiocy.

It’s a common form of idiocy - “we can’t build this thing because it’s not built yet” is a fallacy that deserves its own name.

Anyway, the magic of capitalism is that other people will build it and Toyota can retire if that’s what they want to do.

They may have bet wrongly, as it seems Honda may have as well.

But I would not pledge to avoid Toyotas. Their quality is second to none, by a large margin.

Doesn’t Toyota make the best hybrid cars right now?

Yes. Well, they have a license sharing agreement with Ford.

But their early patents have run out, so there's the possibility of other brands building effective hybrids now. Though Hyundai/KIA have made strides in the Big Ass Starter method of hybridization.

I know nothing about cars. I was watching videos recently trying to understand hybrids because I’m considering buying one when I move back to NZ. It seems like you can save a bit of money with them (hybrids)

It seems the older models before 2017 should be avoided and after 2018 they are really good. And currently Toyota get quite a lot of extra milage.

I looked at Mazda and Honda and hybrid adds a lot of extra cost to those compared to Toyota. But bit worried about the original commenters comment that he would never buy Toyota again.

Is there something wrong with them?

Honda is cheaper than Toyota though, at least in the US.

HFC is more than likely going to win out in the end.

The larger issue is that Hybrids were jumped over for no reason.

HFC is unlikely to win over because of how inefficient it is if you consider carbon free sources of hydrogen. If you don’t consider carbon free sources then why not just stay with gasoline? Hybrids have not been “jumped over”. You’ll find plenty of hybrids in the market, more so than electric. However in the long run we’ll have to eventually more to zero carbon, and pure EVs are already starting to be as useful as hybrids.

I would love to hear your evidence for that opinion, because everything I've seen is that HFC is only likely to succeed in long haul trucking.

It's a chicken or the egg problem. Once the infrastructure gets built out, there's no reason not to use an HFC for any mode of transportation.

I think compressed cryogenic H tanks are a reason.

Storage is a solved problem. The issue is transportation. With the US being as big as it is...it's a very unique challenge.

I'll just put it out here. If the UK alone meets it's plans for phasing out ICE engines for EV, it would consume 9 months supply of Lithium and 2 years worth of cobalt/nickel.

Add on the plans for the rest of the EU countries, US states, Singapore, and Canada and frankly Toyota has a point.

Significant chunks of that nickel comes from Russia hence the price rising 500% since the war began.

There is a complete mismatch in the scaling of electrified 'smart' products and raw materials going forward.

There needs to be multiple horses in play, along with a fundamental realization that the pipedream of a house in a suburb with 2 EV cars for every individual isn't a sustainable plan.

> a fundamental realization that the pipedream of a house in a suburb with 2 EV cars for every individual isn't a sustainable plan.

Nor is a house in the suburbs with 2 ICE cars sustainable. Yet I haven't seen any conversation since the recent petroleum price increase about investing in better mass transit in suburbs in the US. That would make it much easier to stretch the natural resources like Lithium (think electric buses)

We appear to be trapped not only in car dependent infrastructure but also the car dependent mindset.

Mass transit, like higher density living, requires a stronger, more homogeneous, polite and less individualistic culture than the US has. A major driver of the growth of the suburbs was the abandonment of the cities and immediate neighborhoods around them, mainly by catholic ethnics as their neighborhoods were de-homogenized. (Catholicism has always been more urban-friendly than the native US protestant culture.)

At root it boils down to social trust, which has been and will continue to keep falling in the US and elsewhere in the west. Despite my preferences, I expect remote work to take the place of high density living: it's just more compatible with the highly individualistic ethos we have.

> Mass transit, like higher density living, requires a stronger, more homogeneous, polite and less individualistic culture than the US has.

A society doesn't have to be Singapore or Beijing to have viable alternatives to cars for moving the population around.

I've been in few places that are more diverse, rude, and individualistic than New York City, London, and Paris yet they all have excellent (by American standards) mass transit systems. The Bay Area, a more "polite" region, has arguably worse transit.

