“EVs aren't the only answer”: Toyota scientist on the future of cars
autocar.co.uk
autocar.co.uk
The fact is that Toyota has made a major misstep in focussing on PHEVs (plugin hybrids) instead of full electric vehicles and they've been spreading FUD about EVs for years now.
I'm hardly an expert on this subject matter but just based on the fact that this man is from Toyota casts massive doubts on anything he says. I put exactly zero value to his claims given his obvious and massive conflict of interest.
https://electrek.co/2021/11/11/how-toyota-sneakily-spreads-a...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/toyota-lobbying-against-ev-ad...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/climate/toyota-electric-h...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/toyota-bet-wrong-on-evs...
https://electrek.co/2021/03/17/toyota-lobbies-us-government-...
https://www.teslarati.com/toyota-slammed-european-funds-anti...
That doesn't seem to be the case. It seems they want to be able to continue selling iterations of their current products rather than preventing others from selling electric only vehicles.
To me it makes sense, but I had similar thoughts independently before reading this article. The only assumption is that battery manufacturing will remain challenging for the near future.
It does not matter either way, in the EU selling anything but full electric will be illegal as of 2035. If Toyota wants to get out of that lucrative market, it can go ahead.
That is not accurate. It will not be possible to buy a new non-zero emission car.
Of course no one really wants a PHEV anymore!
Imagine if the EU and others had taken a reasonable stance 15 years ago, and said "every car sold after 2015 must be an EV or a series hybrid with more than 50 km realistic range on pure electric". The transition towards zero carbon emissions from the road sector would have gone exponentially faster.
I mean, even if you look at the countries with the highest rate of EV adoption, like Norway with 65% of the vehicles sold in 2021 being pure EVs, it's still only making a tiny dent in the amount of gasoline and diesel sold - around 5% decrease when you compare Q4 2021 to Q4 2019, and then it's still a bit unclear how much of that drop is attributed to WFH and covid.
This is basically what they did. Generally laws try to avoid specifying the technology these days, to prevent locking things in, but the EU and other sensibly governed places have been putting tighter emission standards in place for decades. People were free to meet these goals with whatever tech they came up with, better aero, lighter materials and so on.
If PHEVs were the answer, we'd have more of them, but pretty much everyone realised that going straight to BEV made sense as soon as the oil/battery price passed a certain ratio, and that it was only going in one direction in future.
Here's a 2011 (11 years ago), McKinsey slide: https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mck...
This is also where the $100 per KWh target people talked about a lot comes from, if batteries get sufficiently cheap, BEVs win, and they did.
We have achieved only emissions reductions on paper, when we could have been mandating PHEVs and actually solving problems.
If you look back at when California was actually able to do something about their smog problem, it was through mandating specific technologies - first it was positive crankcase ventilation, then catalytic converters.
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/...
An average family generates 5kg of waste per day. A 400kg battery every 15 years is not going to make a dent in that waste, especially when the 400kg can be profitably recycled.
Why spend money on basic infrastructure for human living conditions, lets give everyone air conditioning and an electric car.
The link between temperature and human productivity is well established, air conditioning is one of those things that seems frivolous but pays for itself.
And of course transportation of food and other goods is also basic infrastructure for human living conditions. So maybe not electric cars, but electric trains definitely.
It's like the opposite of 'appeal to authority' :)
PHEVs are better than HEVs and both are better than ICE, hydrogen is a non-starter (technically better than ICE but there's no infrastructure so it'll be niche) so the future is BEV for wheeled transport.
In depth numbers:
https://theicct.org/publication/a-global-comparison-of-the-l...
https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-m...
They're probably starting this campaign to try to prevent the phase out being brought forward again, and/or spreading to other countries as it's been going so well.
What are your opinions based on? I've seen some some "propaganda science" videos, which were essentially Tesla fanboys defending Tesla's choice for some reason.
IMHO, nothing ever is that one dimensional. Obviously those who invested in PHEV or something else will defend that point and I can't see how one can be correct and the other can be the wrong choice when all come with pros and cons.
