Toyota Is Right: We Need More Hybrid Cars and Fewer EVs. Here’s Why
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
It sounds like EVs are the best option long term: it's just that in the short term there's a few snafus along the way.
Personally, I'm only going to buy another EV and nothing else will do, even if I have to wait a year, two years or even 5 years. I've got an electric bike and I know how to use it.
A brave soul at my condo complex bought a tesla. I have been trying to get the board to allow the installation of charging spots for years now, but if there are enough of us, it will be impossible to ignore us.
Have you tried getting ON the board ?
Maybe as a single issue candidate
The main reason for wanting an all-electric future in my mind is the health benefits of not breathing in combustion byproducts every time you go outside. It's worth it for that.
Lithium is just what we have now, and because business and politics is incremental(I'm not exactly a fan of that trait) we can't just say "Lets build all the charging infrastructure for cars that don't exist yet, stockpile electric cars with no batteries, and switch all at once as soon as we invent the better nonlithium tech to put in them".
Sometimes I wonder how much we could get done if people really did think like that though.
Also, engine noise. Noise pollution in cities can be maddening, and it's mainly car engines.
IIRC at highway speeds the overall shape of the car moving through the air is also a significant noise generator, but I don't remember where I read that right now.
Tyres on the road are white noise and barely noticeable. I don't know if they're louder than engines in terms of decibels as I've never measured either, but engines are definitely much more of a nuisance.
> As required by the PSEA, (1) this rule proposes to establish FMVSS No.141, Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles, which would require [quiet vehicles] to produce sounds meeting the requirements of this standard. This proposed standard applies to EVs and to those HVs that are capable of propulsion in any forward or reverse gear without the vehicle's ICE operating. The PSEA requires NHTSA to establish performance requirements for an alert sound that is recognizable as motor vehicle in operation that allows blind and other pedestrians to reasonably detect a nearby EV or HV operating below the crossover speed. The crossover speed is the speed at which tire noise, wind noise, and other factors eliminate the need for a separate alert sound.
>[...]
> This standard will ensure that blind, visually-impaired, and other pedestrians are able to detect and recognize nearby hybrid and electric vehicles by requiring that hybrid and electric vehicles emit sound that pedestrians will be able to hear in a range of ambient environments and contain acoustic signal content that pedestrians will recognize as being emitted from a vehicle. The proposed standard establishes minimum sound requirements for hybrid and electric vehicles when operating under 30 kilometers per hour (km/h) (18 mph), when the vehicle's starting system is activated but the vehicle is stationary, and when the vehicle is operating in reverse.
The EU has established a similar rule as well, though I think they only require up to 12mph. Wikipedia says there's a 2008 study that confirms it but it's source link is broken:
> A separate 2008 study from Western Michigan University found that hybrids and conventional vehicles are equally safe when travelling more than about 20 miles per hour (32 km/h), because tire and wind noise generate most of the audible cues at those speeds. Hybrid cars were also tested safe when moving off at traffic lights and it was found that under this condition they do not pose a risk to pedestrians. All Prius models used in the study engaged their internal combustion engines when accelerating from a standstill and produced enough noise to be detected.[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sound...
but until the electrical grid is moved to cleaner sources (including nuclear for baseload), it doesn't make much difference what you drive. with the current distribution of generation, we'd be mostly shifting the pollution from tailpipes to smokestacks (especially at the margin) rather than getting rid of it--coal emissions are many times worse than tailpipe emissions, not to mention the pollution from coal, oil & gas extraction.
and pollution is exactly what we should be worried about, not CO₂, which is the worst sort of distraction when trying to make sense of the environmental dangers we're creating (it muddies the waters to create uncertainty and inaction).
The CO2 output of a coal powered EV and a gasoline car are roughly equivalent. If you add in the CO2 used when refining the gasoline and when transporting the fuel to gas stations, gasoline cars are about 50% worse.
> and pollution is exactly what we should be worried about, not CO₂,
For most pollutions, especially for PM2.5, locality is super important. Gasoline engines run in populated areas, power plants aren't.
Why would I want to change the oil on the range extender, deal with emissions tests, and so on? That's a bigger pain than just renting an ICE car for the 1-2 times a year when we take a road trip.
Every time I've rented a car it's been a substantial hassle, and I've felt anxious about how much it might cost me if something happened to the car while I was responsible for it.
Different people have different ideas about what's a pain.
