Former Toyota Exec: skeptic on electric

probably the reason for 'former'.

 

Reinert doesn't seem to have his facts in order. From the Article, Reinert says,

From this partial map of Tesla Super Charger locations (projection for the end of this year) in California -



.... according to Reinert's "200 miles apart" factoid California's north/south length must be about - what - 2,000 long? Yale needs to find more knowledgable 'experts' to write about. Poor guy.
.

 

Not likely, but his retirement means he can open his mouth about something most in toyota think, but won't say, fcv are only good for compliance.

Now I would disagree with him completely that other auto companies internally agree with toyota here. Toyota and Honda are the only two companies that have fcv but not plug-in for compliance. Hyundai/kia and mercedes have a compliance fcv, but also have a bev that they want to sell. BMW and GM may produce compliance fcv simply because partners toyota and honda respectively may make it cheap for them.

Tesla, Nissan, BMW, and GM all have or are working on non-complance bevs that they expect to eventually make money on. Mercedes, Ford, Kia, Fiat, smart, mitsubishi, vw, audi all are further along the plug-in path.[/quote]

 

There are big gaps in the country, but these will be filled in the next 2.5 years, long before there are even 10,000 fcv on american roads.

I'm sure toyota tries to keep their execs in the dark when it comes to bevs, otherwise there would be less group think. Don't get me wrong, I think Akido Toyoda wants to end the group think, and this may be one reason for moving headquarters. I do think that this interview does give a good grasp about what Toyota is thinking.

Bottom line - by the end of 2016 there will be good charging infrastructure for tesla for the whole country, but for now it is fine for most of the bev market. In the last year I went on 5 trips over 200 miles by car (lots by plane). 4 of them I went in other peoples cars. The only 200 mile + trip, I drove to houston and there was a super charger about 4 blocks from where I stopped to meet friends going the other way for lunch. Teslas don't have any performance limitations. They are less convenient for long trips, but lets face it I couldn't drive 1 mile in a fcv, unless I made a deal with the university to use their private hydrogen station ;-) The problem with teslas are the price, but ... battery prices are falling. GM just announced in their share holder meeting that they are working on a 200 bev, nissan appears to be working on a 150 mile bev, and tesla is working on a lower cost model 3.

 

• "There's nothing promising beyond the lithium battery on ... the horizon." - Hummm, I need to build an air-aluminum battery and see what are the issues. However, the charging infrastructure is improving and I hope to rent and test a Leaf on a Huntsville-to-Nashville run.
  
• ". . . a few extra gallons of gas . . ." - certainly this 150 year old technology continues to improve and has a great power-to-weight ratio.
  
• ". . . you'd have to decarbonize the whole grid . . . " - red herring, neither practical nor likely to happen any time soon.
  
• ". . . natural gas . . ." - everything he cited for natural gas exists as a problem with hydrogen only worse. Hydrogen has a much greater flamability range. But it does rise faster to help dilution.
  
• " . . . EVs or FCVs will lose the least amount of money . . ." - what I figured, the FCV is a door prize for CARB. Might as well give them away.
• " . . . FVCs offer more room for . . . cost reduction . . ." - so if you're going to lose money, take a technology that can lose less.
• ". . . yestertech . . . Le Mans race cars, they're all 230-mile-per-hour hybrids . . . we continue to improve them." - YES!
• ". . . electric cars are . . . archaic vision . . . almost any home garage guy." - Ah, a challenge! I'll have to look again at an air-aluminum battery.
• "It [ethanol rjw] absorbs water . . . " - GOOD, FAST, CHEAP, pick two, sounds like ethanol is FAST and CHEAP but it is not sold by energy content at the pump with a significant markup between wholesale and retail price.
• ". . . bioethers . . . " - Hummm, I need to do some reading.

Well I liked the article and he sounds like my kind of engineer. It would be great if we could reach out to him and see if he is free or interested to join PriusChat.

Bob Wilson

 

Reinert says

How about that. Another person gets it.

I hope he is talking G4 Prius and EPA

 

• Absolutely !!

 

For a viewpoint only focused on the immediate future and only the immediate future, his view is not too bad. For a really long term viewpoint, it is way too limited. We have a pollution problem and he sidesteps it. Once sidestepped, what he states makes sense....but it will not make sense viewed in hindsight.

