Toyota chief says ‘silent majority’ has doubts about pursuing only EVs
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'm going to get crucified for saying this, but I suspect hybrids will likely be the future, with EV use picking up slowly (if at all) over the next 20-30 years. Not saying EVs are like 3D TVs, but as it stands right now, EVs are far too expensive for the vast majority of the US population. I'm going to focus on the US for now. The readership for hacker news skews wealthier, but I would like you all to pretend to be broke, for just one second.
The cost of a battery pack replacement for EVs are exorbitant, and that battery pack replacement cost all but eliminates whatever potential monetary benefit an individual would derive from driving an EV in the first place. Yes, I know blah blah blah the environment, blah blah blah lower maintenance, but look - broke people already take their car the cheapest mechanic or have uncle joe take a look at it, or just don't maintain it at all. The vast majority of people are going to look and see if its cheaper to buy, own and insure than a regular gas car.
The price of a new battery pack for an EV is exorbitant. A chevy bolt battery pack is 8 grand. A tesla pack costs 15k. Other electric vehicles are in the same ballpark. There is no way to get these battery packs new, other than going to a dealer, because "refurbished" packs just keep failing every 2-3 years and you keep replacing cell by cell playing whack a mole until the next cell fails. Ain't nobody paying 10-15k for a battery. You can buy a whole ass car for that amount of money. The readership for hacker news skews wealthier, I know, but truly, there are a lot of people who buy cars for 5-10k and drive them for the next 8-10 years, with rarely an incident. There are a whole lot of people who have never bought a brand "new" car from a dealership in their life. And until EVs get cheap enough to percolate down to the masses, adoption is going to be at a standstill.
As an aside - The reputation of car brands is made and destroyed in the used car market. the Prius has an excellent reputation because (despite battery pack woes) there are people who drive those things for 300k miles plus, regularly. I guarantee that if an automaker rushes and builds shitty EVs that ultimately end up being pieces of unreliable shit 5-10 years later on the used car market, that is by far the easiest and fastest way to ruin their their company and drive themselves to insolvency. Tesla is on the cusp of learning this, unfortunately.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-hyb...
I live in hope that EV's are an advanced transition technology as well.
Personally I think 2035 is a more than realistic deadline for affordable EVs and the charging infrastructure to go with it. And the pre-announced deadline should hopefully give companies the confidence they need to invest in these technologies ahead of time.
There will then be another tipping point when ICE/hybrid ownership declines to the point that starts being uneconomical for filling stations to remain open and they start disappearing. At which point ICE cars will be decidedly inconvenient.
Personally, I have two ICE vehicles and plan on keeping them running and in good shape for a long time (one is 7 years old, the other 2 and both are known for running well into the 100s of thousands of miles). I don't drive "frequently", but when I do drive it's is a long distance one way. Living in a rural area with things like snow, etc. EVs aren't anywhere close to being ready for such. If the cost of owning an ICE vehicle becomes too much, then I will consider a hybrid.
It might work in places like Norway.
Life is going to get very hard in Europe for the average middle class family. I'm betting on significant standard of living declines in Europe across the board. People will complain, maybe even riot, but that's not going to make a difference to EU bureaucrats or to the British ruling class. If you have middle or lower class friends/relatives there and communicate regularly with them, you can pick up on the general gloomy view of the future in Western Europe.
Fortunately, most of Asia and the US, where the majority of the world's economy and population are located, is unlikely to implement universal mandates (excepting places like Singapore and Japan) -- they will be one option among other options. California, I expect, will relent simply because the state as a whole lacks the administrative competence to upgrade its grid to support mass EV usage. It lacks the competence to provide reliable power even now.
