Toyota negative on batteries because it has more experience than other others on them

You make it sound so simple and pure, but lots of meetings and lots of documents say something else.

Maybe I just put too much stock in pop culture things like "who killed the electric car", and less in revised claims by a political organization.

According to poll's 39% of of plug-in drivers in california install solar for their car and the rest of their house. EPA ignores these in its fueleconomy.gov but does note it so these california figures are rather high.

EPA using 2009 california grid and assumed gasoline/electric mix
prius phv or volt 200grams/mile
c-max energi 230g/mile
leaf 120 g/mile
model s 70d 130 g/mile
i3 bev 110 g/mile

Unfortunately the EPA does not rate cars like the mirai in terms of well to wheel carbon dioxide. This would undoubtedly be a high number today as there is a lot of transportation cost, and leakage because of the low volume stations. The question is how it will be in the future, say 2017 after stations have been retrofitted and new ones built. This will still be high compared to high volume production. One estimate is 14.34 kg of carbon dioxide to produce 1 Kg of hydrogen if its made from SMR. That's pretty good @67 mpge it is better than the all gasoline prius on E10, but falls a little short of the volt, a car that CARB doesn't think deserve a single zev credit while the mirai gets 9.

mirai 214 g/mile
prius 218 g/mile

One way to make this look better is build 40% renewable hydrogen. It doesn't matter that plug-ins don't get credit for the renewables their owners buy, this is about showing why the fuel cell vehicle should get more. That drops it to

128 g/mile.
Which is nice. Now with the renewables the mirai puts out less ghg than the tesla. It's not much but it is enough for a greener claim and bid for 9 credits instead of 4. I mean if it was about easy refueling that volt and i3-rex and prius phv would get big bonuses.

 

the problem as always is political decisions will please some and bother others. can't keep everyone happy.

 

Does the prius solve the air pollution problem? No because CARB lets a lot of old polluting cars stay on the road. The question though, could be, if CARB removed or highly taxed the old polluters, would the technology in the prius solve the car air pollution problem, and that answer to that one is yes. This includes the SCR and particulate filters on diesels if well maintained, they get things low enough for cars. There are other industrial sources of pollution that still need to come down. The prius technology solves the smog problem probably better than fcv, because encouraging it costs less.

Through this year the federal government has spent about $3B on each of these programs
1) fcv (freedom car, and its current continued spending
2) Electric vehicle tax credit
We have 179 fcv and about 345,000 plug-ins on the road. California voted to fund hydrogen fueling for 100 stations by 2010, now its 2025 but has more reasonable cost estimates. In 2004 they were completely crazy estimates on how cheap the cars would be and how little the state would need to spend per station. Costs have not come down as promised. The 2016 mirai is not so different than the 2009 clarity except toyota will lose less per vehicle than honda did back then. Current estimates are 20,000 fcv and 80 stations in 2020, versus prejections of 100 stations and 50,000 vehicles in 2017 by CARB in 2009. If we add $3B more in funding I doubt we will get $50,000 cars before 2020. Technological breakthroughs take time.

I don't know how they can make much of a contribution to that target. Even if they sell 20,000 fcv a year from 2021-2025, that will only be 120,000 vehicles. I don't think anybody for the fuel cell lobby thinks they will take off like that. You need someone to put in the stations, and I doubt the taxpayers will buy that many.

 

"Economically reasonable" is best figured out by phasing in end goal regulations. What California did initially of requiring 10% of vehicles to be pollution free went very far in showing what the cost were and what technologies were working best. Now it is time to move up that number. It is self defeating to let either government or industry define what is "economically reasonable" beforehand. It is also completely unnecessary. Automakers fought pollution devices on autos. Utilities fought scrubbers on coal plants. Farmers fight restrictions on fertilizer quantities on crops. Many more example can be shown.

In every case above, the associated cost of the technologies involved was wildly over exaggerated. Look at utilities. Renewable power can come from PV panels, Sterling engines (see avatar), Concentrated solar heating, wind and some other sources. Why should the politicians pick from these? Just tell the utilities to figure it out and you can be 100% assured they will come up with the most economical technology. Then everyone knows the exact cost and best technology baseline. If we want to get rid of pollution, the best approaches have clearly been setting end goal directed regulations and stepping them up as established economics allows.

 

The dictate on the regulatory body to be economically feasible is behind the scenes lobbying from industry. Rest assured the regulators do not want it.

 

Agree with that completely. If your comment about "economic reasonability" was about industry manipulation of politics, then I obviously stand corrected.

 

Yep

 

I've thought about this a little more. All the regulatory should have to do is show that at least one tech meets the economic requirement for the goal. Then industry can pick whatever tech they wish so long as it meets the goal. This can be manipulated, but it sure is a lot better than what we have today.

