Toyota's President Says Electric Vehicles Are Overhyped

[reed scott]

Talk amongst yourselves. Or not.

Toyota’s President Says Electric Vehicles Are Overhyped

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal detailed the skepticism of Toyota's president, Akio Toyoda, toward electric vehicles. This is a big deal because Toyota was the third-largest vehicle manufacturer in terms of vehicle sales in the United States during 2019. Mr. Toyoda criticized what he...

www.americanexperiment.org

 

[Deacon Blues]

I'm looking at replacing my present vehicle in 2021 and have put a fair amount of thought and research into buying an EV. Presently, there are very few EVs on the market that I can either afford or want. I was interested in the Kona EV, until they started catching on fire.
I like the Toyota Rav4 Prime, but there's a wait of at least one year where I live.

 

[Sierratim]

Mr. Toyoda has a valid point in regards to the availability of clean electricity to power a large fleet of EVs. There's an article that shows the problem California now faces with the transition to EVs now being mandated; there isn't projected to be enough electricity to power the EVs support the job growth the State needs to stay viable economically. This issue has gotten California's pols to actually rethink nuclear as a clean energy source.

Toyota has made a long term committment to hydrogen based on the issues re large scale use of EVs. Hydrogen has its own set of issues so it comes down to which set of trade offs is easiest to over come.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

Whenever anyone mentions nuclear I'm really not all that interested.

At current costs and construction times you cannot even pour the concrete needed for a nuclear plant over building an equivalent amount of solar or wind production. The average time between approval of a wind or solar project and when that project starts selling electricity is six months. That makes financing cheaper as well. And there is no imaginable way that you can build utility-scale fission plants that quickly, at least without decades of investment in tooling, engineering, and infrastructure that we do not have today.

Yes, you need baseload electricity. Nuclear isn't exactly great for that because you can't spin up or shut down a nuclear plant quickly. Given that battery costs are coming down fairly rapidly I'd bet that by the time you finished a nuclear plant batteries would be cheaper for baseload. At the same time grid operators are getting really good at managing lots of small variable inputs (like wind turbines) and matching them to demand -- actually they are better than I would have reasonably expected a dozen years ago.

The dominant factor in whether electric vehicles will take off is battery costs. Battery costs are dropping rapidly, in fact they are dropping more rapidly than even wildly optimistic projections made by their advocates. H2 fuel cell vehicles are interesting and have some promise, but they are not yet at the point where the system cost is dropping fast enough to make them appealing.

Renewables like wind and solar and battery technology has made enormous progress in recent decades. And it has done so with extremely modest funding. There are order-of-magnitude differences between government spending on renewable sand battery research and government spending on nuclear power research, yet one of those is paying off and the other isn't.

... and don't even get me started about fusion power.

 

[Handlebars]

Whenever anyone mentions nuclear I'm really not all that interested.

At current costs and construction times you cannot even pour the concrete needed for a nuclear plant over building an equivalent amount of solar or wind production.

That's all just politics. No real need for that if CO2 is actually as bad as you want to believe. Can't have it both ways.

 

[Art Deco]

That's all just politics. No real need for that if CO2 is actually as bad as you want to believe. Can't have it both ways.

Nuclear is a dead end now. Economics, not politics. A reactor is just a really expensive way to boil water and generate waste that will remain dangerous forever.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

Nuclear is a dead end now. Economics, not politics. A reactor is just a really expensive way to boil water and generate waste that will remain dangerous forever.

My personal preference as an engineer is when the moving parts of a system are electrons. Or holes.

 

[Art Deco]

I should have mentioned that i live less than an hour from (the still glowing) three mile island plant and might be a bit prejudiced.

 

[Latitude]

Here in Ontario our government embarked on an ambitious plan to phase out coal, replacing it with wind turbines. We have a hydro/nuclear system that works well, and didn’t need the capacity wind generated (when there was wind). Unwilling rural municipalities were forced to have wind farms. Couldn’t store the excess so it is being sold to surrounding states and provinces way below cost. The end result is we have just about the most expensive electricity in North America... costs for businesses and homeowners went through the roof. Businesses left the province. Some homeowners had to heat or eat. The provincial government finally threw in the towel on the whole disastrous green energy initiative... then were voted out of office and into oblivion. A complete disaster that only friends of the government profited from.
Unfortunately some of the key architects of that initiative moved on to play key roles in our federal government. Now their pet project is massive and rapidly increasing carbon taxes that are driving up the cost of everything in Canada under the guise of reducing global warming (our contribution to that questionable fact is miniscule on the global scale, especially since China, Russia, India and the U.S. aren’t buying into the program).