China is rolling out EVs in massive numbers, together with the necessary infrastructure in big cities, simply because there's not enough oil in the world to support 800 million cars driving around China, and it would be an air pollution nightmare -- something that Beijing is very sensitive about. But at the same time, China is not banning gas cars; rural areas still rely on gas cars, buses, and trucks. I remember being in a rickety old bus traveling a pot-hole filled road from Kunming to Li Jiang that lasted about 15 hours - there is simply no way you can do this with an EV. But China is again following a rational plan in which regional needs are taken into account, as China has experience deploying infrastructure at scale and is responsive to public pressures in a way that most western bureaucracies are not. Being a party dictatorship forces you to listen to the public on issues that matter because you cannot fall back on the legitimacy provided by elections -- which is why China just rolled back the zero covid policy. Holding elections often grants the government powers to do all sorts of anti-democratic things, even if the real policies are decided by structures designed to be unaccountable to voters. This is the essence of the administrative state.
It is this unique government structure, together with administrative competence, that's going to allow the EU to enforce these measures even as the rest of the world cannot. But at some point, EU voters are going to get wise to the fact that they are being ruled by structures over which they have no effective levers of control, and then things will get interesting. The EU announced they will create a small army -- they call it a "stabilization force" that can suppress attempted revolutions or unrest, so for a general riot like the Yellow Vests or Dutch Farmer, the local government is expected to suppress it, but if there is successful anti-EU revolution, then this army will be sent in. I expect this stabilization force to be busy in the next few decades.
Toyota revenue by region (2022) in trillions of Japanese Yen:
Japan: 16
North America: 11
Asia: 6.5
Europe: 3.9
Other: 3.0
Generating the power across town with the same fuel (in a turbine instead of ICE), transmitting it, converting it to DC to charge a battery, converting that back to AC and spinning an electric motor is more efficient. Yes there are more steps, but none of them are anywhere near as awful as ICE efficiency.
https://insideevs.com/reviews/443380/2020-honda-jazz-fit-hyb...
Combined cycle turbines are about 60% efficient.
Does this make sense?
A natural gas combustion engine is 40% efficient and loses 5-15% of that in the transmission.
60% * 80% > 40% * 95%.
Also, the data on this stuff is already rolling in since the first gen Nissan Leafs hit the market in 2010, the Tesla Model S in 2012.
That's because engines, properly lubricated, and run at a set RPM (i.e highway miles), have a lifespan that is far in excess of what a normal person would reasonably drive in half their adult lifespan. Dependent on brand, of course. But plenty of people racking up 400k-500k miles on original engines. That shit used to be unheard of back in the day.
Engines degrade by use. This is not the case for lithium ion batteries based on the way they are used in electric vehicles. Degradation is based on DoD - depth of charge. You cycle a lithium ion battery between 50%-60% instead of 10-90%, and you increase the lifespan exponentially. It's not linear. It's exponential. If automakers wanted to, they could add 2k to the wholesale price of the car, make the battery pack 20% larger, cycle the pack in a more narrow window of its capacity, and if age wasn't a factor, no battery pack would fail before the 20 year mark. Unbalanced degradation with age, as it is, is virtually the only reason every battery pack fails.
When you have a prius, and your battery pack fails, all the places that sell refurbished packs do it by taking the battery packs apart, finding the one cell thats shot, replacing it, and magically the whole battery pack works again. Why is it that one cell out hundreds? It's not as if that one cell was charged or used more than the others, they are all in series/parallel. The car charges all the cells the same. That particular cell just degraded faster than the others. The technology currently exists to make lithium batteries that last 20+ years, but it is nigh impossible to predict that during year 17, cell #345 is going to degrade 0.0032% faster than its peers and will cause the whole pack to fail.
Almost 100% of priuses will need a battery replacement by year 15. It averages from 9-15 years, with the peak happening 12 years from manufacture. Oddly enough, on the PriusChat forums, there was someone who tabulated this but cars that spent most of their life in Canada and Northern states trended toward lasting longer than cars down along the gulf coast and in southern states. Not sure if there was a large enough sample for significance, but I'm sure with the sheer about of priuses that have been sold in the past 20 years, this can be figured out.
