Toyota and Lexus Still Hating on Plug-Ins and EVs

PHEV owner since '12; Volt and now a CMax Energi. I've plugged into public charging a grand total of once. I went out of my way to do it; mainly for the novelty and to support the cause (this is TRUCK country). It was free but it cost me lunch for me and my daughter at that location. There's really no need to seek out public charging in a PHEV only a want so as to continue driving in EV mode. It takes me less than :04 secs to plug in at home in my garage to top off my battery.

Using 240v charging at home allows me to cover most of daily driving (30-50 miles) on 100% EV. I buy gas about every 4-5 months that is mainly consumed on out of town trips. Even though I still had 1/4 of a tank, I took the opportunity to fill up back in early March when prices dipped again locally. I've used 3/100's of a gallon since then due to flooring it to beat a yellow light. I don't know what disappointed me more: my poor (illegal) driving decision, my drop out of the top 10 rankings on the Ford app, or the totally unnecessary gas usage.

Yes it's very satisfying. The acronym NPNS (No Plug, No Sale) has become my mantra.

I see BEV's, PHEV's, and FCV all succeeding.

 

Maybe. The fuel cells themselves are getting more affordable, but the refueling possibilities are still up in the air with new ways just around the corner. Which might solve many of the issues with hydrogen. Japan and Europe are starting to switch to pressures over 70MPa, so rushing into private FCV.s could be more expensive to do now, if we then have to upgrade all the stations later.

 

personal account; At 4yrs & 50k plugin miles (avg 4X/wk plugging in, @ home 85% L2, @ work 12% L2, somewhere else, 3% QC or L2) NO maintenance costs to date, but tires & wiper blades. Average 40 miles round trip. Longest trip was a 210 mile round trip, 6,000' in elevation changes. <3% of charging done with QC. But two of our 15 minute QC's, were on that longer range trip. Typically we take the hybrid once the round trip is over 80 miles ... unless that destination has a charge spot. Example; parents have 240v garage machinery. We carry plug adapters for our portable 120v-240v evse. The seats are in no way great as you know. Seldom are they, in mid priced cars ... but .... just like plugging in ... we 'deal w/it' - and find the trade off's to be worth it. YMMV.
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US generates mammoth amounts of electric power from nuclear fusion and you discuss how bad is oil production? How unfortunate!
And by the way, you are alienating my wording. I was talking about the electric power a gasoline car draws from the public electric power distribution system to go 300 miles, compared to an EV.

Have seen the forecasts of oil production for the next 20 years. It is a completely different picture from what you describe.
In my previous post i used the phrase production diversification, too. Even if forecasts fail and oil refineries fail to sell the unsold US gasoline on markets abroad globally then they will allocate resources used once to produce gasoline, across a wide range of their product portfolio in order to stabilize oil production and minimize profit loss, because it's their job to do. Only a foolish would believe that oil production will be decreased, because of selling EV cars.

I don't understand you case. Above, you believe that EV sales will decrease oil production and you make fun of toyota! But now here you admit that Ev sales will be pathetic by the next 20 years. If you don't believe the EV game changing technology, then I am wrong and there is no reason to argue.

This is a convenience problem only for the owner of an EV, that shows how impractical is the EV car.

In a medium-scale in terms of public acceptance scenario:
Public rapid chargers would need some huge batteries with tens of Gigawh capacity to store enough energy for a respected number of EV's. Nobody would want to be near such fierce and hazardous for public health electromagnetic fields. But you could have 2 x 100 kwh completely inefficient batteries at home to service 24h a day, 365 days a year.
Now the ugly math
(2 batteries x 100 kwh) x 30 million EV's on daily basis x 365 days = over 2 Petawh without even counting the energy loss from the mamoth batteries and the network loss from the increased electric power consumption. Anyway, good luck producing all this power from the sun.

COMPARE the above to
120 million houses in US x 11 Mwh Average annual electric consumption for each one = over 1 Petawh annual stress from homes

Currently there is no hydrogen car market and you cannot purchase a hydrogen car in US. You can only rent one for a short period. These are just experimental vehicles, like those were running at 90's. Today, hydrogen targets only industrial market. It is used in food, electronics, metal processing. But soon it is going to enter car market as a fuel. When this happens, hydrogen will get a completely new route.

 

kilowatts. Not kilowatt hours.
If you're doing the simple math you have to use units properly.

 

I still can't quite wrap my head around your reasoning here. Yes I agreed that oil production uses very little grid electricity, really much less than you estimated. But you are saying the US should keep Using oil for over 99% of its transportation needs, because

A) Nuclear power is bad and wore than burning oil
B) Coal power is bad and worse than burning oil.