Furthermore, the most homogeneous and polite parts of the United States have the worst mass transit.

I suspect it has more to do with historical suburban planning decisions (redlining, mass transit unfriendly zoning) designed to enforce homogeneity than it has to do with broad cultural generalizations.

All those major cities developed their mass transit systems long ago in far different environments than they exist in them today. If you don't have strong cultural norms (and in NY, anyway, you do have a sort of lowest-common-denominator norm: you don't talk to strangers on the subway) you end up with people abandoning public transit.

Zoning is and was certainly an issue, but without stronger social consensus you are going to have a hard time getting folks back into a shared space.

I prefer denser living and would love to see it, but I view both sides of the political spectrum as sharing blame for the problem, and neither one willing to compromise on, or, frankly, even discuss it. So, unfortunately, I expect remote work to address the energy crisis rather than a return to sensible urbanism.

> All those major cities developed their mass transit systems long ago in far different environments than they exist in them today.

NYC, London and Paris have been pretty impolite places for a long time - far more impolite when they built their transit systems. For example, many 19th century London buildings were built with urine deflectors [1], reflecting the general civility of the time.

The Victorian era during which the early London public transit system was built was one of the most famous eras of high crime, giving rise to stories like Sherlock Holmes. The the Victorian era also saw mass exiles of criminals and other undesired people to Australia.

The difference isn't in the culture of those places at the time that their transit systems were built, but rather that they were built before mass personal car ownership was a thing.

I don't doubt that the shift to remote work for many people will change the transportation landscape a bit. However, a huge number of people will still have to physically get to a workplace, and highway congestion in major cities is nearly as bad now as it was before the pandemic, so the problem really hasn't been solved in any way by remote work.

1. https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/19th-century-urin...

Lithium-Iron-Phosphate chemistries appear likely to be the choice for less flashy vehicles, and don't require cobalt or nickel. It's slightly less energy dense, though has some other benefits.

Lithium mining can be increased, though perhaps not at current price points (unsure about this).

I'll agree that 2 EVs per suburb house is a bit absurd, but it was absurd before EVs too.

Lithium mining can be increased quite easily and is absurdly profitable at current prices which are about an order of magnitude above where it was 3 years ago.

The problem is time, it takes about 5 years to bring up a mine or a processing plant. Then the worry is that everybody will do it, crashing the market due to over supply.

There are a bunch of mines halfway through this process, but even when they come online in 2025 or so, they're not enough to meet demand. So any crash in Lithium prices is unlikely to come before 2028. But would you invest in a new mine to come online in 2028?

In 1894 The Times said "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure". What they missed in their prediction was how cars would replace horses.

If lithium really does become such a scarce resource we can change laws if we have to. Or maybe we’ll just get better at recycling and mining it.

Only 5% of lithium has ever been recycled. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220105-lithium-batterie...

The places where they are mined in Chille, Australia, China. There is only 1 mine AFAIK in the US and there are huge issues due to large water scarcity and environmental concerns.

Nevermind the issues regarding the other components like Cobalt, Nickel which are the specific constrains here.

The reality is that the world is in no position to scale the production of such materials to meet the demands for every EV manufacturer, home battery production, consumer electronics, industrial and steel production all expecting 200+% growth simultaneously.

Lithium is all over. There just hasn't been demand for it.

This is a modest project, but neatly illustrates where we find ourselves:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rio-tinto-plc-lithium/rio...

For EV's to be commercially viable in the long term, we have to move solid state batteries. From everything I've heard they seem to be much more energy dense and don't require rare earth metals to produce. They would also increase the range on EV's to the point where "range anxiety" is just not a thing anymore.

IMO we're at the "2nd generation" of EV's, in the first gen, they were just toys, in this gen they start to make sense for certain people, by the "3rd generation" I expect solid state batteries to make EV's viable for the majority of people.

