Toyota Takes Aim at EVs with Ammonia Engine
enginelabs.com
enginelabs.com
Pushing for more EVs means increase in electricity demand in Japan, when they are already struggling as they had to shut down part of their old plants, and would need a political and technical miracle to justify building new ones that the public would acknowledge as safe enough.
Betting the farm on electricity is not viable in the current Japanese situation, so Japanese maker looking long and hard at alternatives shouldn't be a surprise.
Other countries have the same issue in variant degrees, so Toyota forsaw they could make a full EV turn later if the alternatives don't pan out.
Where I think they could win is with plug-in hybrids. Plugins have all the advantages of a combustion engine with none of the downsides of an EV.
- easily plugin into any outlet
- range is usually around 30 miles, enough for most people to daily drive on electric only
- combined electric/gas gets you 100+ MPGs
My wife drive a Prius prime, and has filled up once in the last 5 months (she drives everyday for work).
EVs as 4x more efficient than ICE cars - assuming your electricity generation doesn't have a massive loss.
If you're burning fossil fuels, you're losing 60% at generation and another 10% in transmission.
It's not gonna make sense to spend more on a car and lug around a giant battery and build a new infrastructure for a tiny improvement.
If you're the US and can generate a crap ton of solar because half your country is a desert - then it can work.
Or if you have access to other renewable sources or can build nuclear at scale.
Thinking that EVs are a fad is very much behind the times, BEVs have a lot of momentum now and grid operators the world over are planning for wholesale electrification of transportation, with the exception of long haul trucks - for now - this is something that is on course for large scale adaptation. It will still need infrastructure upgrades and obviously more generating power but that can be done incrementally.
If not BEVs then we have serious problems because right now there are no viable contenders other than to burn more fossil fuels and given the amount of legislation in place right now that's simply going to stop. If you're lucky you might be able to drive your classic car or maybe there will be conversion kits for those as well (there are already some of those on the market today, but for now it doesn't look like there will be a mandatory retirement of all ICEs on the horizon).
I think that competing with BEV's will be difficult for PHEV's unless they are cheaper. They're both going after the "can plug in at home" market.
And for those who can't plug in at home, most people probably prefer cheaper non-plugin hybrids and ICE's to the more expensive PHEV's.
Sadly, quadricycle aren't legal in Australia, because everyone's become addicted to F150's.
Had zero maintenance problems in two years.
Toyota offered quality that is unheard of at that economic point across the board; it isn't simply quality drivetrains, it's quality everything that leads to a reliable and trustworthy vehicle that has a high resale value.
Now, I don't know why they're doing what they're doing with the alternative engine designs; but I do know that their manufacturing capability and research prowess is top-notch, and that they could pretty smoothly dive straight into EV by pulling strings with long-term partners. Their journey to full EV won't be the same as ground-up groups like Tesla/Rivian/Whatever.
I don't think it should be viewed as a slip in expertise and capability -- I think it's more like a moon-shot.
The engine was shown by a Chinese partner of Toyota's (which is why the comments about Japan's geopolitical relations with China are extra ridiculous). It isn't going to kill EVs; China is all-in on EVs.
Instead of the conspiratorial, let me go to something more realistic. Toyota is a Japanese company and not everyone's skills are going to transition to electric vehicles. For those left behind, funding research projects seems to be a sensible way to reward their efforts from the past.
Note that new engine projects, especially if they include non-standard fuels aren't exactly cheap.
At this point they would be in the world of alternative facts if they thought this was something for the mass market.
I feel like they risk being even further behind the curve if they're not actively working on an EV.
For instance, here is their Dutch website (4 models, 2 vans and two passenger vehicles):
Some of it may be the japanese corporate culture being ossified and difficult to make large adaptations, since seniority is so important, you can't dissent.
Some of it may be an attempt to chase sunk costs / leverage former investments and market leaderships (FCEV) before Tesla left those in the dust.
