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

[Beetlegeuse]

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

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.

Obama Motors (AKA 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 not yet 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 alternative 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.

Bryan Preston served as chief of staff at the Texas Railroad Commissioner. The Texas Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production in the Lone Star State, which is the nation’s top energy-producing state. He is the author of Hubble’s Revelations: The Amazing Time Machine and Its Most Important Discoveries. He’s a veteran and a Texan.


Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don’t Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

[Hughinn]

The thing is, nobody is against green energy. Virtually everyone supports green energy.

The problem is, we have a faction of people who are unrealistic about it's current capabilities. And have very unreasonable demands in it's applications and capabilities.
And somehow these people get elected.

It's difficult to understand how some of the dumbest people in our nation, have lucrative salaries and work in Washington DC.

I mean, if you want to hear some really stupid people talk, turn on c span for an afternoon. I assure you, you'll be confounded.

[Beetlegeuse]

One analysis I read claimed that if just half of the cars in America were battery-only EVs we'd need an additional 100 nuclear power plants to provide the power just for those EVs.

A hundred. And they take decades to build, after the money is appropriated and the land bought.

Except the Watermelons (green on the outside and red on the inside) are opposed to nukes (more nukes, less kooks!).

Plus we don't have an electric grid to carry the additional current. If you tried it on the current grids, the brownouts and rolling blackouts would make Mexifornia look competently managed. Figure two decades of "modernization," so it might be ready by 2040, if we'd begun last year.

And right now the US only has about two-thirds as many commercial charging stations as there are cities, which makes charging when you're away from home problematic. And if you live in one of America's 20,000+ small towns and villages, you're just going to have to get used to driving to the Big City every time your charge-o-meter shows half endurance remaining. Either that or wait 12 hours to recharge while it's plugged into your household current.

And if it's February and you live in Buffalo, NY or Minot, ND, a full charge will get you maybe 50 miles (provided you don't turn on your heater or get stuck in a traffic ... or a snow drift).

And there's nothing "green" about EVs. They have far more exotic and rare earth metals than ICE automobiles, which means more HazMat to dispose of when the battery shits the bed or the car claps out. And the batteries themselves take YUGE amounts of fossil fuels to make because the raw materials they're made from has to travel tens of thousands of miles to get from the mine to the refinery, then to the processing plant and then to the battery manufacturer. And from there is still will have to be shipped several thousand more miles (on average) because there are (at least) 48 auto manufacturers in the world, and they're spread out all over the planet.

And how much the operation of a battery-only EV pollutes is directly related to how much pollution was created in generating the electricity it runs on. 61% of America's electricity still comes from fossil fuels, generated in plants that burn fuel to boil water to run steam turbines. Which means your battery-only EV is 61% steam powered by way of fossil fuels.

The whole "green" industry is a giant assemblage of interconnected lies.

[wango]

You have little argument from me on this regarding going all electric on all vehicles. And on top of that, rushing the process.

Hell yeah we don’t have the infrastructure, that’s a given. And definitely agree regarding electricity used for the cars is generated using fossil fuels.

I’m thinking more electric car owners are or should be considering going the solar panel route. The folks that I know around here have done so, it’s a given, but of course we have an abundance of sunshine daily. Right there that helps considerably. I also checked the average daily driving mileage and if I didn’t see the wrong data, it was around 30 miles per day on average. That should also be taken into account if the car owners have solar. Hell maybe add an infrastructure tax on the electricity purchased outside of your own home if you don’t have solar.

Are you personally against solar panels for the home?

Then there are cars like the Chevy Volt. That should solve the issue with the need for having so many recharging stations built as a prerequisite for going exclusively electric. You run out of battery power, you use what’s in the tank and then recharge at home.

So those are two very plausible and fairly easy to achieve options that really eliminates the need for immediately overhauling the infrastructure.

Once again though, a topic that should be discussed and planned for more carefully is being made a red vs. blue issue when it doesn’t need to be.

[Test Monsterone]

We find ways for change. In 1900 some guy said the same thing... we don’t have the infrastructure for personal vehicles. Now we do. Sometimes demand drives change.

Just how it took 5-10 years to develop a vaccine before covid hit. As humans we find ways. Electric is the future, and the faster it gets here, the better.

[Hughinn]

We find ways for change. In 1900 some guy said the same thing... we don’t have the infrastructure for personal vehicles. Now we do. Sometimes demand drives change.