This is why I'm a big proponent of E-bikes, for most commutes they are a really good fit. However the USA is tricky, Telsa took cars electric, hat tip to musk, but it's not like he tackled the more complex part of over consumption. Look at the cyber truck!

As for raw inputs, Australia is building and will supply a lot of capacity in this space, the Russian impact won't be forever.

> Look at the cyber truck!

Wouldn't want to do any R&D that replaces laborer vehicles/work trucks eventually?

It's even worse because some people are relying on batteries being used for storage to compensate for the volatility of renewables.

Most of mainstream media reported this with a title indicating that Toyota is against electrification, when in fact they merely stated that there are unsolved challenges to be able to do it at scale.

Just because EV exists as a luxury option for enthusiasts interested in the EV experience does not mean that it is ready for mass adoption.

Toyota has spent billions on hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen technology with little to show for it. They are justifiably upset on that front. They've been against electric vehicles for years now.

> They've been against electric vehicles for years now.

This is such a weird take when the Toyota Prius has been around for over 20 years.

Let me clarify: BEV. Not hybrids.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are electric vehicles.

I guess? Most people draw a necessary distinction between HFCV and BEV. They're very different animals with different infrastructure and challenges.

Okay, but the distinction isn't that one of them is not electric.

Having recently looked at Toyota offerings over here in Australia, what is strange is I can't even order a plug-in hybrid. I would have naively thought there where no challenges whatsoever adding a socket so the battery can be charged from an external source.

So many people I talk too are keeping their junkers running 'just a few more years' until non-luxury EVs or plugin hybrids come on our market. I think there are only two EV models available under the luxury car tax threshold, both nearly double the price of comparable petrol vehicles.

In the near term, EVs are a great way to lower the emissions of a small number of vehicles. Hybrids allow us a better way to allocate our currently limited supply of batteries and reduce fuel usage across the fleet.

Of course both of these compete with mass transit and simply driving less.

Disclosure: I own an EV. While I believe hybrids are better for society as a whole, I like my EV and there's a 50/50 shot I'll stay with EVs when my lease expires. That said, it would be nice to avoid the hassle of charging and get rid of my range anxiety.

There’s also a huge segment of professional vehicles (specialized, delivery vans, ambulances) which are going to stay firmly in the diesel land for the foreseeable future.

Delivery vans? Germany, seem to be electric at my place, and cargo bikes are used in the city as well. A recent advancement: https://ebike-news.de/75-tonner-bald-geschichte-db-schenker-...

I don't think there are any issues of removing diesel here.

I can't think of why ambulances couldnt be electrified as well. Low center of gravity thanks to the battrry could help here.

Also when I’m a big company with a budget, and I see that for the price of one EV with a 200 km of actually achievable range I can buy 2.5 diesel versions of the same model which cost less to maintain and have 600 km range, take negligible time to tank, and you need 50-100 of them, the choice becomes really obvious: unless the state subsidizes EVs really heavily, they are not the way to go for now.

A fleet EV typically adds about $10,000 to the purchase price and saves about $5000 a year in fuel and maintenance. Most, but definitely not all, fleets do less than 300km a day and idle overnight.

Ambulances sometimes have a lot of distance to cover. There’s life outside large cities, too.

Life outside cities arent a problem for evs, usually at least. At least in europe you wont be driving for hours with an ambulance.

In 2020, when COVID-19 was rampant and nobody had a clue what to do about it, it was not an uncommon thing, unfortunately, to have to drive 70 km or more to a case of a heart attack, and then take a mad ride from one hospital to another to find one that would pretty fucking please with sugar on top admit a patient whose life is threatened. All the while stabilizing the poor patient. It could have easily taken hours and many hundreds of kilometers.

This is a true story told me by an EMT.

An EV would in such circumstances have been dead halway between one hospital and another, having to power both its engine and medical equipment (though I suspect those have backup batteries too).

My question is what's happening with military vehicles? Will they stay with diesel or move to something like hydrogen. If they stick with diesel then the cost of war is going to increase as the economies of scale shrink.