 

He voiced a pro-Hybrid attitude, very similar to my current beliefs.

I had no issue with his anti-ethanol positions either, but he fumbled a little there. He should have said, by the way that 60 MPG new hybrid is probably only gonna get 55 MPG in the USA with 10% ethanol RFG. Then on the question: "ethanol advocates say ethanol is needed" for the octane...I would have said they must be drinking too much ...well, ethanol. A refinery is basically an octane machine, and I don't recall anyone saying we just gotta have more ethanol to make gasoline effectively. If so fine, I would not ban it as an additive. Just gimme something like BP Silver E0 at one pump, that's all I ask.

EPA's reformulated gasoline used in about 30% of USA mandates 10% ethanol and the rules may tend to essentially "ban" some of the other options to get more octane. But I wouldn't take the ethanol advocates word on it.

 

I disagree, and pollution/AGW is never far from my mind.

Get rid of subsidies, tax externalities, and let the market crown the winner. My opinion -- the winner will depend on specific circumstances, but will include hybrids, PHEVs, and maybe BEVs; and for electricity either grid or local clean energy, or grid NG.

 

1) Let's take a comment from the article; "it’s hard to see where the case for an electric car really comes in. Is it for carbon reduction? No, you’d have to decarbonize the whole grid to make that case, and that’s not likely to happen."

No carbon reduction ever in the grid? I would contend that a whole lot of decarbonization of the whole grid is a sure thing. What time scale I cannot say, but there is a time scale. I like the idea of starting now. Get an EV....then get PV. Wow, that sure seems like decarbonizing the grid to me. Few can make that step without an EV.

2) Totally agree with your comment "Get rid of subsidies, tax externalities, and let the market crown the winner. " But to the same point, we will not advance very much without (sensible) government regulations limiting pollution. I'm of the opinion (since it is what I would actually do) that if I were heavily penalized for all the pollution I generated (car and power use), then my shift would be to EV and PV. Every other option seems to be a shift to different fossil fuels, not away from fossil fuel.

3) EVs may be a step sideways in the short term. But in the long term the vehicle you drive is either generating pollution or not.

 

Hi FPL,
I took his comment about decarbonization to mean that marginal additions are always covered by fossil fuels, until clean energy is available in excess.

 

How about making alternative cars that are a very good value for the money?

All the time I see the Toyota 101 ads ...

Corolla LE - $17,688

Prius Two - $22,688

Most people will take that $5k savings ....

Not to mention .... Camry SE ... $20, 688 discount price. Most will take the more powerful car for less $.

Prius is GREAT on gas ( just pulled my first 70 MPG , 27 mile r/t commute), but it's just not a heck of a lot of car for the money .... yet. But, it will get better. I still think Prius liftback is the best format (for highest sales in US) for a hybrid, non-PHEV**, it just needs improvement.

** PiP range quite limited

sedans (Camry, Fusion, etc...) with big battery in trunk will, I think , play second fiddle to Prius sales for a long time.

 

I have this fantasy of building a large garage with solar panels and a windmill on my property some day in the near future. I would keep a plug-in as local-use vehicle that would never need the grid for propulsion. Any ICE vehicles I own would become limited use only.

 

If you are a totally short term thinker, plug-ins are not going to really reduce ghg much if at all.

In the longer term purchases today will help drive down battery costs and increase longevity decreasing manufacturing footprint. At the same time if we as a human race are going to get ghg under control its at the grid, and electric car buyers are some of the biggest advocates of cleaning the grid of coal, and as a group buy much more wind and solar than the general population. Reducing ghg is a marathon not a sprint. Fuel cells have an accounting trick in them, the way they get a low footprint is by saying eventually the hydrogen will be made from renewable electricity or from a solar method more expensive than renewable electricity. They claim that solar making hydrogen is all solar, but solar built to fuel plug-ins must be discounted to the avearge US grid. Already a tesla S in california gets between 60 mpge to 500 mpge ghg equivelents depending on how you account for solar and the grid. In georgia its between 30 mpge and 200 mpge.