Well that is fine. we just have a difference of opinion there when it comes to coal versus oil ... but

The US is not building any more coal or nuclear power plants to serve plug-in vehicles. The new power being added to the grid as coal and indeed nuclear plants are retired is mainly ccgt natural gas, wind, and solar.

In Japan they are increasing coal as the nuclear plants have been shut down. They claim hydrogen there will come from renewable electricity added to the grid, but...plug-ins are much more efficient when using that same amount of electricity.

The reason refineries make money is on fuels - gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel. They produce a lot of other products especially coke, but these would not be profitable on their own without fuels even at $50/bbl oil. The prius uses bioplastics on the dash. Drop fuel use and these other products will come from natural gas or bio productions. East coast refineries may not be long for this world and some have already shut down. California refineries have high costs of production and don't even export much fuel. That leaves the gulf coast, which mainly export diesel to europe and a little gasoline in central and south america. If US demand declines they will export fuel as long as their costs are lower. Regulation makes European refineries more expensive.

Those idiots at Deutsche Bank and McKinsey Consulting are the ones that think world wide oil demand will drop if the Americans and the Chinese put a lot of plug-in cars in the fleet. Am I foolish for listening? I was able to realize a nice capital gain on my oil stocks before oil prices dropped;-) The chinese are also pressing methanol which comes from natural gas or biogas, not oil. The US is the largest producer of natural gas, and may soon be a net exporter. At the same time the US is one of the biggest importers of oil,even after you subtract out the petroleum products exported.

 

Just a few thoughts arose via the above;
1) You keep mentioning HUGE amounts to run plugin's .... are you assuming they all need to be charging at night simultaneously? Maybe I just misunderstood that to be the case . . . . because many of the Tesla charge sites (with more coming daily) minimize charging stress on the grid, via PV canopies, like this 3 section jobbie that can put out >140kW's;



Yes, I know the hand wringers will say, "it's not enough because eventually there will be more than 2 cars charging at a time!" This isn't "out of the box" thinking ... you just put more panels up, thus;



And that doesn't have to cover everything, all the time. That's where possibly of the grid & battery & PV can work in tandem. None of the 3 have to supplant the other. Yes, the hand wringers will also fret, "what about night charging?!". That's ok too. Grid demand goes down while most folks are at home sleeping.
2) You keep focusing on the super minority high mileage drivers, then claim it'd need massive batteries and massive chargers . . . the <.01% daily drivers going 300 mile - 400 mile round trips ... as though many will start doing that. Why? .... majority of phev & ICE folks aren't doing that ... and the oil industry isn't thinking it has to rev up fuel production as though that minority will become the majority -


so - even when that day far in the future, when ev's are a whopping 10% of the daytime commuting public - it's still a non issue

3) again, I might be failing to understand ... the colorfull letters seem to say the U.S. "will" control the oil market. Are you thinking the U.S. "control" will go on for ever? or for how long. Maybe a link?
oh .... and a request; I'd sure find it a whole lot less distracting, and a lot easier to read the post, if it wasn't done in rainbow colors. It's more distracting than folk who are quickly encouraged to not type in all caps.
thanks!
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We do?? Did one of the Apollo missions grab a chunk of the sun on the way back?

 

sounds like a fission expedition.

 

Thanks for the cool pics Hill !!

I would like to test drive some EV's just to get a feel for them. I think the solar panels and plugin cars thing is a great idea. It's going to be a while before I change cars, me and this Prius have a lot more to do, but I'll keep my eye on alternative vehicles.

And by the way, it does stink that Toyota (and Honda) are not making a go of EVs

 

I know folks have had fun with this post as poor technique made it difficult to read:

Now there are a lot of reworked press releases that often have more promise than delivery but this one caught my eye: Solar power will soon be as cheap as coal &#8211; Quartz

In Jan. 2015, Saudi Arabian company ACWA Power surprised industry analysts when it won a bid to build a 200-megawatt solar power plant in Dubai that will be able to produce electricity for 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. The price was less than the cost of electricity from natural gas or coal power plants, a first for a solar installation. Electricity from new natural gas and coal plants would cost an estimated 6.4 cents and 9.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, respectively, according to the US Energy Information Agency.​

I enjoyed irony of the "coals to Newcastle" of installing solar panels in a petroleum production area. Still solar and wind energy sources are nuclear fusion powered by the Sun. The article also has technical details about the efficiency growth of larger wind turbines.