I think they'll stick with diesel and whatever kind of jet fuel powers the M1 Abrams. Cost has never been much of a consideration for the military.

As far as I know, JP-8 powers just about every US military vehicle. We sure didn't have anything else available for military vehicles while I was in the Army, but I was never in a tank unit.

I expect space based solar to be the next big thing the military will get into. It's way too expensive for everybody else, but cheap compared to what the military spend to fly generator fuel into war zones.

Once they have secure electricity, they can think about relying on it more.

They are going to make even better torches once they are hit…

What Toyota should have done is selling more PHEV in around 2016. They could save carbon emission for daily use case and uses less batteries (and they keep their advantage).

> Of course both of these compete with mass transit and simply driving less.

Driving less is a solution to reducing vehicular emissions in the same way eating less is a solution to world hunger.

Not really. As Covid has shown us, a significant amount of commuting is essentially useless. I suspect business travel via air will never recover as a percentage of GDP.

Also mass transit isn't analogous to fasting. You still get to eat, but instead of eating steak made to order you're eating spaghetti from a cafeteria.

>require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability

This is a laughable quote. Tesla built their own charging infrastructure [1], designed and secured their battery supply [2], doesn't advertise, [3] and is selling to millions [4]. Toyota missed their e-chance and have no right to "warn us" about electrification.

[1] https://www.finder.com/tesla-superchargers-map

[2] https://electrek.co/2021/11/01/tesla-secures-lithium-supply-...

[3] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-marketing-strategy-is-no-adv...

[4] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/01/02/tesla-499550-vehicles-d...

https://www.engadget.com/tesla-q4-2021-year-end-deliveries-s...

Tesla's self-built infrastructure manages to deal with the (perhaps) 2.5M cars they have put on the road. That's roughly 1% of the total number of automobiles in the USA. I don't think I need to say any more.

I was just talking to my girlfriend about this the other day. Even in our low Tesla usage state the chargers are increasingly occupied. We pull up and now 6/8 stalls are being used. What happens when even a fraction of all the gas cars switch over? What happens when 100% of the population needs them and needs to charge for an hour? I don’t know.

Wouldn't simply building more charging stations work?

Other angle is to increase charging speeds. Of course this might require better batteries, but I'm sure they're improving.

Demand -> Volume -> Economies of scale -> Competition -> Even More Chargers

Many of the superchargers people use today were built by 2012-2019 Tesla, which had far less revenue, people, and fleet volume.

Charge at home! We go to a supercharger once every few months.

We already do. But trips to the big city require a charge to get back home.

"refueling infrastructure (power grids), battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability are huge constraints which must be figured out".

Valid concerns. Especially the ability of the grid to handle all of the extra cars. Both in terms of producing enough electricity and being able to deliver it.

They've been figured out, years already.

Drove pure electric starting in late 2014, BMW i3, and can confirm it's awesome, I never once got stuck, the cost of "fuel" is such that the equivalent MPG (eMPG i think they call it) was around 130 eMPG.

Point is, you can recharge on 110 volt plugs like at home just fine, and you spend at least 5x less on fuel per distance, when gas is cheap, and around 10x less when it's not. Maintenance costs on the powertrain are essentially 0.

Battery resilience is the only concern i had: how do they degrade over time?

I don't think the delivery question is about how to get electricity to a few early adopters. It's about how the grid takes on the increased load of millions of electric cars.

Every single family home in Texas has at least one A/C unit pulling 10-60 amps of power from May - August and the grid is mostly just fine due to the availability of peaker plants. I think grid problems for people charging at home is overstated.

Texas famously has its own electrical grid (for better or worse) that is built with this concept at least somewhat in mind. But MN and WI and IL do not have a grid built to charge (maybe) 60 million automobiles. CA even more so. Even in Texas, the issue of getting sufficient amperage to residents of the state's larger cities is non-trivial, not necessarily because of supply but because of physical access.

