I see way too many Toyota battery articles for a company that can barely put out an EV. They're all promises... in the future, they swear they'll beat everyone, but they just released a Lexus EV at $60k with 196mi range and 5sec 0-60.
When did this become a metric that mattered to any normal person? Do you even know the 0-60 of your car? Do you realize how quick 5 second is to 60mph? Most sports cars of a generation ago couldn't touch that. Why do you feel it needs to be faster? It's plain dangerous to inexperienced drivers.
Previously I had only had crappy used ICE vehicles, and the acceleration was so bad it had never occurred to me how much better driving could be with good acceleration. I probably wouldn't include it in my calculus for an ICE vehicle, but I'll probably never purchase another ICE vehicle either.
Normal ICE cars are in the 12-18s range, sometimes <10s but you’d look like a mad man revving your engine high enough to achieve that.
5s is ridiculously fast and that kind of acceleration should _never_ be used in the middle of traffic or city roads.
I'm not flooring it, but when I make a speed adjustment, it happens 'right away'. There is no delay. Its immediate.
This is easily achievable by many ICE cars. You can get a Toyota Corolla that matches this (and I’m not talking about the GR Corolla).
Now nearly every mainstream sedan or minivan with a V6 will do that, often better.
Even my older model Ioniq is fast enough off the lights to trigger people with German ICE cars into thinking I'm trying to "beat" them somehow. Even though I just pressed down the accelerator to get up to speed in a prompt manner.
It's easy to win a race when nobody else is racing.
1946 it seems:
https://www.motortrend.com/vehicle-genres/c12-0603-icons-unc...
Because there's nothing I hate more than a car that doesn't respond when I try to accelerate.
They're not really related. There are cars with good 0-60 times that have terrible fast-secondary/highway acceleration; cars with big turbos, for example, and overly aggressive throttle-input smoothing (for mileage.)
The more important questions (for me) are how well it handles on curves, how efficient it is and what the range is.
The energy efficiency and weight (in American metrics) are 5.32 mi/kwh (extremely good), and a bit over 4000 lbs (pretty heavy; makes me wonder about handling), with well under 300 miles of range, depending on conditions.
So... It looks like it'd appeal to the people I know that buy Lexus cars. That's not me, but I hope they sell a lot of them.
Torque is generally what you need when you need that. Beat the person off the line because you didn't merge into the right turn lane early enough acceleration onto the highway and two lane highway passing.
Horsepower is largely a metric for top speed of the vehicle, and if we're talking about in a relative statistic for road cars, top speed is far more useless than 0-60
For the rest of the world: I have no idea.
I have seen car commercials my entire life stating the car's 0-60. EV's I think are especially good for this though because it's fun to accelerate in an EV. Fun does sell cars, see the Miata, S2000, every convertible, etc There are tons of examples.
I, personally, as an average Joe, definitely would consider acceleration when buying a brand new car, I think it can be a good differentiator.
It's fair to point out that, eg, a Corvette from 1960 was slower than 5 seconds for 0-60, but you don't have to be a total gearhead to want to be the fastest off the light.
Are you seriously going to try gaslight us that nobody cares about 0-60 times?
I'll be charitable and assume you're confusing max speed with 0-60. Most people care about 0-60 performance as it's what they experience after.every.single.stop. They may not know the documented 0-60 time, but they generally know and appreciate better acceleration.
But I do doubt most people know the actual top speed of their vehicles, and relatively few have ever operated their vehicles near or at vmax.
No need to be a sour puss, let car people love their cars
They're the cars of old conservative rich people that don't buy American and primarily considered reliability
Toyota has been completely asleep at the switch for EVs which is baffling since they pioneered the hybrid electric vehicle.
What's really strange is after having such a huge lead and hybrid electric vehicle, they have really crawled behind other manufacturers and producing plug-in hybrid electric vehicles which are really just a plug adder onto the vehicle.