Just how it took 5-10 years to develop a vaccine before covid hit. As humans we find ways. Electric is the future, and the faster it gets here, the better.

I agree with you that electric cars very well may be the future.

But electricity has to be able to be produced more economically before electric vehicles replaces fossil fuel.

Nobody disagrees with green energy or the idea of electric cars. The problem is that right now, green energy is unreliable and electric cars not practical.

We can't put the cart before the horse. But we also should keep working on development of better energy production.

Of course that'll be difficult to do since Joe biden now has America depending on foreign energy. And thusly foreign energy producers instead of american are now making the profit. We cannot rely on them to invest in development of other technology.

[Beetlegeuse]

I forgot to add that you wouldn't have solar panels or windmills without fossil fuels.

The process for refining sand into silicon for solar panels starts with heating sand to its melting point, which is near as makes no difference 3000°F. The cheapest and most common fuel source for generating so much heat is fossil fuels. Under ideal conditions it takes two years for a solar cell to produce as much energy as was spent on creating it. And the source of that energy usually is coal.

And you can't make steel without coal. The difference between iron and steel is carbon content. And in modern steel production, the carbon they add is in the form of coke. And coke is made by baking coal (to at least 1800°F).

Even ignoring the fact that you can't run a stable power grid entirely using sources with an output as variable as solar and wind, you wouldn't have solar or wind power without fossil fuels.


Considering the rate that our population is increasing, considering how many more electronic gizmos we bring into our homes with each passing year, there's not a snowflake's chance in hell that "renewables" can keep pace. If we blindly keep heading down this "renewables" path, we will reach a point of no return when there will be no option but to cut back drastically on electricity consumption and go back to living a 19th Century lifestyle.

Nuclear is the only option technologically available that will support all of our forecast increase in energy production without also demanding we curtail individual consumption. Green energy is a sideshow that does nothing to make our energy future more secure but continues to suck resources from a fixed pool that would be better applied to improving our nuclear future and investing in fusion research.

[wango]

I forgot to add that you wouldn't have solar panels or windmills without fossil fuels.

The process for refining sand into silicon for solar panels starts with heating sand to its melting point, which is near as makes no difference 3000°F. The cheapest and most common fuel source for generating so much heat is fossil fuels. Under ideal conditions it takes two years for a solar cell to produce as much energy as was spent on creating it. And the source of that energy usually is coal.

And you can't make steel without coal. The difference between iron and steel is carbon content. And in modern steel production, the carbon they add is in the form of coke. And coke is made by baking coal (to at least 1800°F).

Even ignoring the fact that you can't run a stable power grid entirely using sources with an output as variable as solar and wind, you wouldn't have solar or wind power without fossil fuels.


Considering the rate that our population is increasing, considering how many more electronic gizmos we bring into our homes with each passing year, there's not a snowflake's chance in hell that "renewables" can keep pace. If we blindly keep heading down this "renewables" path, we will reach a point of no return when there will be no option but to cut back drastically on electricity consumption and go back to living a 19th Century lifestyle.

Nuclear is the only option technologically available that will support all of our forecast increase in energy production without also demanding we curtail individual consumption. Green energy is a sideshow that does nothing to make our energy future more secure but continues to suck resources from a fixed pool that would be better applied to improving our nuclear future and investing in fusion research.

Appreciate your insight.

So after 2 years you are saving more energy that it took to make it, sounds like a good formula for saving energy in the long run.

So I can’t supply my house with enough electricity with enough solar panels? The estimates that we received indicated to us that we’ll end up with too much electricity for our needs if we use too much of our roof (1300 sq. ft. home). After the 2 years have passed and my fossil fuel usage is drastically eliminated, how is this not a step in the right direction? And my neighbors and theirs and theirs, etc.

And what if we make our panels in the US, instead of once again having to rely on China? That’s not jobs created for American workers? Explain why this can’t be done.

I hear your argument and have agreed, going totally green may not be feasible now, but why throw away the chance for improvement before the industry and technology has really had an opportunity to develop.

[Test Monsterone]

I’m not sure the answer to our dependence on fossil fuels is to become more dependent on fossil fuels?

We do need to reduce our consumption of plastics, especially. I am not opposed to universal containers for foods, beverage, and other common household items. In some countries people return the beer bottle crates with the empty beer bottles to the beer store and get money back. The same concept could be used for anything.