> It's about how the grid takes on the increased load of millions of electric cars.

In my condominium we have chargers which talk to each other, to limit the overall power draw for all our cars. Modern chargers also integrate with grid pricing, so they can charge when the price is low (and hence ample supply).

Couple that with EVs starting to be able to act as grid-connected batteries, and it seems the equation isn't as horrible as it might first appear.

Not saying upgrades won't be needed, more so in some countries than others.

Yeah I personally have no clue how valid this concern is, and with that ignorance I can confidently say it can and should be solved ;)

I was only pointing out that the comment above ("I can charge my car") didn't seem like it was responding to the actual concern ("can we charge 300,000,000 cars?")

> "can we charge 300,000,000 cars?"

== "is the average driven distance per day ~40miles" && "can the grid handle running ~ two lightbulbs for 12 hours for each electric car needing 40miles of charge?"

Right, but recharging on 110v plugs is adequate for daily travel if not cross country, so if the grid can handle roughly one lightbulb per house left on overnight, it can charge cars.

The calculation that's unclear is if every car is a big battery tesla and if its entire range is drained every single day. That's just irrelevant, but what fear-mongering focuses on.

no offense, but it seems like you don't know how tension and current intensity relate to each other. Tension (100V) is like the pressure you get at your water tap: it can be high or low. Current Intensity is how much water it's flowing through your tap. The same amount of water (say 100 liters per minute) can flow from a high pressure tap that is only opened a little bit, or from a low pressure tap opened all the way.

Just because the car charges at 110V, it does not mean it consumes only as much as a bulb. In order to charge overnight, an EV will need to draw 1000s of times more current than a bulb. Multiply that by all the houses in a city, and you start having issues.

An average car needs about 5 kWh of electricity daily. That's 24 hours of two incandescent light bulbs.

And it's needed overnight when the grid is almost idle.

average daily distance is 40 miles. Average consumption is 0.346kWh per mile. That is 13 KWh per day.

I was talking about overnight only, because you definitely don't want everyone to charge their EVs during peak hours, so that is around 10 hours, you need about 1.3 KW constantly during that time. BTW, why did you mention duration of 24Hours, but then said it's only needed overnight?

If you have 2 EVs per family, that is 2.6 KW. It takes us to 26 large incandescent lightbulbs (I can't barely find 100W anymore) or 260 LED bulbs. This all assumes that the EV plays nice with the grid and only charges at the minimum draw, rather than as fast as it safely can. If a Tesla charges at 48AMPs, that (5KW) is going to be MUCH larger than a lightbulb).

It's not as simple as: one light bulb is the same as one EV...I agree it's not an insurmountable problem, I don't even think it's the biggest problem with EVs(batteries are), but you can't just handwave it away.

> I dont' even think it's the biggest problem with EVs(batteries are)

agreed, and this has been a great conversation.

It makes me realize, i wonder if there's big money to be made by pushing the narrative that "the grid" can't handle EVs, since for average distance trips the grid impact for our ev really has been on the order of an incandescent or two running through the night, and we align with your average stats.

none taken; i know exactly what you mean, and thanks for being clear anyway (not joking).

i just mean to emphasize that the draw on the grid is comparable to an incandescent lamp running, for most EVs daily recharge needs.

I think it's a little disingenous to compare the load of an electric car to "one lightbulb". One lightbulb is probably 100W, 200W if you're pushing it. The car is probably drawing the max 1500-2000W it can from the plug

>The car is probably drawing the max 1500-2000W it can from the plug

They don't draw from the plug like that; their onboard electronics is configurable to slow charge, and thus the incandescent bulb or two analogy.

It's actually not misleading at all, after 7+ years of doing so, and paying electricity bills for such.

The technique, to your point, works well when charging overnight when rates are low and the time to charge need not be a short time span, which therefore means the average daily distance isn't outlandish.

Figured it out for a few people.