Some of it may be that Toyota knows they missed the boat and are hoping to keep as many irons hot for future flexibility. Honestly, they may not like China, but they can get in the EV game effortlessly with some rebadging of Chinese stuff or just hopping on the Chinese drivetrain and battery infrastructure in the short run.
For local manufacturing, Japan relies rare metals on China. It's vulnerable for EV manufacturers.
Contrary to the heavy-handed tone of this article, I don't think that's actually true; Toyota is invested in EVs -- BEVs as well as FCEVs -- as well as doing far-out (and almost certain to be commercially unviable) efforts like this.
And FCEVs, while perhaps also a dead end, weren't a weird scheme they got into after they had a lead with hybrids, they started FCEV work 5 years before the first Prius was introduced in Japan.
> every other brand can't seem to retool fast enough to get to zero emissions line-ups as soon as they can design them and here is Toyota going against the flow with not just one but two exotic designs for which there is at present absolutely no infrastructure and no viable pathway to get there based on a single manufacturer's blessing
I assume you mean hydrogen FCEVs and Ammonia; the latter isn't in production and is not even at a concept-demo level, just an engine demo, the former...isn't a single manufacturer thing (Honda actually introduced FCEVs first, and is still selling them as well; they've been clear they see BEVs as definitely more dominant in the near term, but FCEVs as a potential longer-term play and they are keeping their oar in that market.)
Toyota (and Honda, and others -- e.g., Nissan and its "bio-ethanol" fueled fuel cell work) are just not putting all their eggs in one basket.
Electric vehicles don’t have engines, only motors, and motors are far easier to build.
If Tesla is a battery factory searching for more things to put batteries in, Toyota is an engine factory searching for more things to put engines in.
So, from the perspective of Toyota, and from the Japanese economy as a whole, there is little reason to think that there is much value in manufacturing EVs. Sure, Toyota might be able to slap their brand on an EV and get a few out the door, but they're not going to dominate the market like they do today.
Japan is notoriously good at fundamental material science, and Panasonic is a battery giant. Sure there's tough competition, but they never shied away from fighting these kind of battles.
Relying on mainly China for the rare earth/metals could be an aspect of it though.
So in EV Japan is a minor player, if not for US sanctions Chinese EV makers would have overtaken Tesla as well, but which they will give them some time.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-11/china-s-c...
I heard houses were a depreciating asset in Japan too.
Funny how cultures are different.
A budget paint job on a single panel is up to $750 now.
I mean, with that kind of cash and establishment you can do some real wacky things publicly that turn profit. A company the size of Toyota could influence public trends enough to make money on the side via profits from share-held groups.
Maybe they have a larger hand in refinery/opec/whatever markets than one would first imagine -- if that was the case then there is plenty of valid 'business reasoning' that would end in the publishing/advertisement of weird products.
Never underestimate ego in a situation like this. Hell, just look at what Elon is doing.
Why admit you screwed up (likely costing you your very lucrative position and bringing shame and dishonor to your family) when you can double down and try to reality distort your way out of failure? Sometimes it works!
When it doesn’t, it can bankrupt huge multinationals (or historically even nations occasionally!), but at that point it’s almost always the type of problem that someone else needs to help you solve anyway. Often ones you can even scapegoat foreign powers or domestic enemies with. Win/win.
If ships do embrace ammonia technology, it may make sense to use it to power cars. If you are a big corp you have to hedge your bets. This seems a more realistic strategy for the world largest car company than to bet every thing on EVs.
In the meantime the waiting lists for Toyota Hybrids are some of the longest in the industry - they're what people really want.
> Tesla Model Y is the first EV to become the world’s bestselling car
It's mainstream, Tesla drivers don't even wave to each other anymore.
They also seem to have been stuck for a long time on the 'hydrogen is the future' bandwagon.
Imagine a gas station that's perpetually covered in a blanket of toxic fog that drifts to nearby homes and fills in their basements.
Here is the MSDS on Ammonia:
0.5% and you're looking at respiratory arrest and 1% and up and you will have skin damage (think burn wound but chemically induced rather than fire).