If your argument is that EVs won't take off because fresh batteries aren't cheap, I mean, you're right, they're not. The refurb battery market is huge though. Instead of paying the dealer a couple grand for a brand new pack, Uncle Joe or the local cheap mechanic, and YouTube University can do it, often for as cheap as couple hundred, with practice. Plus less waste for the environment.
Given the millions of EVs already sold though, and the various EV-only mandates globally, I think it's moot because they're already here, unlike 3D TV which had no such government mandate. The average used car price from a dealer in November was $31k, and a 2012 Tesla Model S can be had for around that much (Nissan Leaf even less than that), so I think the electrified future's already here. Just gotta let it percolate out to the rest of us.
You could be right though, I don't have a time machine :) It's just EVs are so stupidly much easier under the hood. No PCV valves, no carb or fuel injectors, or O2 sensors, no emissions crap. There's still some complexity, but it's just not the same.
All the problems with EVs are manufacturing at scale issues that will go away.
Currently EVs have enough demand that there's 6+ month waiting list where I live for all the models I've looked at. That tells me that although they're a small % of the market right now, they want to be a bigger share.
I watched a review of a Byd Atto3 yesterday. That's a cheaper EV and the reviewer said he couldn't believe how well built it seemed + features at it's price point. We're at the start of the road here, manufacturing at scale is one of those things people always seem to underestimate.
The question is probably: can we dig up enough lithium? I think everything else is irrelevant tbh.
Many people think they are late adopters. Most aren't, but some are.
* I live in rural America. I do a lot of local driving, but when I don't, it's often 200+ miles and a good amount of that is 500+ miles. Many parts of that route do not have charger infrastructure. I'd have to buy/rent an additional car for these hauls.
* Towing range. I tow a small trailer occasionally. All vehicles reduce their range with towing, but it's even harder in an EV when the infrastructure isn't in place.
* Winter. Winter kills range.
This is EXACTLY who should be buying an electric car. If you're commuting around 15km each way, then you drive aboout 15000km a year. Over 10 years, in a gas car you're getting something like 7L/100km, which at local gas prices here in Ottawa is around $13,000 over the life of the car. For the same amount of driving over 10 years, an electric will cost you about $2K in electriciy. And that's not counting all the other money you save in things like oil changes and reduced brake wear and the fact that the electic is a lot less likely to break down since it has fewer moving parts.
Right at this exact moment, car prices are all crazy because of supply shortages, but in pre-covid days I bought myself a second hand 2015 Leaf for around $15K. If I'd wanted to buy a gas car and keep it for 10 years, to break even on gas and oil, I'd have to have bought a second hand gas car for around $3-4K, and even pre-covid, that didn't buy you anything that would run trouble free for 10 years.
Yes, eventually I'll have to replace the battery pack, and that will be expensive, but even up here in the frozen wasteland of Ottawa where my range drops precipitously in the winter, I seriously doubt I'll have to replace it in the first 10 years, so if I opt to do that, it will be instead of buying another car later.
All of this ignores any rebates you'd get for buying electric, too, which makes the gas car even less attractive from an economic standpoint.
Everyone's financial situation is different, and there's certainly people for whom that $3K gas car will make sense, but long term the electric is going to win from a financial perspective.
That 2k cost for electricity you mentioned is for people charging at home, in their garage, with their own charger, and the latter two are things that people who live in the city are probably not going to have.
https://walletburst.com/tools/electric-car-savings-calc/
At 57 mpg (which is what the latest prius gets), and gas at 2.50 a gallon, and assuming electricity costs 0.13 cents per kwh, you only save 150 bucks a year in gas. Thats 12 dollars a month. That's nothing. If an electric car costs just 8k more than an equivalent gas car, thats 50+ years to break even.
12 dollars a month - broke people are just going to work an extra shift or 2 and make that money and not think about it. Better than than missing work because you couldn't find a spare charger in the city, or paying 20 bucks for a fast charge overpriced public charger.