If you already own and know everything you need, yes. Most regular people don’t own a jack capable of lifting the car high enough. Most people don’t own jack stands to make getting under the car safe. Most people don’t own an oil filter wrench. Most people in cities can’t just do all this on the street without getting their legs run over. Most people don’t know how to dispose of motor oil. Most people don’t know or are not allowed to know which oil to buy and how much (my car’s manual doesn’t say that).
I get full service 5W20 oil change (with fluids top up, oil disposal while no effort and have the assurance that the job will done impeccably) in under 20 minutes for $29 at my local mechanic. I do this 3 times a year, and it's $87.
Whereas I were to do it myself, I'd have to invest in $274 worth of equipment, and the 5W20 itself is about $15. It'll take about 20 oil changes to break even (roughly 6 years) and then after you'll really only be saving $42 a year, not to mention the time cost and oil disposal hassle.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a27169631/how-to-chang...
Can't argue with your bottom line, though. Even if I consider my time free, I don't really come out ahead.
But - I like changing oil in my car. I get to see the oil as it drains out, the color of it, if it's the amount I expect to see, or if the car's burned some since the last change. It's an excuse to look around under the car and notice if there's any unexpected damage. It just feels good to personally take care of a piece of the infrastructure I depend on.
I think there's one other big advantage of your way, though: you're maintaining a relationship with a mechanic who you trust.
It's way more efficient to build the a hybrid with the gas engine as part of the drivetrain than only use it power electric motors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofycaXByTc Conceptual explanation of the system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O61WihMRdjM Weber Auto giving an extensive hands on explanation.
It's just that the no-gas range of a hybrid is something crazy low, like 4 miles or something, since it has a very small battery. The plug-in hybrids improve that situation just by adding a larger battery, not by changing the mechanics of how the drive works.
I don't every want a 100% electric car. We're a 1 car household so I really want the flexibility of going wherever without having to plan around the charger network.
The claimed mileage is similar to Toyota's planetary power splitting thingie, no idea how it works in the real world.
You could also say that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are series hybrids, since the fuel cell mostly charges a battery, which is much more flexible in what power it can provides and can be recuperated into, unlike a fuel cell which is one-way.
Is this how we are re-branding internal combustion engines?
As it stands right now, EV's are NOT up to the task of replacing Combustion Engines full stop, even in the light commercial/consumer car markets. Are they improving each year and able to cover more and more applications where ICE previously excelled? Yeah.
But EV's are pretty shit right now tbh. Sure, they're perfectly fine for a broad part of the personal/consumer car market. There's a LOT of owners of Camry's, Impala's, Civics, etc that would love a similar form factor EV Version of their car. I'm not denying that. But Camry's and Civic's and Joe Blows daily driver aren't the biggest polluters. Additionally, car pooling and public transit could reduce the number of personal commuter consumer vehicles by massive numbers, it would have a far bigger impact on local/regional air quality/pollution than switching them to EV's ever could hope to.
It's the trucks, from pickups all the way up that are the key, and why I say EV's are shit. You can't carpool fully loaded Semi Trucks together (not safely anyway). If your metric for "EV better than ICE" revolves around Emissions, then your EV needs to be able to match the 8+ hour duty cycle of a combustion powered work truck, while beating it on emissions. Battery/Charging tech isn't quite there yet, though a high capacity battery swap system (despite having a multitude of it's own challenges) would help "bridge the gap". Just look at the Rivian and it's terrible mileage when actually hauling a load (even with regen braking, they don't beat diesel on range, despite eating MULTIPLE thousand pounds into the GVWR budget). This is where the reality and logistics of EV's today just fall flat for long haul and large/heavy freight, and unlike with camry's, there aren't viable alternatives like public transit, biking, carpool etc.
And GM's about to learn a very hard lesson by not allowing Android/Apple Car Play to drive this point home.
Also
> Electric vehicles generate fewer carbon emissions than those powered by combustion engines over their lifetimes,
How many EV's do you have to go through to match the lifetime of 1 ICE powered vehicle? Genuine question, they traditionally have been significantly worse, but battery tech is getting pretty good.
Toyota's right. Hybrids are the way to go TODAY, because there's a lot more to this debate than Emissions (Like it or not, the grid is not ready for a rapid turnover of ICE to EV, and it wont be cheap to address). Long term, assuming we don't hit some sort of hard wall with battery tech or something, they absolutely will be superior.
Though, frankly, I'd much rather see this car centric madness die. Advocating for EV's or hybrids over ICE is a lot like advocating for a duller knife because it kills you slower when what you really need to do is realize you don't need a knife for 99% of your daily tasks in the first place.
