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Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?

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BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET



Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is nowhere close to ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.

The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second.

GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book.

That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch.

Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.


https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-p...ifying-all-autos-is-anyone-listening-n1433674
 
The folks in charge don’t care about facts. They make up their own to suit their $$$

Example: using North American oil is bad for pollution, but if we buy it from half way across the world and transport it across the ocean it’s all so much better. LOL

We just had a 4 year run of making North American energy independent and it worked darn nice, so let’s trash all of those ideas.
 
Unless GM can leap frog Tesla the all electric business model will put them into government ownership (they won't go out of business, just government owned and operated).
Simply making a electric fleet is not going to save GM, unless the fleet is market superior to Tesla. Now we all know that the government will support GM and keep it from catastrophic failure, but for how long until it's given away to a European company like Obama did with Chrysler will be the interesting scenario.
 
Euros won’t want GM as much as China.. China has been wanting GM for years..
 
I’m not into solar panels and electric cars. Locomotives and trolleys are in a different ball game. I think we are barking up the wrong tree while helping China again. Boycott China!
 
This is FAR to complex of a topic to just point fingers on faults, trends and futures? Toyota making predictions on future US power grid capabilities? Please. We dont even know. Nobody does. It's why both sides of the isle agree we need infrastructure planning and building for the future. Including electric grid upgrades. And that's without a major shift in energy demand. Let's start there? It's required. No matter how fast new electric vehicle technologies advance?

Toyota cares about Toyota. And they will push any topic and/or discussions that best servers their company's needs.
 
Unless GM can leap frog Tesla the all electric business model will put them into government ownership (they won't go out of business, just government owned and operated).
Simply making a electric fleet is not going to save GM, unless the fleet is market superior to Tesla. Now we all know that the government will support GM and keep it from catastrophic failure, but for how long until it's given away to a European company like Obama did with Chrysler will be the interesting scenario.

GM Sold 11 Units Of The Chevy Volt In Q2 2021

These cars have been sitting in dealer's lots for 2 years which shows how undesirable the Chevy Volt is/was.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2021/07/gm-sold-11-units-of-the-chevy-volt-in-q2-2021/
 
GM Sold 11 Units Of The Chevy Volt In Q2 2021

These cars have been sitting in dealer's lots for 2 years which shows how undesirable the Chevy Volt is/was.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2021/07/gm-sold-11-units-of-the-chevy-volt-in-q2-2021/
That was/is a crappy car. Chevy has made plenty of stinkers in their tenure. They are ok for quick city commutes? We have a couple of them that do get used. But nothing to any real distance. I never checked one out. But thats because I have had bad luck with all company loaners. Last time I checked out a car for a 150 mi trip they gave me a flaming purple Dodge Neon. I don't mean Viking purple. I mean light violet neon purple.

I'm typically not homophobe, but even a gay dude would say. "DAMN" It was a funny topic of discussion once arrived. (Which by the way was in more rural part of Minnesota.) I honestly considered playing hooky because of a car's color and look. Lol.
 
Let's make gas with co2 like that video shows of that plant I think in Canada already doing it! Way smarter idea!
 
I totally believe that sometime in the future, ALL vehicles (including big rigs & construction equipment) and appliances will be 100% electric. However, we can debate just how far into the future that will happen. With that said, I agree with the Toyota article.

To facilitate (what I consider to be) the inevitable, actions must be taken to either increase power supply, and/or the efficiency of the load. Whereas I am not involved with increasing the supply, I work diligently to improve the efficiency of the load. I know this will be perceived as "conspiracy theory", but consider: Nikola Tesla had a Pierce Arrow he converted to electric -- and he NEVER charged the batteries! Search Edwin V. Grey (aka EV Grey). Just for kicks, look up John Bedini's SG. Now before you scream Conspiracy, I have been working with some of Bedini's stuff and can say what I have played with actually works.

Getting back on topic, if a car currently goes 300 miles on a charge, and technology can double that -- same batteries, same charging infrastructure -- electric cars just became more plausible (again, look up John Bedini and his School Girl Project (Bedini SG)).

Electric motors are inherently inefficient. Much energy is wasted on Back EMF. If I'm working on viable solutions, I guarantee Toyota and others are as well. Although I am not contributing to reducing charge times, I KNOW range can be increased cost effectively. When my stuff (and gobs of other folks' stuff) makes it to market, the gradual transition will become more and more viable.

I don't suggest by any means go out and buy what you consider to be sub-standard electric junk. Just don't discount its bright future.
 
Let's make gas with co2 like that video shows of that plant I think in Canada already doing it! Way smarter idea!
Just for the non-chemists out there, whenever any hydrocarbon (HC) fuel is combusted, the result is CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2O (water). When you look at the hierarchy of chemical reactions, CO2 is the lowest energy level any HC can reach. What some entities are doing is using solar power (or some other "free" source) to extract the carbon from CO2 and combine it with hydrogen (usually derived from splitting water in an electrolytic process) to produce an HC fuel (Methane -- aka CH4 -- is popular as it is the easiest conversion). Unless the electrical energy supply is "free" like solar, this process is up-side-down. It takes more energy to revert CO2 to HC than you get when you burn HC with O2 and produce some form of power (check out Faraday's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). I've followed that path long enough to look the other way.
 