It really is mystifying
Keep in mind they're basically isn't a single car manufacturer outside of China and maybe Tesla that are actually doing original battery research. They are all partnering with actual battery manufacturers like Panasonic, Samsung, etc
People really need to let go of their EV fanboyism (and likely that includes Tesla fanboyism). In reality, if EVs were the future, Toyota would start making vast numbers of them in just a few years.
The real issue is that BEVs are not cost effective right now, and show no sign of that happening anytime soon. Until then, PHEVs and hybrids make a lot of sense.
PS: A lot of these Chinese EV makers are scam companies propped up by the Chinese government. They have no ability beyond shoving giant batteries into generic chassis.
That must come as quite a surprise to all of the people who’ve already found them to be cost effective. Did you mean something like “gargantuan e-SUVs and trucks”?
Gas over here is currently 2€/litre. Looking at my current market rate electricity price, it's 1.15c/kWh.
Let's pretend your $25k hybrid uses 3l/100km. That's 6€/100km.
And let's take the most power hungry hunk of metal they attached an EV drivetrain into and it needs 25kWh/100km. That's about 0.30€/100km.
The electricity price would have to go up 25-30x permanently for an hybrid to be cost effective per driven km.
I didn't even take into account the fact that for many EV brands the required maintenance to keep the manufacturer warranty is "swap air filter, update software, maybe fill up the window washing fluid if it's low"
Re: maintenance costs every reputable analyst says that EVs are significantly cheaper throughout the entire lifetime of the vehicle, even when you factor in the higher tire wear and tear. That doesn’t factor in the disruption cost of having to get service, either, which adds up with every extra visit unless you live next to the repair shop.
Finally, yes, insurance covers some costs but you’re paying money into that pool. Everyone I know has been complaining about premiums going up due to thefts disproportionately affecting ICE vehicles and a lot of people have been paying money out of pocket trying to harden popular targets like Priuses because parts were in short supply.
Maintenance costs are just marketing. The moment you factor in battery replacement costs, the advantage collapses. BEV companies just pretend this never happens.
Catalytic convertor theft is not that common. This is more wishful thinking.
Very very few EV batteries actually need replacing. We have statistics from Nissan and Tesla from over a decade ago and even those ancient batteries have performed better than expected, retaining 80%+ of capacity.
Newer batteries are better.
Insurance cost data doesn't seem to bore this out. BEVs have pretty decent maintenance costs.
The dual-mass flywheel broke, that was 1k€. Had to do a clutch repair at the same time, 700€. The turbo started acting up, that was around a grand with all the labour. When the turbo was fixed, it clogged the already close to full diesel particulate filter. That would've been 2000€ to replace, but I knew a guy who just emptied the casing and modded the software on the car to think it was still there.
Finally a tiny hexagonal thing at the bottom of the engine broke, which prevented any oil from circulating in the engine. That would've been a 2000€ operation. Had my guy do a quick patch job with some bonding agent, sold the car.
...and that's on top of the normal wear and tear + yearly oil changes etc.
The car was under 10 years old at the time and 90% of the problems were issues with the overly complex drivetrain with thousands of moving parts, instead of just one like with electric engines.
On the hybrids I owned all the issues were in the combustion engine. On my current EV all the problems are unrelated to the drivetrain - currently the AC can't hold its coolant for more than 6 months, haven't found the leak yet.
Once you deal with the eventuality of a dead battery, it will easily trump all repair costs of ICE cars. People are just pretending it won't happen to them.
Also, an FCEV is an electric car too, and doesn't have that many mechanical parts either. It also lacks a giant battery. Basic engineering suggests it will be the cheapest type of car of all to maintain once they hit critical mass.
in, what, 2010? So ... no. Hybrids aren't necessarily more expensive, they were really only substantially expensive because Toyota dealers price gouged so much for them. If the US Government (Bush was in power, so not a chance of it happening) or California had mandated Hybrid/PHEV for all consumer cars by 2015 back in year 2000, the world would have been in a much better place today.