The current reality is they are no where near adequate for many people. There are no outlets were my car is parked and the nearest charging station is a 2 hour walk.

And for me, the range is also far too low. I make several 8+ hour, 500+ mile trips per year. At least one in the middle of winter. Actual winter. With snow. And temperatures where breaking down in a blizzard without proper clothing is fatal. (Which means you'll be using the heater a lot.)

An EV at 50% battery has enough juice to run the seat heaters for a month.

And no dangers of plugging the exahaust and killing yourself with Carbon Monoxide.

I've made 500km blizzard trips in my EV, and I consider it much safer than my ICE car. It has better traction and is more reliable, especially in the cold

While all of that is great, it is irrelevant to the point Toyota's making.

Just a note, it takes A LOT of energy (and electricity!) to refine oil into gasoline. In CA for instance, the power it takes to refine fuel could, almost, be used watt for watt to power EVs going the same distance.

You can also add in the energy costs to extract, transport, store, etc fuel too (but EVs have a lot of that overhead too).

You seem to be implying that increased EV usage will dramatically decrease the need for oil refinement. Do you have any evidence of this?

In just the US, EV purchases have grown nearly exponentially over the past decade [0]. However total petroleum consumption in the US has slowly but steadily risen [1] during the same period (excluding, of course, the pandemic). Gasoline consumption has remained roughly flat.

There's a common and understandable assumption that "more green technology usage means lower GHG emissions" but in reality there is little evidence to support this. Globally, green energy usage has only served to supplement energy demands.

Since the industrial revolution we, as a species, have never reduced our usage of an energy source [3] Surprisingly we still burn as much wood as we did when every home was heated by wood burning.

The only dips we ever see in GHG emissions are during periods of economic disruption, but that's a path people are very unwilling to even discuss so it's not worth bringing up.

Point being, people dramatically over estimate the certainty that an increase in EVs will someone also mean a decrease in overall oil consumption.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...

1. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...

2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

Do you have a citation for this? Not that I don't believe you (it's actually a very plausible statement), but I have so many questions on the technical details here.

"the chicken can't exist before the egg"

Come on, all of these are things that grow WITH the EV industry as the EV industry develops.

Given how much Toyota has helped the hydrogen industry develop hydrogen infrastructure over the last decade as they put all their eggs into the hydrogen bucket, they very much know all this.

> all of these are things that grow WITH the EV industry as the EV industry develops. Doesn't mean that they will grow at the same rate. The concern is that EV goals are too aggressive given the pace that these other things can grow at

> Given how much Toyota has helped the hydrogen industry develop hydrogen infrastructure over the last decade as they put all their eggs into the hydrogen bucket, they very much know all this.

Then perhaps we should take their concerns more seriously when they raise them about the rollout of electric cars.

Then lets hear some actual concerns.

All this is just a disingenuous "the industry can't develop because the supporting infrastructure isn't there", while if you look at their actions, they've been building the supporting infrastructure along with the developing industry.

It looks like disingenuous FUD because it seems like the market is saying they've bet on the wrong kind of infrastructure.

Nope. electrifying all the cars in germany would cause merely a 15-20% increase in electricity demand. Then factor in that there is a shift ongoing away from cars to bikes and publjc transport... No, production isnt an issue...

15-20% seems low. Do you have a source for this?

And I have feeling that people in north america drive far more km/day than those in Germany/Europe.

https://edison.media/erklaeren/so-viel-strom-braeuchte-ein-v...

I wonder if burning your corporate credibility contributes to GHG emissions.

Will be interesting to see which brands survive this discontinuity.

Due to the buyer demographics Toyota has spent 15+yr courting and the brand image they have been cultivating they have really stagnated themselves into a corner.

The cheap enough and nice enough EVs other brands are bringing to the table are going to cost them a lot of sedan and hatch buyers.

And the Tacoma/4Runner/highlander money printer is going to get run over by the EV F150 and other big electric family haulers that the other OEMs have in the works.