 

[Deacon Blues]

Well said, Latitude.

 

[Sierratim]

Nuclear is a dead end now. Economics, not politics. A reactor is just a really expensive way to boil water and generate waste that will remain dangerous forever.

It is a dead end in some (most?) Western countries, not so in other rapidly growing countries.

Also as an engineer I'm all for those technologies that use the least amount of resources with the least impact on the environment to accomplish a given goal. California, and apparently Ontario, are discovering that solar and wind may not be the final answer. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 15 years for California when the State is scheduled to stop the sale of all ICE vehicles. Some estimates are that the distribution grid itself is ~25% under capacity to supply this additional load from EVs. The generation side may be more behind considering that rolling blackouts are now the norm in the hottest months.

 

[Art Deco]

Here in PA, wind works well. But we get the winds all the way from Canada along the ridgetops. In Texas, solar works a treat. Hydro works well at Nigara Falls, But nuclear seems to fail economically everywhere that I've heard of, even China.
A classmate of mine spent a decade or two in China setting up nuclear plants, and said they were strictly an interm solution or "vanity projects" as he called them.

 

[J.R.]

Wind isn't the cheap solution here in PA either. There are many windmills on ridge tops that have yet to even pay for themselves. Often locals hate them, environmentalists hate what they do to the mountain ranges and wildlife habitat. 20 years ago PA generated 70% of its electricity from coal, now less than half that. Three Mile Island went off line a couple years ago and more coal is being used to try to make up the shortfall. Dams aren't acceptable to many groups, many are being torn down, but they are the black start option for our power grid. My area has 3 hydroelectric dams and I think the newest one is around 80 years old. We need viable options and we're running out of time.

 

[Art Deco]

Indeed. We may have already run out of time for the BAU solutions. But I don't think so, or at least I don't admit it very often. Never say never.

 

[john peck]

I´m looking forward to the day when the cheapest practical transportation doesn´t start around $29,000, I still haven´t
driven 500 miles yet this year. My van´s 35th birthday´s coming up. I paid $1000 for it 20 years ago; spent $13.59+tax
in maintenance yesterday; put a new lock cylinder, tuther plum wore out. My registration just went up $30. I took it out today
for no good reason & promiscuously drove a 6 mile joy ride. It looks like a total derelict, but runs better that it did comln´
off the line.

 

[john peck]

I get that Mr. Toyoda is pointing out challenges and they're valid points.

But I don't think we should be just keep burning fossil fuel and emitting carbon emissions.

Yeah, electricity is expensive, but there's a reason why bullet trains (electric powered) are one of the most efficient transportation in the world and.. did I mention ebike?

Can you imagine fast speed transportations like bullet trains being powered by gasoline engine?
Ebike being powered by those little gas-bicycle engine emitting smog in the bike trail?

No thanks.

Have you ever tried to imagine the gross tonnage of metal in motion come rush hour in Seattle, then multiply it by every metropolis in the U.S.
Gotta be a better way!

 

[john peck]

I should have mentioned that i live less than an hour from (the still glowing) three mile island plant and might be a bit prejudiced.

Geez Art, You shouldn´t let geography cloud yur judgement.

 

[J.R.]

Have you ever tried to imagine the gross tonnage of metal in motion come rush hour in Seattle, then multiply it by every metropolis in the U.S.
Gotta be a better way!

I think there's a better way and always have been better ways. Even a diesel electric commuter train from bedroom communities would be better than a thousand cars, each with one person going to work. The Northern Central RR had several daily commuter trains running through central Pennsylvania and central Maryland. I know people old enough to have used them, so not ancient history. Imagine having a service like that where you could take a job 50 miles away and be able to get to work in under an hour. The auto industry destroyed electric streetcars in most cities. I can remember streetcars. Even the smallest cities of 30,000 residents often had streetcars. Shocking waste of time and money from our leaders.

 

[Art Deco]

The Brits still have trains like that, not the "tube", overland to the city from the burbs and back. Seemed to work rather well most of the time, except when they didn't , and then they were horrid. Almost as bad as airports.

 

[Handlebars]

Nuclear is a dead end now. Economics, not politics. A reactor is just a really expensive way to boil water

Hilarious stuff.
After giving Samsung the sweetheart deal at our expense at every single step:
From 2013: Ontario will pay Samsung 44.3 cents a kilowatt hour for solar power and 29.5 cents for solar in the later phase of the contract.

December 22, 2020
The OEB has set new electricity prices for households and small businesses for January 1 to January 28, 2021. In accordance with regulatory amendments made today, all consumers on the Regulated Price Plan will pay a fixed price of 8.5 ¢/kWh