But the world can still breath so we're not ready for that discussion yet.
A less limited battery supply?
Or to flip it around, what should we do to best make use of a limited gas supply? Well obviously we should move to EVs, and preserve that limited resource.
1. Some Politician: We need to invest in public transportation.
2. Planning Commission: Okay but it's geographically infeasible to blanket the city in busses, the only thing that is going to work is a rail system to cover the long distances and have busses to cover the last mile.
3. Sounds great! Let's put together a proposal.
4. Politician: Hahahahahahahaha we can't afford that. Also people will riot if we eminent domain literally thousands of homes.
5. Politician: What if we just added really annoying bike lanes to like 3 roads that will sit there empty because a dedicated lane wasn't what was stopping people from riding their bikes?
6. Planning Commission: But that won't actually he....
7. Politician: LOOK AT HOW WE'RE INVESTING IN PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION!!1 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. GREEN. ENVIRONMENT.
Like good lord if they would actually commit to more than just some symbolic non-solutions I would volunteer to swing a hammer to lay tracks.
Three dedicated lanes won't be what was stopping people from riding bikes (in most cases) but a network of them sure would increase ridership.
2) Childbearing couples seem to function just fine in relatively dense European urban housing. The idea that we somehow need space to spread out is largely confined to the Anglosphere, which is why land management problems are so much worse in the Anglosphere.
I hate dealing with crowds of people.
I hate waiting for whatever conveyence I'm going to ride on.
I hate feeling like I need a full bath after riding on said conveyence.
I hate dealing with the inevitable schizos, drug addicts, mental illness, and other malcontents that will undoubtedly pan handle or beg. And no, it isn't my problem to care or deal with them.
Once I got enough money to ride in my own car to and from work, I stopped public transit and never looked back. If I somehow become stupid rich(doubt), I would charter private jets for the same reason.
I see you're from Italy and will concede that European public transit is better when it comes to frequency so there's less waiting but that's about it. Still have the drug addict schizos and cleanliness problems.
I still owned a car when I lived in Europe and if I do it again I'll be owning another, especially now with kids.
1. It has to take me directly from the front of my (rural) house to directly in front of my destination. My vehicle does this.
2. It has to do this as fast as or faster than my vehicle.
3. It has to be available in the time that it takes to find my vehicle's keys.
4. It has to be as comfortable as my vehicle.
5. It has to smell as nice and be as clean as my vehicle.
6. It has to not put me in more contact with crazy people than my vehicle does.
7. It has to be as cheap or cheaper per mile than my vehicle.
8. It has to be able to haul my belongings when I need to move them, with at least the capacity of my vehicle.
A few alternative to cars can check a few of those boxes, but nobody gets them all:
Walking and Bicycles: 1, 3, 7
Busses: 7 (maybe)
Trains: 2, 7 (if long distance)
Taxis: 2
Rideshare: 1, 2, 4 (maybe), 5 (maybe), 6 (maybe)
Car/Truck rental: 2, 6, 8
Most of the journeys I take on my bike would take twice as long in a car, including time to find parking, walking to/from where car is parked etc., so a bike easily wins on 2.
But sure, on 4. it loses out in rainy/cold weather. Otherwise the physical pleasure of riding a bike far exceeds that of driving a car.
I'm curious why you come across so many crazy people riding bikes, or why your bike would smell so bad...
EDIT: on my commute to the office I managed to think of at least 4 other reasons people prefer driving over riding: prestige, safety, theft risk and restrictions around suitable clothing (particularly when there's a lack of end-of-trip facilities).
Personally, I think a big part of the issue is the size of vehicles that have been mandated by regulatory agencies. Why don't we move towards micromobility?, something between a E-bike and a super light weight car. that would require far less lithium, and far less oil.
Edit: Unironically, something like the P45 (https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/P45), but maybe with a bubble instead of my arms out.
Like, a e-scooter/motorcycle? I see hundereds of them during my daily commute. Costs around $3000, and about $20 in monthly charge costs.
the ones that are electric are usually limited to 28mph or just a little more than that. also, very few if any are 4 seaters.
You are not going to be happy to learn where the $128 billion for California's high speed rail and other mass transit infrastructure goes: concrete, asphalt, steel, and lots and lots of dirty fuel for the mining equipment and earth movers. Salaries for high-paid consultants on the project may be spent on air travel or other luxuries.
Car usage will only decrease when someone invents something better.
