Featured Not alone in feeling that Toyota is missing the EV-boat (article)

The latest ev rebate proposal is direct cost reduction, not tax credit. But they already sell all they make without rebates today. The whole debate on ev vs ice is history. Of course most families in the near future will have one ice derivative and an ev. EV has won the battle and Elon is the General. Toyota will follow.

 

Yes a full rebate is more equitable, however people with lesser incomes generally cannot afford new cars. I would prefer to see Government subsidies got to reducing CO2 and the lowest possible CO2 $/tonne cost .. and that is probably not EV's.

 

Don't make the same mistake as others by assuming the war is being fought on just one front. You'll discover that a single approach is how to achieve victories in battle but is not how the war is won. It's like fighting with just one weapon. Odds are pretty good that isn't enough. Markets vary. Objectives vary. Audience varies. Toyota is positioning to address what Tesla hasn't been able to.

 

i don't even know what it is

 

It's the replacement for your PIP and Dakota in one package .

 

after a full year of driving the dakota every day back in 2008, i realized i'm not a truck guy. it has it's utilitarian value, but i prefer the prius size

 

Only three Model S fires were mentioned in a recent Forbes article.

Latest news was that it was still a tax credit, albeit a refundable one.

Latest proposal did include a $2500 credit for used EVs.

Are the solar subsidies still in effect?

 

Yes still in Australia.

 

I didn't consider a Volt because the back seat only had leg room for a double-amputee.

I'm not sure I agree with that. A battery *pack* should not catch on fire simply because one cell does. It's very difficult to make cells 100% perfectly so the pack has to be designed to accept a single-cell failure without destroying the entire car.

What's not entirely clear to me is if LG designed and manufactured just the cells or if they designed and manufactured the pack as well.

Which is irrelevant. You don't design for the average drive of the average driver, you design for the furthest extreme drive of the population to which you wish to sell. If my car was designed only for the average, it would have a range of about 4 miles and would only work when it's 63 degrees. But last month, I drove a 450 mile leg, in high winds, with 95 degree temperature and the sun out, so it's a good thing they don't design for the average.

 

I was heartened by Toyota's decision to secure some battery capacity. It looks like next year they will still be battery constrained, but it should ease by 2025.

I would not say Toyota missed the boat, but they spent a lot of time and PAC and advertising money trying to deny there was even a viable boat. It takes about 3 years to build battery capacity, and it looks like they just started at the end of last year. With the rav4 ev experience with tesla they could have easily had a viable bz4x with battery capacity by 2018 instead of 2022. But that is only 4 years for the car and longer for volume. Of course if its a hit they won't have enough battery capacity until 2023 or 2024 to do decent volume. It is a slow roll to put out bevs in more vehicles. The rav4 prime is constrained by battery capacity, maybe that will look better next year as it takes a smaller battery. I have hopes that the Toyota partnership with CATL can fire up some liquid conditioned lithium iron phosphate phevs using knowlege from the primes and the less expensive chemistry. Already about half of prius's sold are primes, and with the corolla and camry hybrids a ground up phev hatchback or sedan makes a lot of sense. Maybe toyota will have one in 5 years when they have more battery capacity. I can't even order a rav4 prime for my gf in austin. I thought that was strange, but they don't seem to even want to sell them here. I hope that will change as they build battery volume.

 

Cars that caught fire are running under 0.01% of those sold.

Reports are that LG essentially designed the entire drive train. LG Bolt was an early joke.

 

There isn't.

There isn't anywhere close to enough materials or manufacturing capacity on the planet to make enough batteries even for just Toyota to be all BEV, much less all the other manufacturers, and the gap is something like 5000% (50x).

 

Lee jay that definitely is a made up statistic. Why would anyone believe that? Who did you get that bad information from. And why make it sound like I was even suggesting they would go 100% bev. I even put in the rav4 prime in my description. Is that a BEV? Toyota only has battery capacity for 80,000 bevs next year. That is just poor planning, but they are correcting it.

Toyota has said they will have capacity in 2030 for 3 million bevs. They can easily do that. Tesla will have capacity to produce 1 million next year, and 2 million in 2024. Tesla is going for a mix of low cobalt and cobalt free batteries to reduce cost.

 

The planet produces 80m cars a year. BEVs were about 2M of those and the supply is battery-constrained. Since the average BEV is smaller than the average car, I upped the difference from 40x (80m / 2m) to 50x to compensate.

 

The constraint isn't in raw materials, but in the conversion of said materials into batteries.

Could the steel industry supply production of 80 million cars a year when the Model T first rolled off the production line?

 

That is precisely why Toyota is striving to do more with less. A battery able to be used harder and more often by a system that is more efficient is better than just adding more capacity.

It's really unfortunate how some disagree, choosing the brute-force method instead and portraying it as the only means to achieve change.

 

That's only true for some of the components. Nickel and cobalt are constrained.

Probably could, yes.

 

Yeah, it takes about 3 years to increase capacity. There is enough lithium on the planet for 10 Billion cars. Of course the some of that will be expensive to get but say 80 million bevs a year with recycling its not even a constraint if companies take until 2040 to ramp up production to that level. Cobalt is to scarce to produce that many but new chemistries use less of it or none at all. Please don't use the bad assumption of we only make this much because this is that is the limit. I know Toyota was in 2019 pretending they couldn't make many batteries but even they have changed.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02222-1

Just giga berlin should give tesla battery capacity for another 2 million bevs. Many of them will be cobalt and nickel free.

 

That link doesn't actually support your claim. In fact, it did the opposite. The content about recycling reinforces why Toyota taking the time to do right is the better approach.

 

Lithium isn't the constraint, as I said Nickel and Cobalt are.

And the batteries are not even as good as NMC batteries are, and those are terrible.

Please don't use the bad assumption that, because it's on the planet, that we can get to it or that it can all be used for batteries.

If we had good batteries, we could do this. But we don't have good batteries. If we used batteries smartly, we could do this. But BEVs use batteries in a really dumb fashion.

And even lousier than NMC batteries in the energy-density area. But, at least we could make enough and maybe they'll be okay if we can get fast chargers at every city and town like there are gas stations now.