BMW and Toyota to partner on sports car and EV tech BMW And Toyota To Jointly Develop Sports Cars And More | The Truth About Cars has cool pic of Akio Toyoda and BMW chairman in front of the BMW Welt.
Toyota reliability with BMW over-engineering and non-reliability put into a sport hybrid? Smells like a disaster. The weight of the vehicle will be really high too.
Well, it'd be nice to get some Toyota reliability in BMW and some of the BMW handling and driving experience in a Toyota.
The "handling" in BMWs is sort of a common representation but it isn't really there. They ride stiff, which americans associate with "sporty". But there are plenty of sporty cars that ride nicely. And then the other side is do you really want a roaring stiff ride in a quiet nimble car? I would rather Toyota just take from within and sprinkle Lexus goodness into it. Like they are doing with the CTh.
Note the last sentence in the article: "The expansive partnership builds on a deal between the two automakers brokered in March to collaborate on next-generation lithium-ion batteries." I suspect that deal will have more to do with what most of us drive than the sports car.
The only sports car/ev tech that i know of with bmw is the i8, it did not say sport sedan 2014 BMW i8 Coupe Production Sheet-Metal Revealed – BMW i8 Production Car Uncovered – RoadandTrack.com This must be expensive to design and build. Some lexusfication of a shared platform might help both bmw and Lexus. The lexus hybrids have so far had wimpy drive trains, or big heavy hybrid systesms (GSh, LSh) that compromised handling. This sounds like a system that can proform, be front rear or AWD, and get great fuel economy and handling. I would bet that that 3 cyclinder becomes a 4 cylinder before production if its a lexus. DailyTech - BMW, Toyota Come Together for New EV/Hybrid Tech, Sports Cars ugg. Fuel cells really. I guess bmw might get forced into it, and Toyota s investing heavily, but do we really need fuel cells when phevs show so much promise.
That's even worse. If the US imported all its natural gas fuel cells the pollution and economics of fuel cells get much worse. The way to go then would be phevs with biofuels and electricity from wind, solar, nuclear, and coal. Pick any source for hydrogen other than natural gas and it becomes much less efficient. That is for japan, where lng is very exensive and its energy intensive to liquify the natural gas to transport it on boats. Europe is a different situation where natural gas pipelines exist, but... they seem further behind the US in phevs and are pushing BEVs. This sports car likely is a phev with a 3 or 4 cyclinder ice driving the rear wheels, electric motors driving the front, and around 20 miles of all electric range a number likely chosen for a battery pack that can cover the power requirements for a blended sports mode. 20 mile BEV range would likely cover about 40% of miles in US commutes, but more than that as a sports car. The hybrid part would likely get more than twice the mileage, which means a buyer would only use about 1/4 of the gasoline of a car this is replacing. Do that enough and we won't really miss fuel cells.
^^AG beat me to the question- how does fuel cell help Japan in post-Tsunami era? In the pre-Tsunami era, perhaps the vision was nukes to make power for eletrolysis H2.