As with solar, the credit goes to technological advances and volume increases. For wind, however, innovation has mainly been a matter of size. From 1981 to 2015 the average length of a wind turbine rotor blade has increased more than sixfold, from 9 meters to 60 meters, as the cost of wind energy has dropped by a factor of 10.​

Already these solar fusion powered systems are moderating the amount of base power systems needed. Available during the business day, they have moderated the need for more power plants. But what sort of 'battery' might be used?

This is a case where hydrogen fuel-cell with on-site, storage might someday make sense. But the round-trip efficiency does not. There are more efficient battery systems that make more sense for base power. Better still, distributed systems using EV capacity.

Bob Wilson

 

...don't forget in 1960 nuclear power was going to be so cheap that we would stop having to charge for electricity.

 

Actually the claim was it was not going to be metered, not that it was free. You would just get a monthly fee.

 

+1

Exactly bob. But that poster was talking about bad for the environment in his option, and many others, fission reactors. I hope everyone agrees solar fusion power in the form of wind and solar is less damaging than most fossil fuels when it is done properly. Some poorly designed wind systems and solar thermal seem to harm wildlife.

On today's grids fast cycling ccgt natural gas is the power of choice to fill in for renewables when they go down. Wind is so cheap today that it often is cheaper to over build and waste a little than back it up. With the drop in price of lithium ion batteries they are now the dominant storage proposed in new projects. Stanford just came out with an aluminum ion design that may be less expensive.
Green Car Congress: Lux: Li-ion dominating grid storage market with 90% of 2014 proposals

+1

If you can get the price down far enough on fuel cell systems the efficiency won't matter as much. Say a fuel cell system is only 40% efficient, that still makes sense instead of wasting the power. Often peak power costs 10x more than low demand power. The Japanese and German grids are places where this power shifting makes the most economic sense. Both economies are building advanced coal plants, and hydrogen generation at a IGCC plant can be very efficient as the waste heat can be used to make the hydrogen more efficiently. It may also make sense in the Chinese and Indian new nuclear plants.

 

I'm betting you'd LOVE to test this - 200hp, street legal and setting records - salt flats and Pikes Peak ;

Pretty much for the cost of a dressed out Goldwing. There's another YouTube video showing the 218 beating out a whole batch of ICE super bikes on one of the area raceways. For street use they have to dial down the torque. too funny.
Hey Toyota, are you listening?
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oh, hope not.

 

Very cool thank you I was a little confused when Jay agreed that $38,000 is 'comparable to ICE bikes'. The Japanese literbikes are about $14,000 give or take, more exotic Euro bikes are somewhat more.
As always, range is a bummer. I would ride over 150 miles a day (to the peninsula mountains, maybe 90 miles on backroads, home). Of course we might stop in Boulder Creek off Hwy 9 and just pump in 4.x gallons.
Very cool bike, but, bummerama, the range and recharge time and seemingly the cost will bite.

Thanks for the vid though. Never heard of them. I'm currently not riding as of 2010. Mom is 87 and needs looking after. I might not ride the streets again, done so much of it and I'm glad to have no injuries cause of it.

 

These records are short lived.. they will not hold when this monster is around:
2015 NINJA H2™ Ninja H2™R / H2™ Motorcycle by Kawasaki
2015 Kawasaki Ninja H2 and H2R Superbike Review- FIVE FAST FACTS: What our Road Test Editor learned while hot-lapping these supercharged Kawasakis at the Losail track in Qatar.

 

Sorry, cound't follow your thought.
I can understand the peak requirements for the quick recharging (higher standby producton facilites and/or station revamp), but cannot agree neither on the math or the ecology/environment impact.
Charge 500km in 12 minutes is the least probable of the events. Trip lenght pattern analysis show that.
Charging 500km in 12 minutes should draw about 80kwh total. Roughly 400kw. My house is rated 6,9kVA. So it would draw about 59 houses simultanous at rated power delivery. Not 1000houses!
I suggest you read a bit more about electric power distribution impact regarding BEV load:

http://www.cars21.com/assets/link/JRC%20rep.pdf
quote: On the contrary they also show that without an appropriate regulation (e.g. the intelligent integration of electric vehicles into the existing power grid as decentralised and flexible energy storage), they could heavily impact on the daily electric power request. Actually this is true only considering very high (in the authors’ opinion unrealistic) future electric vehicles market share (20-25%) in 2030.
Impact true if (only) 20-25% market share.

 

I think you confusing max rated load with avg consumption. And not sure 80kWh from the grid will give you 312mi range, too optimistic.

And you are mistaken if you think 12min charge is least probably of the events. Overwhelming majority of all cars on the road (all gas cars) are charged under 12min with charge to last at least 300mi.