Toyota unveils home battery pack to compete with Tesla Powerwall | Hacker News Reader

Toyota unveils home battery pack to compete with Tesla Powerwall

electrek.co

29 pointsvwoolf8 comments

Operating range “-20℃ to +45℃”

Is this typical for battery packs that are going to be outside? Here in the SW a black battery pack will often exceed that 45C outdoors in the sun. And I’m dubious on it staying below that in the shade at the extremes.

Edit: nvm, “Toyota is taking pre-orders for the system, but it is only available in Japan for now.”

I'm just going to assume this is better and more cost effective than teslas. Why is tesla so adamant on making a module that mounts on the wall, on the interior of your house? Toyota, being pragmatic engineers, say make it a big rectangle that sits on the ground, outside, like a gen-set. A few hundred dollars of cinder blocks later and you don't have to worry about the house burning down.

While everyone has been salivating over Musk and his market manipulation tactics, Toyota has been actually been building way better electric/hybrid cars and batteries when compared to Tesla, for a few years now.

Isn't Toyota launching it's first BEV this year? Or have they been selling them in other countries for years?

As far as I know they’ve at least dabbled. They made a BEV RAV4 with Tesla at one point. I think for compliance the threw an electric drivetrain in a Lexus for certain countries too? Their hybrid experience though makes a BEV not much of a stretch.

Yes, the "bZ4X". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_bZ4X

This Toyota battery pack is 8.7 kWh compared to 13.5 kWh in a Powerwall. The Toyota pack can produce slightly higher (I assume sustained) output at 5.5 kW compared to 5 kW on a powerwall. But there is also no mention of the peak power output which for a single powerwall is 7 kW. Also no mention of pricing and if you can connect multiple batteries in parallel to increase total storage and output, which you can do with multiple Powerwalls.

I’m all for home battery backup but no one has come close to meeting or beating what Tesla has offered for years.

I quite like the Prius line.

I don't know why there is a fight between BEVs and ICE.

If you are a one-car family or one-car single person, a plug-in hybrid can be that car.

When you can't charge, it's a heavy compact sedan that demolishes any pure ICE on city and highway MPG.

When you _can_ charge, it's a lighter BEV [1] that gets awesome MPGe for short commutes but also has no range anxiety.

My daily driver is pure ICE, but the computer has a live MPG readout, and now I feel guilty every time I brake... I don't need a pure BEV, I just want a battery to soak up braking energy.

[1] A Prius sedan is lighter than a Tesla Model S, I'm pretty sure. Feel free to fact-check me.

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