Featured Toyota Announces 2 New EV's

Late is a narrative from impatient early-adopters.

No one in the industry is making profitable BEV yet; they're all subsidized in some manner still. Sadly, infastructure has a long way to go as well.

Fortunately, we already see that Toyota has delivered and continues to refine the hardware & software. It's really just the dedicated platform to take advantage that remains, which is the easier part.

Again, the market is still very much in the enthusiast stage.

 

My son wants an EV. Because of Elon's behavior during the pandemic, he and his friends have entirely written off Tesla for life - they'd all rather walk than own an Elon product. So he's looking at the logical options - Leaf and Bolt.

Sadly, both have limitations. Both have even crappier range than Teslas, neither has fast charging (both are limited to around 50kW if they even have a fast charging port), the Bolt doesn't even have radar cruise, neither has a HUD.

He's willing to get an EV because we still have the Prime for road trips. EVs are still in-town only cars for us because of the lack of charging infrastructure near some of the places we like to go.

I'd love it if Toyota would come out with a long-range (>500 miles) EV for a reasonable cost (<$35,000) with fast charging (350kW). Combined with slightly improved charging infrastructure, we could move to EVs. But I'm not optimistic that will happen any time soon.

 

The phev will almost certainly be the Lexus version of the Rav4 Prime, a version of the next gen NX coming out in the fall.

I'm more curious what the EV models will be.

 

Are they limited, or is the charging station limited?

 

Well, the Leaf has Chademo, so that's the limit there, but the Bolt has CCS which supports up to 350kW but the car limits it to something like 55kW.

 

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Outside of tesla, vw group, and chinese bev makers - hyundai seems to be pushing the farthest into fast charging bevs.

They are claiming their new bev will be able to add 60 miles in 5 minutes on a ccs 350 kw charger. Apple will use kia (part of the hyundai group) to build their bev.

If we look chinese - nio has battery swap and says they will be selling a swapable 170 kwh solid state battery in their next car next year. Chinese DC chargers are working on an upgrade for trucks and busses to 600 kw or 900 kw, but this is still in flux. Currently they can't charge as fast as tesla's v3 or ccs.

 

It will be interesting to see what they do. I'm not a potential customer because the Prius Prime fits my needs very well ** , and I already have one.

I'd really like to see a mid sized PHEV similar to the Camry to complement the Rav4-Prime and Prius Prime. As someone said, the Mirai should be easily transformed into a BEV by swapping out the fuel cell stack (and supporting equipment ) with batteries and charger equipment.

Even though most car manufacturers have an EV in the works, most are hardly mainstream. As I've said before, I live in a town that is considered a mecca of early adopters. In a 3 mile drive to the grocery store and back I see dozens of BEVs and even more PHEVs and hybrids.

But I don't see a lot of BMW EVs. Nor Jaguar, VW, Volvo, Porche or many of the other world leaders in the EV market. Leaf, Tesla, Bolt dominate the EV market here. In researching this post, I was surprised by two things. Worldwide in 2019, the Tesla Model 3 had 1/8 of world EV sales. That's cool. But I also saw that Chinese manufacturers made up a huge percentage. 1/8 of the EVs sold world wide were from China factories.

Dan
** Charged daily, my daily use virtually never exceeds the battery capacity. Once a month I drive a thousand miles or so, and the gas engine allows a day of driving without stop, regardless of traffic congestion, weather or terrain.

 

i have ruled out gm and toyota because of their behavior the last four years. nissan is out because of ghosn.
i'm running out of companies to buy from that do everything right, according to my world view.

 

Another problem with EVs is out-of-town charging cost. Electrify America charges $0.31/kWh. With gas at $2.80/gallon my Prime is around $0.20/kWh equivalent. So driving an EV out-of-town is around 50% more costly than driving my Prime on gasoline.

 

i hope you passed that sage advice along to your son

 

From Wall Street Journal For 2020, Tesla reported a profit of $721 million on about $31.5 billion in sales, supported by the increase in deliveries and higher revenue from regulatory credits. That compares with an $862 million loss and sales of $24.6 billion in 2019

I guess you can say that they are profitable even if a sizeable part of that profit comes from "regulatory credits". I believe that they would have not made a profit in any quarter were it not for sale of "cap and trade" credits and sales incentives in the form of tax breaks, rebates and flat out subsidies. I could be wrong there, but I don't think so.

Dan

 

Agreed! My BMW i3-REx benchmark for the 120 miles between Huntsville and Nashville:

• ~$24 for electric
• ~$6 for gas

A Tesla owner, it is desirable that SuperCharger rates be higher than residential rates to encourage home charging. Better still, remote location from larger urban areas to the electric commuting cost make SuperCharging less desirable than residential or L2 charging.

Bob Wilson

 

Yes - more than all of it.

You're right - they've lost money on every car they've ever made, despite them all being over-priced.

 

And which turned out to be wrong.

 

We *know* this is true of Tesla, since they said so in their reports. It's easy to figure out because they only sell EVs.