As an aside, using a fast charger just once - just one time a month - is likely to eat whatever savings in electricity you would otherwise have from buying an EV.
I will concede that if you use the calculator above and plug in $5.00 a gallon, then the average payback comes down from 50+ years to around 10. But - at least in the states, the places that have gas at 5 dollars a gallon also have electricity kwh costs of ~30 cents per kwh. And if you plug that into the calculator, the payback goes back up to 50+ years. Actually, the numbers are suspiciously quite similar. It's almost as if you can't win. Is it a conspiracy? I don't know.
This is very true. Although I would point out in the older EVs, they charge just fine from a straight 120V socket, since they don’t have enough range to warrant a fancy fast charger.
My analysis also fails to take into account the cost of financing. I’m not sure how much of an impact that would have without doing the math, but it would definitely skew things towards the gas car or hybrid.
You talk about battery refresh costs, but a hybrid that uses 85%+ of the capacity on every trip will wear much quicker than the EV that uses 10% of its capacity on 95% of trips.
Consider that the average new car in the United States cost $48,000 in 2022[0].
I own a new 2023 Chevy Bolt. It cost $36,000; the base price is more like $27,000.[1]. The Tesla Model 3 starts right around that average number at $48,000[2]. The Ioniq 5 starts at $42,000[3]. The Mach E likewise, around $46,000[4].
Electric cars are priced right around what people are paying, on average, for new cars.
You're right that battery packs are very expensive - right now, for new vehicles. But the very first Tesla Roadster was only made in 2008, and the model S, in 2012. We've only had a market with multiple decent choices for reasonably priced EVs in the last three to four years. Give it time.
Also, just to add: a "bad battery" isn't necessarily one that's worthless. My Bolt's battery gets ~250 miles of range now. I don't drive a quarter of that on an average day, nor do most people. Batteries degrade over time - they don't necessarily give out or totally stop working.
[0] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-hits-reco... [1] https://www.caranddriver.com/chevrolet/bolt-ev [2] https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/model-3 [3] https://www.caranddriver.com/hyundai/ioniq-5 [4] https://www.ford.com/buy/mach-e/build-and-price.html?gnav=sh...
Hybrid are classic absurdity of those who fear the new matched to those who want to profit from their fears...
So I've heard the argument about "why haul around a gas engine you are only going to use 5% of the time". The same thing can be said about all electric -- in that case you really need a 300 mile or so battery instead of the 50 mile battery, but most days you will be hauling around 250+ miles of extra battery you will only be using 5% of the time.
Also, on a PHEV, I'd like to see the gas engine be just barely enough horse power to drive the car (and keep some minimal charge on the battery). And have it use that in conjunction with the electric motors for acceleration. That way the gas engine can be kept even more light weight.
That being said, I think PHEVs are great, but I think consumers and producers both see greater benefits moving to full BEV.
Edit: grammar
In my opinion, this is probably the best option for now. I'd much rather 4x as many range extended hybrids with 50 mile-ish range than 200 mile range electric cars.
There's basically only the Prius Prime that was available, and it's at a price point where there are better EV's to get. There's the bZ4X as well but I've never seen one available anywhere. They have a bunch of stuff announced for 2023 though.
Using Toyota as the barometer is only really useful for Toyota. It's not a great reflection of the rest of the market.
Model year 2022 in the US, if you exclude non-plugin hybrids, then Prius Prime (PHEV) and Mirai (FCEV) seem to be the only two; 2023 adds RAV4 Prime (PHEV), and bZ4X (BEV).
I personally wouldn't count the Mirai, since it's a weird lame duck. Limited availability (only california and hawaii iirc??) and IMHO nobody sane was buying one unless they got it on the often crazy deals you could find (I think you could get one brand new for <20k, and last years model at 11k at one point)
Meanwhile, at other automakers:
Chevrolet Bolt, Tesla {S,X}, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and 6, VW ID.4, Ford Mach-E. Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, Lucid all have theoretical contenders. And I’m probably missing a few from other manufacturers.