Even if you discount that the US has been at war in iraq through the last 6 presidents, either supplying them to bomb Iran (Carter, Reagan), bombing them to stop Saddam (bush 41, clinton, bush 43), or bombing them to kill terrorists (Bush 43, Obama) its all based on that war for oil doctrine (Carter doctrine+Reagan corollary). You have to understand that easy oil is going away, and tighter oil is going to produce more ghg than the stuff we are using now. It just is not smart using the most scarce resource (oil) for fuel, claiming to be green because in the short term using accounting tricks gas looks better than electrons.

We have the international Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies in town, and I don't think any over them think the market is going to crown a winner reducing ghg without governments supporting that winner. Industries are now just under investing in technology and over investing in lobbying the government. It would be great if say the US government or China would pass something that included all the costs of oil and coal, but that just isn't the way politics is played. The US government could strengthen some carots (give the car companies not not the consumer tax breaks so the credits appear on the window sticker, reduce red tape (streamline) solar and wind permitting. Enforce clean water act to outlaw mountain top removal. Add straightforward oil scarcity ($1 or $2 per barrel) and coal pollution ($50/ton) taxes. Remove grandfathering from heavy pollution sources (50+ yo coal plants).

All light vehicles pollute even if they ran on water ;-) If your goal is to cut ghg from vehicles by 60% by 2050, you can do it with plug-ins, I don't think you can do that with more efficient gasoline, hybrid, or diesel.

 

And over time, plugins with sizable batteries will promote a virtuous circle of cheap used rechargeable batteries enabling utilities to build cost-effective and highly-efficient large energy storage systems to balance the output of naturally varying renewable energy sources like wind and solar thus enabling larger scale integration of these sources into the grid and lowering CO2 emissions by increasing numbers of new additional plugin cars.

 

I'm skeptical of the idea that batteries will ever be the 'grand buffer' that people who like to chat about the 'smart grid' are so enamored with. Utility scale hydrogen with fuel cells to deal with the required time shifting probably makes more sense.

Germany has already proven that a stable grid run on 50% renewables is possible without heroics. I tend to think that for most regions of the US, when it becomes a *real* issue, cheaper modalities than batteries will be used. Hydro and regional inter-connects come to mind, in addition to TOU metering to wake people up a little and force them to think before they flip a switch. I also would not be opposed to a grid goal for 2030 that is 65% wind/solar/biomass/geothermal; with 15% hydro and 20% NG to cover peaks.

Which brings me back to my main point: the government should stop spending money on cars, and spend it on infrastructure instead in order to accelerate clean energy development. You want government involved ? Have them cut the red tape

 

I am finding the H2 FCV idea to be very interesting, so I like the fact that Toyota has picked that option to lose money (or better R&D area, should I say).

...made some green H2 at home the other day, just stuck the leads from a solar panel into salt water...in 5 secs I was making H2 (and as a bonus, O2). Actually I used baking soda not salt, but I think salt works too.

 

Nice now all you need is a storage tank and compressor for 10,000 psi. Honda's home kit compressing natural gas for 3600 psi cost $5000, which seemed crazy, but the home hydrogen market should be much lower. Now that you decide to fill that tank, which will cost you about 3 or 4x the electricity you would use to run the same number of miles in a phev, + the cost of water.

I am perfectly fine with toyota and honda and the Japanese government funding the research. I am less fine that the US government has already spent $2.8B and GM already spent $2.5B and I am sure the government would have lost less money in GM's bail out if they had not wasted so many resources of fcv.

The doe finally has been cutting the hydrogen budget after years of false promises. Proposed budget is $90 for vehicle R&D in 2015. I find it likely they will also renew the $8000/fcv tax credit that expires this year (why is it more than plug in?). California is throwing in $26M + $5000/fcv + HOV stickers + 9zev credits /fcv (versus 4 for tesla of same range, or 3 for a leaf)

Let's look at the end of 2017 and see if fcv has hit any of their goals. No increased fcv budget until then. That is what the toyota pr is all about, to increase US and California government spending. They suceeded in the upping california, after failing to deliver the vehicles promised for 2012-2015. If they fail again let the tax credits actually run out this time, until they are closer to commercialization.