If hybrids had been mandated earlier, we would probably see a semi-electric car with 50-100 miles of all electric range and a compact charging rotary motor range extender. BMW was close but they were also too incompetent to close the gap from their whacko i3 to a really useful long range PHEV.
Tesla's per vehicle margin is allegedly the highest in the business, and their cars, while once priced in the "low luxury" segement, are pretty much the same or less than the average cost of a new car, which is at $48,000 right now.
Maintenance costs are theoretically much better, you may be right they aren't practically since Tesla build quality is still suspect.
These figures are all for previous generation battery economics. High density LFP/LMFP and Sodium Ion batteries will place EV drivetrains fundamentally under the cost of an ICE. These cells, already in mass production, will be half to 1/3 the cost of Nickel Cobalt cells, and essentially the same density at pack level since they don't require extensive cooling/safety systems due to inherent safety.
Solid state batteries may be like fusion at this point. The true economic victory for EVs is LFP/Sodium Ion (especially if the roadmap for 250wh/kg LFP and 200 wh/kg sodium ion bears fruit in a couple of years) which are the path to affordable city transportation with no cobalt, nickel, or even lithium. If fusion became "viable" in a sustained manner, it probably couldn't beat nuclear for LCOE cost. Likewise a mass produced solid state battery probably won't be more economical than the new LFP/Sodium Ion batteries for mass market cars. Will be very significant for trucks, short planes, etc though.
Of course why hasn't this trickled down yet? Apparently car manufacturers can't as effortlessly switch over as you suggest.
You seem very pro-Toyota. I would be very concerned about Toyota because they are 10 years behind and have dinosaurs for executive leadership. Kia/Hyundai have loads of fairly competitive EVs available, but still, crickets from Toyota and split mind syndrome over hydrogen. It's sad that the world leader in car manufacturing and the jewel of the Japanese economy is so asleep at the switch. There's still time, Toyota's engineers are no joke, and they can probably just buy / steal some Chinese EV company's tech and designs, or partner with Nissan.
Gas is inherently subsidized. First, nobody pays for the carbon, but I get the impression you aren't a global warming guy. Fine. The IMF says that fossil fuel subsidies were 7 trillion dollars last year. If one was honest, they'd realize that the US Navy and Marines exist as power projection to ensure oil resource access and shipping. Taxation in the US is for road construction, and has nothing to do with any environmental externalities and damage that fossil fuels are causing.
The rest of your post is just a giant rant. It touches on way too many points for me to address and it is just mostly just wishful thinking. Case in point, you talk about na-ion batteries as if it was real. I remember people from last year talking about how they already exist, and yet they still don't exist. A classic example of "I'll believe it when I see it." The only thing that seems based in reality is the part where you admit Tesla's build quality is suspect.
Im looking at some small crossover so far I found tons of used bz4x marked as lemon/deal buybacks, Hyundai kona has a multitude of issues and also has buybacks. Mustang Mach-E seems the best deal and Tesla is hit/miss.
btw are you the hypx from the /r/Realtesla Tesla skeptics subreddit?
In practice you are not:
- you need an entirely new software stack (the S-word makes car manufacturers break into sweat)
- you need an entirely new supply chain, or even worse for OEM-integration-addicted carmakers, build your own supply chain
- you need to secure a competitive priced volume battery source
- you can't just slap motors and batteries into an ICE frame. You NEED that last 50-100 miles that total system integration and design gets you in EV range
Don't buy our competitors EVs, something much better is coming soon we promise...
There are people who have driven cars for 40-50 years and every car has been a Toyota. These are the people they're trying to keep.
"Our Super Great EV is just around the corner, but here's a new Toyota Corolla Hybrid for you for the mean time"
[IBM salesman's wife]: All my husband does is sit on the end of the bed and tell me how great it's going to be.
However, this exists, and kind of looks like a tall Corolla:
Oof size "La Grande".