That isn't to say more public transport investment is bad, but there are other alternatives. For example, make ebikes cheap and make inner cities be ebikes only. In places like NY or Boston, everyone on ebikes would likely result in faster trip times.
And yet we effectively force most people to drive private cars largely on basis of how our cities are laid out and how we invest in infrastructure.
I'd also suggest that in many countries with high PT usage (Japan etc.), very few people feel "forced" to take it. Many services operate with very little taxpayer funding (certainly no more than goes into building & maintaining roads etc.)
They do: walking. Even ebikes keeps you dependent on electricity. Bicycles keep you dependent on consumables for maintenance (oil, etc.) and spare parts suppliers.
I bicycle as my primary transportation, and I have to admit that I've been increasingly irritated by ebikes. They drive on the bike paths (even though that's not legal here), and when doing so they drive far too fast and don't even try to warn others using the path that they're passing.
I've seen a half dozen cases of ebikes slamming into pedestrians and bicyclists in the last few months.
I think the people advocating ebikes need to start educating people driving them about how to do so without endangering people, or this is going to turn into yet another flash point between groups who should be on the same side.
The problematic ebikes are already breaking the law by driving on bike paths where motorized vehicles are prohibited. All they'd really have to do to both be legal and to avoid endangering and angering other users of the path is to not use the motor while on them.
Since they don't, I don't think they'd care anything about speed limits, either.
Yes, which is why it is a tragedy that we have built an environment in which it is straight up dangerous to walk or bike because of cars.
If you think owning a car makes you less dependent, I've got a bridge to sell you. Between gas, insurance, oil changes, brake and strut replacement, tires, and various fluids, you are arguably MORE dependent with a car than without one. And that's not counting the dependence on other drivers not acting the fool with several tons at high speeds.
"Independence" due to car ownership is a sales tactic, not a real thing. Folks in New York City aren't inherently more "dependent" than you are for their transportation needs.
Right now people just love to hate on it cause "it's over budget, and road projects never go over budget."
This, people need to get out from behind the wheel and walk, bike. In the long term it will greatly benefit them.
The funny thing is, with auto prices so high, many people cannot buy new, and quite a few cannot afford even used. So maybe a trend is starting.
What if instead of more efficient 20th century technologies we moved away from motor vehicles as a transportation class and into more livable, higher density and more nature preserving cities.
How come that’s not the first conversation?
I do agree with the common sense argument that less impact earlier is better that’s described in the article, but the entire conversation seems to have stalled out on “better version of what we have now” instead of a more radical but much more long-term sustainable vision of society transformed to be in balance with natural life support systems.
The conversation around sustainability is always about merely adjusting the system that has wrought profound destruction to the planet — always smart sounding but not particularly wise.
Look at the enormous amount of hatred even a small change like "your car, your house heating and your stove will use electricity instead of compressed refined dead dinosaurs" got. Look at how many people when told "we need to change things or this planet is going to be uninhabitable in a few decades" stick fingers in their ears and say "nu uh" or actively start claiming this is all made up.
I'd love to have more sustainable vision of the future, but since most people would rather see humanity end than give up tiniest comfort or accept any change (even a good one, like people in walkable cities are actually happier than people in suburbs). So we don't exactly have a lot of manoeuvring space.
Also, it’s been my experience that people only change when they are in incredible amounts of pain, and I think that that’s true of this debate with climate change, and it’s impacts on earth.
As soon as food and water supplies are threatened, and people are having to retreat from coastal areas in the next few decades, the conversation may finally shift to meaningful action. And that’s the reason for my “optimism.”
Obviously, for those of us who actually study the issue like yourself know it may be far too late to do anything about it, because by the time these impacts hit, there will be a great deal of downstream consequences, but I do think people will change eventually. If for no other reasons than because they have to, or at least they will then.
Just a little sad you can’t avert the inevitable consequences that are so clearly laid out because people hold onto iterating on simple extensions of the existing failed ethos and paradigm, which is why I generally try to inject a transformation instead of iteration comment into these types of posts on online platforms. They are polarizing ideas, but if more of us injected this bias at scale and with great frequency I believe it could gradually change public opinion.
And that is how you bring about change — the environmental consciousness is profoundly different than it was in the 50s and 60s, when a visit to the forest camping with the kids or even backpacking often included USFS run burn pit and people scoffed at the clean water and air acts, and it was done with similar educational and outreach so it really can change things — we do have impact as collective individuals in sharing our perspectives and alternative belief systems. So I don’t generally feel the need to provide the answers to how because the purpose of this comment and my many others like it is to anchor an alternative opinion to allow for alternatives to the dominant paradigm not solve the execution issues in providing a visionary societal transformation as that far exceeds what one person can do.