Toyota is behind.
edit: formatting
From searching Toyota only planned to make 7,000 for the US this year. And then ended up with a stop sale due to a safety issue.
Toyota sold about 1.8 million cars in the US last year. So it would have been 0.388% of their production for the US.
That’s not a failure to sell. That’s a failure to try. Every other manufacturer can’t keep BEVs in stock.
(Still ahead of Honda who currently has ZERO full EVs models for sale in the US)
Toyota has lots of jobs and industry and know-how built around the internal combustion engine --- and therein lies their concern.
They wouldn't say, "Oh yeah, EV's are awesome! Go get EVs" when they don't have one that people want to buy.
Toyota is also the biggest car maker in the world with one of the best reputations, any EV they would make would sell great.
bZ4X sales in US in 2022:
05: 199
06: 33
07, 08, 09: zero (they recalled every car and stopped production and sales)
10: 351 (resumed production)
I can assure you this is going to sell like hotcakes (especially as Toyota offers a 1 million kilometers warranty, good luck driving a tesla even for a third without having to change the battery) and there's no shortage of demand (it's Toyota afterall).
Their petulance does not make sense to me unless you account the musk factor of big personalities in.
They could easily dominate the EV market but they just don't want to. Yet.
Their marketing is also borderline criminal, Lexus still has billboards at my local airport talking about "self-charging hybrids", carefully omitting that you charge your self-charging hybrid at the petrol pump.
Seems pretty uncontroversial
Not having to visit a gas station ever, would be kinda nice.
Having to get a rental for longer trips once or twice a year would be mildly annoying.
A hybrid with enough battery range for daily use would probably be fine.
An EV that can be hybridified with a generator on a trailer would probably also be fine.
On a more meta note, nobody degrades online automotive discourse to a very low common denominator quite as reliably as Toyota fanboys and the vast majority of those people are secondarily EV fans so it really brings a tear of joy to my eye seeing this topic sow division among a group of mild-grade trolls.
It's so inefficient.
Hybrids are the least polluting option out there, unless most energy in your region comes from renewables or nuclear. Also don't forget producing an ev is insanely polluting too.
If your local electricity generation mix is 100% made up of the dirtiest possible coal being shoveled into the least efficient possible power plant, then sure, maybe, it'd be comparable over the lifetime of the car… except for the obvious possibility that said plant could be retired, upgraded, or the car moved elsewhere.
Battery manufacture does produce pollution, but it's also a process that can be improved over time, and the break-even point for an EV battery is at something tiny like 5K miles driven.
You need the grid and to generate the power first, then you can keep increasing EVs.
We're already energy starved and import energy or produce it with gas.
In the beginning of this year the same guy (Akio Toyoda) was spreading all the EV FUD there is: electrification will tank the (Japanese) economy, the electric grid will collapse, no-one needs electric cars etc.
He just might be right about tanking the Japanese economy but not because "EV bad" but because Toyota and Honda and their suppliers are big parts of the economy and they are laggards among laggards on EV adoption front.
And it's not just words but money and lobbying: Toyota joined Trump's lawsuit against EPA (now dropped) and is among the largest anti-EV lobbyists, in the great company of oil giants. Anti-EV lobbying means: lobbying against increased fuel efficiency standards and ICE bans.
Given that China is already 30% EV, Europe ~25% their position doesn't seem rational but purely talking their book and trying to not get killed by mistakes they made in the last 5-10 years.
Until mid-2022 they were selling more hydrogen cars (1) than EV cars (0). Hence their bizarre "we're pro EV but ALSO pro hydrogen" stance. Hydrogen lost and there's no path to hydrogen becoming a thing for passenger cars.