That won't be a real problem because you're likely going to be dead anyway...
I can imagine ways to make the car tank reasonably safe in car crashes, just by making the tank good and strong and protecting it along with the passengers such that anything bad enough to hurt the tank already killed everyone anyway, and anything short of that, there could be a pretty simple mechanical auto shutoff inside the tank that seals up all the pipes from the inside and the only thing to escape will be the contents of the lines, and the lines can be thin. So I'm actually not that worried about car crashes.
But the number of infrastructure bits that all need to be mechanically sound and properly maintained and not old, bent, chewed up or worn seals, corroded, abraded, rusted, dirty with sand, ice, hit with a back hoe, ruptured from ice or tree roots, etc etc...
https://www.motortrend.com/news/china-gac-ammonia-powered-in...
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-e....
What about the energy to run the HB reaction? It's super high temp and high pressure. Is there a zero carbon way to make that?
It clearly wins by one measure (it's easier to make it a liquid, which is easier to handle than a gas), but I'm not enough of a chemist to really understand the table in the link downthread for how it compares by other measures.
And MAN look at that "ammonia engine". All I have to do to judge the viability of the ammonia engine is look at that, it's simply too complex.
By the time any ammonia infrastructure and production ready ammonia engine came to market (which assumes VAST amounts of government investment that should instead go to alternative energy, storage, and battery production/research), EV drivetrains would be probably half the cost of a traditional ICE, much less some new fangled ammonia thing.
That's the reality that all the ICE makers are staring at: sure batteries and EV drivetrains are still a bit more expensive than a traditional ICE, but ... that's going to change, especially with 150 wh/kg sodium ion coming into mass production, which is a 300 mile car with potentially a $40/kw-hr bill of materials, and the sodium ion roadmap has 200+ wh/kg cells in a couple years. If that's not dense enough, there's 200+ wh/kg LFP now at about $60-70/kw-hr bill of materials, and 250 wh/kg on the roadmap.
And sulfur techs / aluminum air / solid state and a host of other approaches on the 5-10 year that should double or triple density.
There's simply going to be 20 years of cost reductions in EV drivetrains that ICE (and whatever that ammonia monstrosity is) simply cannot compete with.
And EV drivetrains are much more flexible for application. The motors are pretty compact, so they can fit in wide ranges of vehicles, and the battery pack is pretty easily adapted: you scale the number of cells to the area available.
For ICEs you usually have to stick to pretty standardized form factors or you have to design a transmission, driveshaft, engine, emissions, gas tank, etc to fit the application, and those usually won't have the cutting edge efficiency technology of the large market consumer vehicles.
We're really close to crossing that line, maybe we even have already done so. For someone shopping new sedans, it's hard to argue with ROI on the Model 3 RWD right now.
All the incumbents are still way over it, I hear like $140/kw-hr for things like the electric ford F-150. I'm fairly confident Tesla and the chinese are under $100/kw-hr, and that's without the forthcoming high density sodium ion/LFP cells that will probably get into cars in 2024.
The Chinese EV makers are really the Sword of Damocles to Toyota and US/EU car makers. Tesla can already match them in costs, but if they gain access to the US market, the other car makers will have to eat a lot of losses to stay remotely price competitive with them.
Also, CO2 is a major byproduct of industrial production. While that might be a good feedstock for carbon capture and storage were this approach to scale up, that just opens the whole system to CCS issues.
My take, ammonia is not a panacea...
It doesn't explain where they expect an ammonia infrastructure to appear from, especially since battery vehicles are already rolling and infrastructure is being built out.
After reading this I'm thinking about shorting Toyota. They are totally sunk at this point. Between fuel cells and this nonsense they've sunk countless millions when they could have lead the EV market.
I don't have petrol at home to fill my car's tank either. Obviously if ammonia engines took off, it would be available for refueling.
That said, I have no problems with alternative fuels being researched. I am not even sure if EVs will ever be practical enough for widespread adoption. Many people don't live in single family homes with easy access to recharging.