Did Intel made the wrong choice x86? Did Apple made the correct choice with ARM? Isn't it possible that at different stages of maturity of the tech and the market the "correct choice" can be different?
Lately I'm very annoyed of the science and tech propaganda on Youtube. One of my favourite YouTubers, Derek Muller of Veritasium, was criticised for filming a propaganda video for Google[0] and I'm afraid that the critics have a point. Company positions in the skin of scientific discussion are not new but with YouTube is seems like we are having hard time to identify them.
Really? hard to argue about that because it's a statement without any backing. "Simply better" , a magical "argument".
My focus on Tesla? My Youtuber? I'm not sure if I should honor this strangely aggressive comment.
I'm not advocate of any of those, my personal position is that public transportation is both the present and the future of transportation. Cars are great recreational machines and EVs, petrol cars or other types have different characteristics with different kind of fun(EVs acceleration is amazing but petrol is lightweight and agile, their engines sound is amazing). No, from recreational perspective EVs are not simply better.
> “I’m not sure. Of course, Toyota will comply with the law. But is the proposal the best way to reduce carbon?
> I don’t know. Maybe in 15 and certainly in 20 years’ time, it could make sense. But in eight? I’m not so sure.
Oh spare me.
Yes, wouldn't it be nice if this could be someone else's problem in 20 years instead of my problem in 5.
I get it, it's hard. Things are hard. Drastic action is hard. Doing mostly nothing for a long time while we slowly embrace change is very modest, thoughtful and relatively cheap and unrisky.
Of course that's what he wants. It's his job to want that, and advocate for it. Let's wait.
> the truth is that we don’t know what technologies are going to get us to the best way to rid ourselves of that CO2.
Maybe someone will come up with technology to solve it. It's not impossible... and, it saves doing hard, risky work now.
The question we should be asking isn't 'is it too soon?', it should be:
Given that climate change seems to be rather catastrophic, what do you propose to do about it?
Wait for someone else to solve the problem? No, I don't think that's an acceptable answer from the Toyota Research Institute CEO.
EV's aren't a silver bullet... but I tell you what does not the fix the problem: making it someone else's problem. Suck it up. You work for Toyota ffs; ICE vehicles are what, 25% of emissions?
It's not going to completely fix things, but hey, it'll help right?
That's good right?
Even if it's complicated, hard and risky?
Yes. It is.
Basically, BEVs need to have huge batteries to sell well. Not because the consumer is actually using this huge battery to its full extent, but because otherwise the consumer will not buy the car due to range anxiety. This huge battery, of which maybe 1/4 or 1/3 is used throughout a day, is a huge inefficiency to manufacture and adds significantly to the CO2 footprint of BEVs. For a lot of people it might therefore make more sense to have a PHEV with a battery big enough for one day of driving, and a range extender, which ideally would not be used in day to day driving. The range extender is an ICE engine or gas turbine, which is made of more common materials. In the future it might even make sense to combine PHEV with synthetic fuels.
The argument I heard against this is that people with PHEVs ignore the plug-in functionality and drive it on gas the whole time. But while this might be true, it does not counter the technical argument above. It is a completely other problem.
Toyota is free to make PHEVs, people is free to buy PHEVs or EVs. We'll see who ends up being the Beta (claimed superior by fans but zero sells) and the VHS.
No, it doesn't. This myth has been repeated over and over for twenty-plus years, as long as the Prius has been around. The CO2 footprint of the battery is dwarfed by the footprint of the car as a whole, and the in the case of a gasoline vehicle, its manufacturing footprint is dwarfed by its CO2 emissions: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
A BEV is better for the environment after barely a year of usage:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...
There are other reasons for having a larger battery. For one, the larger the pack, the less wear on the pack; a smaller pack would be cycled more, and degrade sooner.
Charge/discharge rates are a function of battery capacity. The higher the rate relative to the pack's capacity, the higher the wear on the battery.
But that's the whole problem, people aren't going to change their convenient lifestyles unless forced to.
That's why everything should be taxed the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes.
