A petition to Toyota to build electric vehicles

Pretty much like the EV1

 

Maybe after the bar closes.

 

Depends if you are a leader/innovator or follower.

 

I like to think of myself as a follower of progressive leaders.

 

The World needs both, and perhaps there's a mix of these too?

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

IMHO the leaf is one ugly car. next to it the i3 looks good;-)
next to the model s or i8 it looks bad.

Many that own the leaf would disagree with me, and that is fine.

 

Absolutely!
And most of us are followers. If innovators don't have anyone following, they can't do much.
Early followers, or early adopters play a dual role. They aren't the leaders, but they do help show others the benefits of the new innovations.

As an early adopter, I have helped expand the introduction of EVs and to a lesser extend, I did similarly with hybrids (I wasn't as early jumping into that technology).

Very importantly though, it is the followers that decide the large scale impact of a technology.

 

So do we start a petition for a better class of car buyer too? Ones who like us would buy these cars.

Bob Wilson

 

government mandate, with tax benefits.

 

Forty years ago, the only car choices were heavy polluters. The vast majority of the population thought that was how it had to be.. There was a lot of coverage back in the 70s of how all this pollution control stuff would cripple cars and the car business. I've seen how that turned out. The EV is a market in transition. After the transition gets steam, then it will be ICE vehicles seen as dinosaurs.

 

the pollution equipment was pretty awful until computers came along. timely to say the least.

 

It was awful because it was intentionally designed to be awful. The American cars did not change their engine designs one bit to address pollution. Meanwhile the Japanese designed their engines to be low polluting. The Honda CVCC design was extremely clean burning without any pollution equipment. The Japanese also designed other engines to operate with higher backpressures from incorporating a catalytic converter. The American (dumb) approach was to smash some stuff on 20 year old designs with horrible results...and the hope that emission standards would go away once a public backlash occurred. What actually occurred was a whole lot of Japanese autos being purchased. The backlash was against crappy cars.

 

...I do not know though FL, it seems Detroit did get the message that it's better to stop being adversarial and cooperate with Congress on making cleaner cars. Not much complaint about the 52 MPG mandate, even though it may turn out to be a pipe dream. But Detroit is hard at working making aluminum F150's and stuff like that....you're giving ICE an opportunity for a Mark Twain moment: rumors of my death...

 

Let's make sure my comment is conveyed correctly since I'm trying to make two points. Point one was the american auto companies of 40 years ago took shortcuts in pollution controls that caused poor engine performance. It was not a lack of computers causing that problem.

Point 2 is the length of time necessary to bring new technology into full scale mass production takes decades. EVs are decades away from being serious competition to the mainstream ICE auto. But at the end of those decades, the EV advantages will be very significant over the ICE vehicles in many (not all) areas.

 

or maybe ev's will be a thing of the past and fcv's will be the dominant tech.

 

This coming from someone driving a plug-in? (Humor)

 

oh, i love electric driving, and of course, i have no idea what the future holds. i would try an fcv if the price was right, i could fuel up at home and it had a range extender to 600 miles like the pip.

 

what .... you don't like their typical i3 - hello kitty color schemes ?

.

 

Now that is funny. Of course that is the idea Alan Lloyd pushed in his dual role as chairman of CARB and director of the california fuel cell partnership seemed to be saying when he shut down ev advocates in the meetings more than a decade ago.

He even helped toyota put this study into evidence that no one wanted electric cars.
California may soften electric car mandate

Now its hard to think that people would need a check to take a leaf, or volt, or electric RAV4 EV, but there you have it, entered into evidence. Another link about the same study going to carb, but this time with more Toyota commentary.

CALIFORNIA STUDY SAYS MASS MARKET NOT READY FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES | News & Analysis content from WardsAuto

And you can see toyota's point. I doubt they would find 6.400 rav4 ev hand raisers a year, without making the car cost in the neighborhood of the gasoline one with those ovonics cells back in 2000. But this was followed by people really want fuel cells? No studies. Why not at least allow the questions to be asked to this expert that said people needed to be paid to take an electric vehicle. Then again since toyota paid for that study, you have to ask why they priced the 2013 rav4 ev at $50,000 if it wasn't to prove their 2000 point - "there is no demand". Unfortunately for toyota there is tesla, and they aren't part of the club, so trying to kill the electric car really isn't going to work out.

 

I think if Toyota took the Prius plugin, removed the ICE and put in more batteries, put the spare tire back in, put the charger port in the front and sold it for $35K - $40K after rebates, they would have a winner. The range would need to be at least 120 miles in winter, 150 in summer. A lot of the sales would be at the expense of the Nissan Leaf. Given the cost of the Leaf and the fact that much of the Prius-EV is the same as the regular Prius, this seems reasonable. Of course they could sell a fully loaded version for $5K - $10K more, taking some sales from Tesla, if they had enough high end features.

I think a lot of potential EV buyers think the Tesla is too much and the Leaf (and others) are too limiting.

Not doing this gives Tesla a few years to build out its offerings (more downscale) and lower costs. In 10 years Toyota may regret not doing this now.

Mike