Vehicle platforms take time to develop and bring to production. Toyota is gonna be late to the game. And being late to the game can be the same as not being in it when you're chasing the fickle high end consumers they are.

Their credibility is worth something if they sell it now. It might not be worth anything down the line. So selling their credibility while telling themselves it'll be ok might simply be the best they can do.

'...As Wimmer pointed out, only 2% of cars in the world are EVs. That’s a tiny sliver, yet automakers and governments are acting like the EV formula has been cracked. The problems Wimmer brought up before the Senate, refueling infrastructure (power grids), battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability are huge constraints which must be figured out before the industry goes charging headlong in the EV direction'.

This is without the reality that meanwhile ICE powered vehicles have never been cleaner or more fuel efficient, while tire pollution issues have never been greater, arguably the most important issue around transport. I think Toyota are wise to remain conservative given their stellar performance creating efficient hybrid vehicles (ceurrently circa 35% of vehicle markets). Priuses replaced diesel Mercedes as the world's taxis.

I'd back Toyota on this, we have a very long way to go before BEVs are practical or viable except for the VS crowd.

Pure EVs provide more miles per kg of carbon emitted over their life even if you consider 100% coal power generation and most fuel efficient ICE vehicles. I’m not sure what tire pollution you are talking about, but to me it seems like it would apply to both ICE and EVs and should have no significance in an argument between ICE vs EV

https://www.tiretechnologyinternational.com/news/regulations...

BEVS are very hard on tires due to battery weight, torque characteristics

https://www.fleetmaintenance.com/equipment/brakes-tire-and-w...

We have a century plus of developing resource extraction and refueling infrastructure for ICE transportation. It seems unreasonable to expect electric infrastructure overnight. New charging stations are being built all the time. Renewable energy infrastructure is being built all over the world.

Fossil fuels have a lot of positives, if they didn't, we never would have developed them. The infrastructure we've built out makes it easy to continue using them, not to mention the political inertia of disrupting big players. However, fossil fuels also have major downsides: local environmental impact, global environmental impact, geopolitics, etc.

I'm a car guy, even a Toyota fan. There's an '87 Supra in my garage right now. Fossil fuels had a good run, but it's time to move on, hopefully in time to maintain a habitable planet. I think sooner than we expect, we'll look at ICE vehicles the same way we look at coal powered steam locomotives: The tech is neat, some people still love them, there's a community of hobbyists, even if it's in miniatures. But as transportation, everyone knows they are horribly slow, inefficient, noisy, dirty and smelly, and nobody would dream of taking one to work every day.

I wish Toyota would quit spreading FUD, and instead help us move to a cleaner future.

Batteries in cars do not make sense.

Hybrids using alcohol fuel do make sense, if you grow the fuel as part of local regenerative farms. "CSA for fuel."

- Most ICE cars can be converted to use alcohol. (We can use the existing cars longer, rather than replacing them, which would save a TON of resources.)

- The exhaust is non-toxic.

- It's carbon neutral. (The carbon in the fuel came from the air, not the ground.)

- Pretty much anyone can make it. It's not hard.

- The byproducts are good animal feed. (Yeast is protein, fermentation converts the sugars and starches into yeast and alcohol. So alcohol production improves the inputs rather than destroying or degrading them!)

- Alcohol has (much!) higher energy density than batteries.

- Batteries have all kinds of problems once they are wrecked: cars have spontaneously erupted into flames a week after the crash that sent them to the wrecking yard. When they do burn they put out crazy toxic smoke.

I think we should have driven in hybrid mode until we figure out a better battery/energy technology.