It is unfortunate to be hauling around a heavy battery that isn't required for short commutes, but the utility doesn't end with transportation alone.
even in that case PHEV gets much better mileage than pure ICE and thus is a significant improvement.
I think the problem with Toyota is that Japan seems to be targeting hydrogen (in particular there were plans for large wind farms on Kuril islands with production of hydrogen and transporting it to Japan), and Toyota probably has bought into that strategy, and thus considers PHEV/BEV as temporary solution, and thus even not investing much in BEV. Hydrogen in a bunch of aspects is better than BEV, and its main issue - infrastructure - is what Japan is perfectly capable of doing. Other countries are very different from Japan, and this is i think where Toyota's miscalculation comes in - the other countries are transitioning to BEV much faster and doing it as as main approach and without any plans for hydrogen totally disregarding that supposedly, under some conditions, better approach. Hydrogen is the Betamax so to speak.
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon that inferior but cheaper solutions won the competitions. Let's wait and see.
Guys from Toyota PR could talk about how expensive are the batteries or the cars themselves. But in terms of moving "giantic" batteries they seem pretty OK in terms of efficiency.
It’s hard to tell. Your account was created only 20 hours ago. Maybe you posted it with a different handle?
I saw a lot of EVs being rented on my recent vacation.
You can complain about the myth that batteries are somehow more polluting that the entire supply chain of petroleum (extraction->refining->transport->storage->burning in your car) but the tens of thousands of superfund sites that are gas stations are evidence that's not the case.
Your argument is like criticizing the increase in compute power 20 years ago, asking why do people need such fast, power heavy CPUs to do email and spreadsheets, but that led to far more efficient computers today that also enable us to do really cool things. With everyone having huge batteries, you can do things like virtual power plants where the power direction is reversed and consumers can send power back to the grid when necessary instead of a power plant having to dispatch its on-demand carbon heavy production. I think this is already being tested out on a small scale.
What he does not mention and what the war in Ukraine has shown again is that dependence on foreign oil is just bad. Any engine that consumes petrol or natural gas products prolongs that. A purely electrical car can use electricity from coal that is abundant and much more evenly distributed on the planet than oil and gas. Moreover, when an electrical car use electricity from the modern coal power plant, the end result is less CO2 per distance driven than the corresponding petrol car.
Make your own carbon neutral synthetic fuel. You're going to need jet fuel at the very least:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-10/efuel-plant-proposed-...
Or battery powered plains with in the air charging using microwaved renewable battery.
Or we need better batteries the necessary energy densities are hypothetically possible with a theoretical limit of 2,700 Wh/kg of Li-S https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.9b02574 . Chnages to mission profile with Aerotowing for take-off might also help a lot.
This coming from someone who flies 20+ times a year.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/airlander-10-air-nost...
https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/electric-...
See how you feel about it when crossing the pacific.
The 50,000 mile number is based on calculations based on when batteries cost > $300/kWh to make. A large part of the reduction to the current cost of $100/kWh is reducing the amount of energy needed to make the batteries. Current estimates are under 10,000 miles. But they compare like-for-like, and a Model 3 is bigger than a Prius, so it'd be over 10,000 miles.
Your last statement stands alone. Yes, if we convinced every pickup truck driver to drive plug in Prius's...
Any place that has a stockpile of 15 years of gasoline can reasonably claim to be independent from the vagaries of the fossil fuel market.
A single taxi ride can pay for quite a few liters of fuel.
Public transport also comes with many other benefits over cars (quieter cities, less deaths from collisions, fitter population).
For super low population density locations cars will probably remain the only possible solution, but for most of the population we really need to implement a movement away from car dependence.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Page 3
[2] https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-...
Sounds so 2022.
Just move things around so people don't have to sit in traffic or commute for 4 hours a day.
Hey that is what happens when people feel like not joining a union and adopt an each for itself strategy.
And overcrowded buses happen in underfunded bus systems with not enough capacity or on peak times. Consider increasing the frequency or upgrading to a tram line if your buses are always full
The captured regulatory system in the US benefits corporations first, and people last.
I had such joy during two years, close to the French Alps.