Do we need a hundred types of bottles? If we had a smaller number of universal container types/standards, when we recycle, close to 100% of our containers could be reused or repurposed. The only difference between container types would be the labels.

For our homes, solar panels and other renewable sources of energy would be plenty. Remember that electronics become more and more efficient in regards to power consumption and materials required. Things become smaller, lighter, and better. Think of the materials required to produce a 50 lb computer from 1995 vs a 2.5 magnesium alloy laptop today. The laptop is 20 times lighter and 1000 times faster.
The same concept can be used for other technologies in the household.

In displays like TVs and phones, OLED screens light up only the tiny light emitting diodes, whereas LED/LCD panels require the entire panel to be backlit, even the black pixels. Think of how much a 65” rear projection TV consumed and how much material went into its construction vs a thin panel OLED tv.

Even if we keep using fossil fuels in industry/manufacturing, if we can make our homes run clean energy from solar panels (etc.), it would have an incredibly positive impact on our environment and cost of living.

[Fluidic Kimbo]

I want to get wood from the hardware store (a few pieces of 8 foot of 2x4) to make the frame for a Flinstones car. For the four wheels I think I'll get wheel hubs from my local scrap yard, then just make benches/seats from wood. For the steering I was looking at guides on YouTube for making gokarts. So then 6-8 people could sit into the car and push it along with their feet on the ground while singing gospel music.

[Honkey_Kong]

Nuclear is the only option technologically available that will support all of our forecast increase in energy production without also demanding we curtail individual consumption. Green energy is a sideshow that does nothing to make our energy future more secure but continues to suck resources from a fixed pool that would be better applied to improving our nuclear future and investing in fusion research.

Nuclear energy is the green answer people need. We haven't had a new reactor built since the 70's. The fact is nuclear power plants have come a long way since then in efficiency and safety. It's the only practical solution to our power demands. In addition, we need a real multi-trillion dollar investment in updating our power grids so that they can handle those power demands without starting fires every time there is a little wind.

[Mooseman33]

We find ways for change. In 1900 some guy said the same thing... we don’t have the infrastructure for personal vehicles. Now we do. Sometimes demand drives change.

Just how it took 5-10 years to develop a vaccine before covid hit. As humans we find ways. Electric is the future, and the faster it gets here, the better.

trump delivered the vaccine in record time.
trump found a way.

just fucking with you, sometimes I have to be a dick.

[almostgone]

Nuclear energy is the green answer people need. We haven't had a new reactor built since the 70's. The fact is nuclear power plants have come a long way since then in efficiency and safety. It's the only practical solution to our power demands. In addition, we need a real multi-trillion dollar investment in updating our power grids so that they can handle those power demands without starting fires every time there is a little wind.

....a little hardening against EMPs would be a good addition to the power grid investment. The technology and cost seems sustainable and to me, it's well worth the effort.

https://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/i...20power%20grid.

[Honkey_Kong]

....a little hardening against EMPs would be a good addition to the power grid investment. The technology and cost seems sustainable and to me, it's well worth the effort.

https://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/i...20power%20grid.

That would be great. What we need is to invest in a grid system that is state of the art, that we project will meet our needs and safety for the next 100 years but still will be designed so it can be upgraded if our forecasts don't meet reality. The costs are going to be astronomical but that's why it needs to be built to last. If we build it now and maintain it, it'll be good for generations and will likely save money in the long run.

[Cuz]

I know this thread is like two years old, but let's dive into Toyota's perspective on electrifying all autos. With Toyota's vast experience and understanding of the car market, their opinion holds weight. They believe that the world isn't quite ready for a fully electric auto fleet. It's crucial to consider the practical aspects of supporting and powering hundreds of millions of electric cars. The need for a larger energy capacity and more strategically-placed charge stations is evident. We have a long way to go before a complete shift to electric vehicles becomes feasible. By the way, if you're interested in cars, you might want to check out https://www.jdmbuysell.com/buying-guide/nissan-silvia/. They have a helpful buying guide for Nissan Silvia that car enthusiasts might enjoy.

You took the time to register on a steroid forum to try and fucking sell cars. You car salesman are like snakes. Just slither on little fella this aint the place

[almostgone]

Thanks, Cuz. Appreciate you pointing that out, man!