I think Toyota is being realistic, and prudent. There is a lot of hype around EV's, and perhaps a certain level of ignorance, blissful or willful. On the blissful side of things, you have the average EV consumer who after waiting months for their back-ordered EV will plug the vehicle into the electric grid. Obviously this increases the load on the grid, which entails many things. If the EV owner uses standard household 15/20 amp (120 volt) receptacles, the Toyota charger will use about 11 ~ 12 amps, which obeys the 80/60 rule. Meaning 12 amps is 80% of a 15 amp circuit breaker, or 12 amp is 60% of 20 amp breaker, leaving a little spare capacity on the circuit to hopefully not trip the breaker. If the EV customer upgrades to 240 volt charging, the circuit must use a larger cable, and thus less resistance, and the result is more amperage may flow. So without going into Ohms law, your average Lvl-2 charger will do about 30 amps. Or put another way the circuit is protected by a 37.5 amp breaker, again obeying the 80% electrician "ampacity" rules.

So... just imagine a bunch of homes adding on average 30 amps ambient load to the electrical grid, not all at once, but probably at night, or probably at certain times of day like after rush hour, etc.. So then imagine places like California, or Texas with large populations, and electrical grid capacity issues. In California they have infamous problems with "not in my back yard" problem, unable to expand the electricity grid to meet future expected demand because the various municipalities don't want power lines in their back yards. Also, California's grid is apparently already unsafe, having caused wild fires from old overloaded high-lines, etc. The situation in California is sad because it's probably the most progressive EV market anywhere in the USA. As for Texas, their electrical grid is probably better than in California, but most of the power is from natural gas fired power plants, and there is a second energy grid... the natural gas grid and the quality there is lagging behind. So there is a nexus of causality, and if the NG grid cannot sustain higher load, then the electrical grid beyond will not be capable of delivering the higher demand, etc... and one only has to point towards the winter of 2021, if that implication wasn't apparent already.

All of this ignores the more fundamental issues of mineral extraction, and scarcity. This topic will from an economics perspective act as a natural constraint on EV growth. This may provide enough time for the "grids" to upgrade their capacity, which represents huge regulatory hurdles, and if effectively a mega project in terms of bureaucratic hoops, and actual deployment. So if in an alternate universe we had ample spare lithium, nickle, cobalt, etc... then the constraint would be the speed at which we could upgrade the electrical grid.

One last note about the grid regarding rooftop solar. The grid is not designed for a bunch of homes back-feeding the grid at scale, and there are legitimate safety issues. This is a related issue, in a similar way maybe 1% of homes back-feed solar power, so the grid can absorb the increase for now, but not at scale. Because while we're updating the grid to handle more delivery from power stations, we may as well update the last mile to handle solar rooftop generation. This is perhaps an even more ambitious mega project, as it involves increasing circuit "ampacity" along the last mile, which is like 90% (exaggerating so you get the point) of the total grid cost.

Another important limitation in the article that is not mentioned is that how 'green' electric cars are isn't determined by the engine, it's determined by the energy input. The lifetime emissions of an electric vehicle are still about ~70% of a conventional one in most countries.

Accelerating electrification when all you've done is move the resource consumption from the car to a conventional power plant isn't really that helpful.

We should not just switch to EV and keep everything same. The power generation needs to switch over to more renewables or probably nuclear at the same time if we want to reach zero carbon soon. However if we don’t switch to EVs then there is no other way for us to cut the carbon from transportation. We can’t wait for the magical carbon free transport that may come in 20 years and just keep using ICEs in the meantime

A 30% emissions reduction is amazing, why would you use that argument? Gas engines will always use gas while electric motors can use any kind of electricity. Transferring generation from car to power plant is a fantastic plan. Economies of scale kick in and it allows you to aggressively invest in cleaner tech which causes a virtuous price cycle.

>why would you use that argument?

Because dynamics like the Jevon's paradox exist. Marginal efficiency or sustainability improvements generally just lead to increased consumer demand. This is exactly the dynamic of the traditional car engine. It's why despite the fact that green energy output has increased by several magnitudes in terms of production, globally we've only lowered carbon dependency by marginal amounts. Gains are being eaten by increased consumption. In fact this applies even to green energy infrastructure itself which often needs to run for a long time to pay for its own construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#Energy_conserva...

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