But I do believe we should be actively talking about transformation and not iteration of the existing system much more actively.
I think this is inline with much of the thinking I’ve seen from policymakers I’ve read and talked with.
Speaking for myself, but you’re describing hell. I’ve lived in high density urban environments, and moved back to Montana just to get away from that misery.
There’s a broad spectrum of density between Montana ruralism and downtown Manhattan, with different thresholds of possibilities at each degree of concentration along the way.
Besides Montana is growing at 1 percent a year on average and that will certainly increase as winters become more mild. I believe it was Idaho, Montana and Florida that saw the highest population growth among U.S. states between 2020 and 2022 as well. If it grows 10 percent a decade it won’t be the rural paradise it is for long.
WRT growth, Montana is roughly the size of Germany, but with 400k residents. It will take some 90+ years at the growth rate of 10% per decade to even break 1m residents, let alone Germany's 84m.
That's well beyond my lifespan, though I'll do nothing to discourage the growth - that would be cruel. Even if I don't like living in an urban environment, I won't take that choice away from others.
The Toyoda grandson of the founder was retired because he said the world needed to rethink the transition to EVs due to the impact they would have on Japanese auto factory workers (and of course, the people that make money off of those workers).
Japan has the lowest EV adoption in the first world.
For a country with 0 petroleum, you would think they would be more eager. But Japan, for all of it's renowned innovation, is actually very top down driven, and nothing happens unless it's going to benefit incumbent wealth/power.
They actually still advocate for tobacco use, because diet members own the tobacco industry after it was privatized in the '90s...
CO₂ is just an excuse to market, the reason is that we need to do more, cheaply and en mass. Electricity is not the cheapest solution, but we need it anyway, so being able to run anything on it means being able to drop other form of energy, along their sourcing, logistics and storage.
An EV is a far cheaper vehicle than an ICE or hybrid. It demand far less parts, far less precision to produce and assemble them. That's the point. EVs are cheap for the industry, in raw material terms, like electronic watches are far cheaper on scale than classic mechanical ones.
Similarly a heat-pump is cheaper industrially speaking than a gas based heating system along with gas storage, logistic and so on.
At scale run on electricity means far less raw materials needs, far cheaper large scale process.
Tesla seems to have figured out how to make an affordable EV, and they make margin on every sale. They're also aggressively dropping the prices, making Teslas ever more attractive. The other manufacturers mostly lose money on every sale, so they're not eager to drop prices.
Tesla's already got the 'best selling' title, something unthinkable a few years ago.
So I won't be surprised to suddenly see more articles about how hybrids are better.
This article also fails to discuss the C02 emission cost that goes into producing the battery, which for an EV will probably never be recouped. At least for the lifetime of that vehicle.
Do you have any links about the CO2 footprint? I don’t see how the total lifetime footprint could be higher than a fuel burner
This is debunked:
FACT: The greenhouse gas emissions associated with an electric vehicle over its lifetime are typically lower than those from an average gasoline-powered vehicle, even when accounting for manufacturing.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...
I don't think that's true, source: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...
The CO2 emission cost that goes into producing the battery is typically wildly overstated, it doesn't take very long to be recouped.
Fewer EVs sounds like a very dumb idea.
OK...
However, older pickups were already above 20MPG, and diesel trucks are way better than that. On top of that, the F-150 is now aluminum, and isn't matching the fuel economy of the old steel frames. So, they're clearly wasting a lot of full economy on something.
Anyway, the 2023 Prius has a 13.6 kWh battery in it, so even Toyota appears to be abandoning the hybrid (vs PHEV) approach. First-generation EVs had a bit over twice that many kWh, and for all the graphs in the article that compare apples-to-apples PHEV and EV, we see a halving of CO2 emissions per car. So, PHEV vs EV looks like a wash.
That's why the article argues for more hybrids, which would make sense if we replaced all ICE cars as quickly as possible until hybrids built today are also retired.
If you're betting that lithium supply won't ramp fast enough to meet demand (and that none of the non-lithium technologies on the horizon pan out), then they have a point.
However, betting against capitalism's ability to cost optimize products and mine stuff is usually a bad idea. The article also points out that hybrids only have a 5.5% market share at this point, and they've had decades of non-battery-limited time to penetrate the market. That suggests there's a demand problem (probably due to perceived reliability and other maintenance issues).