They are also waiting their time working on manual transmission for electric cars. It's peak stupid.
But most importantly they only have 1 EV on sale (with a genius name of bz4x) and it doesn't sells well.
Rumor has it that they just decided that their e-TNGA platform used in bZ4X is not cost-competitive with Tesla and started working on a new EV platform that won't be ready in 4 years.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
Than arrive the issue: electrical motors are fantastic compared, more power, constant torque, far wider rotation range, far less thermal issues, far lighter, cheaper, ... BUT we damn need electricity.
Electricity is the problem since it's a hard form of energy for us. Drill a hole to milk some oil is not simple as it sound, but it's also not that hard in tech terms, oil hold much energy in a compact volume and mass, we can move around and store for very long with very little issue. Electricity is far more complex.
Lithium tech just reach the level of BARE MINIMUM on-scale usability, since suffice from small pocket torch to cars, it does not last enough but still enough IF we will been able to recycle batteries (so far many experiments exists BUT none usable on scale because scale IS the issue) so it's promising. I do not know and I pretend to be arrogantly pretty sure NOBODY really know if such move will be successful or a disaster BUT we need to try to see.
The sore reality is that the sole way to try without much risks is the public. We need public research so to have a damn standard that allow interoperability, for instance is DAMN STUPID to being unable to couple a car's battery BMS to a p.v. MPPT simply because no such standard exists so far and competing vendors try to push their own, it's equally a pity we need to charge from p.v. (DC) to an AC inverter to another AC inverter in car to DC again because those who crafted actual tech need to mach different layers of crap from different vendors. It's a pity we do not have a build standard for batteries to allow a bit less complex recycling and so on. These are still SMALL POTATOES issues, but are costly issue due to the current development model. Bigger issues lie in uncertain about how much lithium we can harvest and when we will been able to recycle batteries effectively, IF we can.
The typical public research is: we try in a lab, we start experimenting with some public body, let's say a PUBLIC postal service cars, some army services etc, we correct issues emerged from such experiments and keep going experimenting for a while until we think tech is mature enough to try the big scale. We go to the public with some incentives crafted to allow a proper development like "the government subsidies buying an EV only in certain areas where the electricity grid it's ready, if the Citizen have a private parking place to recharge etc" something no private company can do. The again few iterations to correct new emerging issues and a wider cohort of public testers. The the first opening to commerce and so to anyone.
This was essentially the classic way of evolution even the USA have done WHEN they innovate for real, like pharma research by universities and NIH, like public funded labs from PARC to NASA.
Now with the WEF corporatocracy model such effective system got dismantled and research costs got offloaded to the people, pushing them with crappy advantages if they accept to pay or forcing them to pay.
Personally I have an EV and a classic European diesel, I like the EV but it's designed by some who do not drive them, do not have p.v., do not have any damn clue about cars. It's just a crapload of crapware on a classic car, with a nice visual.
We need to mandate FLOSS in cars, mandate NO proprietary services allowed to send OTA, mandate some standards like the aforementioned DC bi-directional coupling (who exists now, but just since few months [1]) and mandatory policies on batteries imposing an EV at the same price of the equivalent ICE. We need to KILL the PSP market for public charging: those who install charging stations also sell the energy directly paid with any classic payment means just like gas/diesel ones and so on.
People will always swear by something when asked in polls but pollsters will never explain the tradeoffs.
The tradeoffs for electrification are too complex and the downside too big. All for the benefit of people who will be alive 150 years from now. It doesnt make sense from a gametheory perspective.
The E in ESG will either drop or will have to be transformed in “Ecology”
At the end of the day when you dig deep enough it’s clear that this is all about the need that the elites have of having a shot at being the person who gets remembered as having solved the biggest problem ever in the history of humanity .
A leap that would put the moon landing to shame, but the non-elites have much more stringent , less grandiose needs and although they can be convinced of all sorts of BS , I dont think they can go against their interests in such a big way