Tourist visits isn't the same as living deeply into the country.
It's not a technology problem, it's a political one. American auto lobbies destroyed public transport, it's not a secret.
Here is france a lot of busses use a LNG/fuel mix. Regional trains have room where you can put a bike.
Take a quarter of what is being spent on domestics cars, and allocate it on public transport, instead of subsidizing oil. Unfortunately, making something for the community so it can be collective, is immediately seen as a socialist or communist measure in the US, so it will probably take a revolution.
Americans will continue to be one the largest emitter per capita, and will lose the fight on the environment, while countries like china are already building a lot of nuclear power plants.
Edit: I hadn't thought about their use of regenerative braking which certainly reduces the amount of brake dust particulates. Found this literature review (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...) that uses an estimate of zero braking for EVs and yet the increased tyre and road wear still makes the particulate pollution similar to ICE vehicles:
By analysing the existing literature on non-exhaust emissions of different vehicle categories, this review found that there is a positive relationship between weight and non-exhaust PM emission factors. In addition, electric vehicles (EVs) were found to be 24% heavier than equivalent internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). As a result, total PM10 emissions from EVs were found to be equal to those of modern ICEVs. PM2.5 emissions were only 1–3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
Though you're right, they aren't emission free
Also low rolling resistance tires cause less particulate loss and last a lot longer too.
A French think tank named The shift project, also came to the conclusion that the fastest way to decarbonize and meet emission targets would currently not be BEV currently but switching globally to super-light ICE vehicle with very small engine and optimized consumption (consumption of less than 2.5L/100 km, meaning > 100mpg). A bit like Japanese Kei car. [1]
And when you think about it, this is not crazy. BEV makes perfect sense in country like Norway, France, Switzerland or Canada where electricity is already very low carbon [2].
It does not if you consider most of the world: Poland, Australia, India, most of Africa and Japan has an electricity still running massively on coal, petrol and gas. It will takes several decade to change that and this is more than the lifetime of a car.
Without even considering that many countries, including Japan, country of Toyota, do not have a power grid design to reload EV in individual home (100V, single phase low power network). That would take massive effort and an other few decades to change that. [3]
Like always: There is clean and nice solutions on paper... And there is the reality kicking in the face
Disclaimer: I do own an BEV because I do live in a country where electricity is low carbon.
[1] https://theshiftproject.org/category/thematiques/transport/
Yet now I can think of only a single hydrogen fuel station in London (there are likely more but I am only aware of one), yet there are literally countless electric charging points all over the place now, and are starting to appear on on-street lamp posts now (see ubitricity et al), at least in London. It seems like hydrogen has an unassailable infrastructure issue, while EVs are getting increasingly more viable.
I appreciate that lithium batteries are not especially eco friendly, but there is scope for new chemistries in the future so I would be reluctant to say that BEVs are "not the answer" because lithium.
The EV, despite its many advantages over the ICE is still an incredibly resource, dollar, and space-intensive form of personal transportation.
He also talks about range anxiety which was a thing a few years ago but with so many charging stations all over the place and more coming online every day, and cars with higher range and fast charging. it’s not really a concern anymore and will be even less of a concern in the future.
Lithium ion batteries aren’t without consequence. They’re made using rare, mined materials – in contrast, an engine is made using more common materials – and weigh a lot.
The rare earth metals in your catalytic converter alone have orders of magnitude greater impact. They rely on open pit mining in third world countries and directly pollute ground water and have very poor disposal options.
Assume otherwise and he starts to look more like an apologist for a company that is trying to recover from some bad marketing decisions.
Toyota, I feel your pain but your place in the future is not a given. You have to earn it.
I wish Toyota well but the future doesn't wait for anyone. Either help create it or be crushed by it --- these are your options.
This is why extensive, high stakes research into battery technology is going on all around the world. Whoever comes up with a lighter, cheaper, safer battery will own a big chunk of the future --- and the auto industry in particular.
Apparently, Toyota has decided it won't be them. The fun fact about the future is everyone gets to choose how they want to play it.