GM Sold 11 Units Of The Chevy Volt In Q2 2021

These cars have been sitting in dealer's lots for 2 years which shows how undesirable the Chevy Volt is/was.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2021/07/gm-sold-11-units-of-the-chevy-volt-in-q2-2021/
There are two year old Dodges on dealer lots too...in 2020 Dodge sold four new Vipers even though they hadn't been built since 2017. Also three new Jeep Patriots that went out of production in 2016. I'm sure every car maker can point to an example. If by 'undesirable' you mean popular, the Volt was the best selling plug in electric car in the States for most of the years between 2010-2019. The Volt went out of production in 2019 and the Tesla took over as most popular that year.

Driving.ca quite liked the 2016 model, and got 676 miles of range out of it before the gas (33 litre or under 9 gallon tank) and battery life was used up.
 
Last edited:
BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET

Toyota may be building here, but ultimately,
where do the millions in profit end up?
Some union guy in the US, at least in the
meantime, can afford to feed his family.

Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is nowhere close to ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.

The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second.

GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book.

That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch.

Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.


https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-p...ifying-all-autos-is-anyone-listening-n1433674
 
Many a American city is dead. Indiana, Ohio,
Michigan. Thousands of jobs lost from
manufacturers such as Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge,
AMC. All due to corporate greed and the ability
to compete in a cut throat business. America's
greatness has been diminished for the love of
a dollar. I don't care what anyone argues.
America lead the way, but sadly handed over
the baton.
 
If you think about it, America has lead the innovation process for 2 centuries (or more). Things like cars, electronics, and other things were invented here in the US, and initially manufactured here. But bit by bit manufacturing slipped to other countries. In the past, that wasn't even noticed as the American genius was pumping out more new jobs for new innovations than were bleeding off over-seas. What changed?

[Note: this will probably be construed as a Political Post]

Many companies took their manufacturing to countries with less governmental regulations. The costs for OSHA compliance in some cases becomes prohibitive (in some cases a good thing, but in some cases quite excessive). Some moves were triggered by sudden tax spikes. Sometimes it was motivated by Union Labor disputes. Other countries don't necessarily honor Labor Unions.

If America invented 70+% of everything we consider modern, WHAT HAPPENED??

Why are we now lamenting over jobs lost to foreign entities??

What happened to the entrepreneurial genius of yore??

Why aren't new jobs replacing the ones being shipped overseas as it was for well over a century??

Bill Gates said that he couldn't possibly re-create Microsoft today because of the over-bearing governmental regulations. Although I'm not a fan of Gates, I must agree with him there. I think that spells out most of it in that simple sentence.
 
The folks in charge don’t care about facts. They make up their own to suit their $$$

Example: using North American oil is bad for pollution, but if we buy it from half way across the world and transport it across the ocean it’s all so much better. LOL

We just had a 4 year run of making North American energy independent and it worked darn nice, so let’s trash all of those ideas.
I’m of the mind that using up easy to get foreign oil first is preferable to using up all our own first. Not a big fan of placing my balls in the hands of the Russians or Saudis. We need to produce, I just wouldn’t get all pumped up that we are independent.
 
"GM may be virtue signaling..."
"May be", my *** - that's exactly what they're doing, joining the chorus of anyone else who
wants to appease the kumbaya crowd (especially with who is in power in DC these days).
There honestly are those among us (and God help us, a lot of them are in positions
of power these days) that think all they have to do is say something often or loud
enough (and/or pass laws trying to force issues) and wala! - it comes true.

The article does a good job of outlining all the logistics of what any major shift to electrics
would cause, but it doesn't really get into the other end of the issue, either - namely, the
environmental impact of what all that battery production causes - not to mention what
happens at the other end, as millions of used up batteries will have to be dealt with, along
with the cars themselves.

I have no doubt that one day the production of the internal combustion engine will be history.
That day comes when technological advances make it possible, practical, cost-sustaining to do -
not when enough virtue-signaling has been accomplished.
 
I’m of the mind that using up easy to get foreign oil first is preferable to using up all our own first. Not a big fan of placing my balls in the hands of the Russians or Saudis. We need to produce, I just wouldn’t get all pumped up that we are independent.
Your balls have been making them rich for 70 years! WHY? This is just stupid. Look at how rich the saudis are for us stupid Americans buying their oil. And 2 gas crunches we had to struggle through for nothing! Early 1973 and 1979.

And as I drive by the gas station everyday it’s now $3.59, it was $2.20 at the lowest 9 months ago. $1.39 more a gallon every household pays in this state.
Did you forget the $4.50 a gallon 10 years ago? I haven’t.

The electric cars will come around as technology figures it out and advances, just not by 2030.
 
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I find it hard to believe politicians don't know this so why? Why are they knowingly pushing us towards something that isn't yet feasible? There's more to this than the environment.
 
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