I'll believe it when I see it.
There seems to be a lot of noise, confusion and FUD coming from Toyota lately.
There seems to be a lot of noise, confusion and FUD coming from Toyota lately.
Not really? The old CEO with his irrational hate of all-electric cars left, and Toyota is now free to catch up with the rest of the industry. And the best way to catch up has always been to leapfrog a tech generation ahead, rather than trying to copy what the competition designed last year.
Toyota's revenue is up 24.2% since last year [1].
I think Tesla would love to be a zombie corporation with those numbers.
[1] https://pressroom.toyota.com/tmc-announces-april-through-jun...
Many a large corporation had revenue growth even when the writing was on the wall for their business model.
Which ever way you look at it Toyota is hardly struggling as a company.
*So, Japan imports most of the energy their electrical grid comes from, largely in the form of LNG. If Japan wants to move away from fossil fuels, then that new energy source needs to come in some form; importing liquid hydrogen has seemed an obvious prospect for years now.
This is important because if Japan's future electrical grid will run on hydrogen anyway, then a BEV's energy chain will be (imported hydrogen)->electricity->battery->car, whereas a hydrogen FCEV will just be (imported hydrogen)->electricity->car. Thus, hydrogen stands to be more efficient than BEVs in the specific context of future Japanese logistics.
But where does ammonia come into this? Simple: Ammonia, being NH4, has been considered as a better method of transporting hydrogen instead of liquid hydrogen (hydrogen has great specific energy (energy-per-weight) but literally the worst energy density (energy-per-volume), and ammonia could fix that. If so, then a car engine that uses ammonia directly could be more efficient than a hydrogen engine that's fed from ammonia anyway.
What? It seems to be there is a lot of irrational hate on Toyota for its pragmatic approach. There's going to be a need for ICE vehicles for decades to come. As far as I'm aware, the people most likely unable to switch to EVs are likely already Toyota customers. It's not like they've relying on gas guzzling monsters like Ford/GM/etc. They've had hybrids and plug-in hybrids for how long? And in case you did not know, they do have an EV which is available to purchase. I guess they snuck that under the old bat's nose.
> Toyota is now free to catch up with the rest of the industry.
Toyota has been out in front with their hybrids. It's the rest of the industry that's catching up with Toyota. Whom do you think is actually ahead of Toyota?