And the push for better battery technology is not at it's end; it is just getting started. It will be the gold rush of the century.
If i get a full remote gig next year, i think i will go back there and invest in a kayak, i know there is no dam between that place and the village's country store.
So yes, EV aren't the only answer. I don't think i need to ever buy a car.
Elsewhere on the internet, BEV vs FCEV arguments descend into typical slanging matches. But it’s not A vs B. The world and market can have A and B and C and D.
Many of us will never be able to plug in at home.
With ICE cars stopping sales By 2030 in my country, options like fuel cells are totally viable. My local hydrogen station is green, using electrolysis from excess grid energy. The Toyota Mirai is a nice car. There are also promising projects into hydrogen combustion engines.
Then you have new tech like Zero Petroleum in early stages.
I’d not discount BEVs being the Betamax of the 2020s.
Blue Hydrogen isn't exactly the magic wand that some are green wishing it to be.
https://theconversation.com/blue-hydrogen-what-is-it-and-sho...
Why is this a major concern? There's no possibility for me to plug in at home and my EV works just fine. Public charging stations are totally sufficient and the long range means I don't have to charge but every few weeks. Of course this is totally location specific (Netherlands).
It’s not a major concern. It’s just a buying factor. For those who can plug in at home it’s a plus. It’s a weak con for me. I’d rather not have to do two 60 minutes charges a week vs 4 minutes at a fuel station.
It’s light years from a scientific study but I definitely notice a lot more EVs on residential streets with off-street parking than not. In the UK at least it’s easy to spot/count them as the number plates have a green stripe indicating zero emissions.
we simply don't have enough green energy to afford wasting it on use Cases were batteries are feasible, and this won't change for some time. the article acknowledges that btw, and that is coming from a company that has a vested interest in the contrary due to selling the Mirai.
800v infrastructure cars can DC fast charge at over 250KW, which means you get 13 miles of range per minute. Plug in, and let's say it takes you just 5 minutes to get a coffee and donut in the shop on your way into work - you've got almost 70 miles of range added. If someone lives in the city, that's a significant amount of driving, from just 5 minutes of charge time.
But charging at home...I take it you mean people who live in apartments without a driveway? Because "level 1" charging is actually pretty sufficient for many, many people given how few miles they actually drive per day. You plug in when you get home around, say, 7pm and by 8am your car has been charging at, say, 10 amps / 120v. That's 14.4kw/hr. Many evs use around 250-300whr/mile on average, so that's 48 miles of range every night. If you install a level 2 charger, you're looking at being able to fully charge in a couple of hours.
There's no reason apartment buildings can't be set up with charging systems for their parking lots/garages...with deployment scaling as there is demand.
The way he dances around the point clearly demonstrates he knows the argument well enough to know he's lying.
• electrification of trunk roads
• hydrogen-powered vehicles
Batteries are simply too heavy to replace all that petrol and diesel for all use cases.
As for hydrogen the problem is that you can make a battery car go several times as far on the energy required to produce the hydrogen. That means to fuel it you will have to pay several times as much as the electricity equivalent. Or of course you can relatively cheaply make it from fossil natural gas via steam reformation but that generates lots of CO2 and if you were to just make electricity from the N-gas and use it in battery cars you could again run more of those than you could from the hydrogen you generated.
(1) source my ass. just a guesstimate. does not include things like Medium sized Trucks. Its fine not to solve those right now.
Customers and industries worldwide downplay and resist hybridization, and now electrification. Prius being a tangible bad experience explains huge bulk of it. My speculation is that they use negative sentiments associated with products to even out sales figures over generations, but that type of ignorance and arrogance were what led to complete destruction of Japanese flip phone hardware industry.
iPhone don't dominate the current market because of its Unix-derived kernel for the operating system, nor because they integrate advanced linear actuators for haptic feedbacks. The way Toyota is thinking cars is the latter ways; they are gauging interest in parts it uses where customers have been moving away from its products.
This might be a bad analogy but when the majority starts moving towards organic foods over engineered industrial foodstuffs, there must be something going wrong with the class of products at scale.