 

...not true many utilities are viewed by states as a business enterprises owned by the states. Historically utilities and elected officials will bend over backwards to kill smaller distributed power sites, and they will say the only thing that makes sense is an enormous central power plant (say nukes if fossil fuels including nat gas are effectively banned by EPA later today as reportedly is happening). They do not care one iota about rate payers. Everyone (banks, shareholders etc) are guaranteed a huge risk-free profit and the rate payer rates will go up to meet these profit guarantees.

Here's the future as of today:
The CPP action by the EPA today, assuming it stands, is likely to increase power costs substantially. Actually the utilities were predicting power costs to increase before the clean power plan even was dreamed up (due to replacing aging plants). Will gaso become cheaper than elec: Yes and No. The CARB states have basically agreed to hold elec and gaso at the same price so that EV's refueling is guaranteed to be no more expensive than gaso. So if gaso gets cheaper than elec, that means EV owners must be provided cheaper power, or alternatively gaso taxed to price equivalence of elec.

 

EVs and PHEVs can do exactly the same thing and more. Plug them in at 8 or 10 pm and request, for example, 5 hours of charging. The car charges only when there is excess wind power during the night. The aggregated group of requests for power is known by the utility, in advance so that different cars all charge at different times giving an even demand for car charging power, etc.
There are numerous papers on this type of things (at IEEE behind paywalls)

Mike

 

Austin energy is doing a test of this technology in one neighborhood,. They are doing cars, solar panels, and small batteries to buffer, with smart chargers tied to the network. The participants in the test neighborhood also allows the utility to turn down the air conditioning to help with heavy loads coming on the grid. Most of the country hasn't installed the grid technology yet to test how it all works. DOE gave Austin energy (municipal city owned utility) a grant to help pay for the equipment. I believe the report will be out in 2017. Austin energy should be over 35% renewable next year, with the bulk of the renewable being wind, which should be a good test case to see if this charging technology can really help put more wind economically on the grid.

NREL definitely sees central hydrogen production on wind as the cheapest renewable source for fuel cell cars. I would not count that out, but for the next decade putting renewables through batteries seems like a much easy task.

 

This is certainly true in many states, but not all states. Where it is true, I agree completely. A totally incestuous or substantially corrupt system is reflected in the legislation and regulations sustaining the corruption. But this is the other side of the point I was stressing. A good functioning government provides technology independent legislation in a stepped manner. A properly run utility then makes money in a competitive marketplace while complying with the regulations. I was stating this is the goal, certainly not the present situation in so many areas (if any). Yet getting out of this corruption is a necessary step toward sustainability.

 

Hi everyone!

I haven't posted here on PC for I think over a year now.
(I hope I'm still allowed....I traded in my '07 for a Fusion Energi )

Anyhow, it's good to 'be back' and hear some of the informed and intelligent comments from the same folks.
Unfortunately, that doesn't include comments made by Toyota executives!

My 2 cents on this issue:

Firstly, Toyota, you DO NOT have more experience with high-voltage batteries than any other carmaker. That honor would go to Tesla Motors, as of recently.

Some math is in order:

According to the article, Toyota has sold "over 7 million" hybrids. Since they never made that many BEV's, I'll still be generous and say they've put about 8 million hybrids on the roads, globally.

Well, the best-selling one is the Prius and it has a 1.3 kwh pack. Other larger ones like Camry hybrid and Lexus RX hybrid are larger and have bigger packs, I'm guessing about 2 kwh packs. I'll be generous and say an average of 1.8 kwh for your typical Toyota hybrid.

1.8 kwh x 8 million vehicles = 14.4 Giga-watt hours of batteries in Toyota hybrids out there

How many Model S's would be needed to match that?

14.4 Gw-h divided by 85 kwh per Model S, we come out to 169,411.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Tesla producing like 1,000 Model S's a week? And, excluding the Roadster, the've been at it for nearly 3 years now, so I'm going to call BULLSHIT on this one and say that Tesla has put more GWh's on wheels at this point (or very soon) than has Toyota (or any other carmaker!)

Also, as others have pointed outL

(1) the COST of a nationwide H2 infrastructure would be PROHIBITIVELY expensive, and require federal and state (read, taxpayer) assistance,

(2) and most of the H2 would come from natural gas reformation. These facilities produce co2 (although easily captured, as it is pure).
EV's have upstream emissions too, but get cleaner with time as grid cleans up

(3) the number of H2 stations would have to FAR exceed the number of L3 SAE Combo/Supercharger-type stations for the simple reason that EV drivers can fill up 90% of the time in their own garage. The charging stations only need to be along long-distance highway corridors. H2 stations on the other hand, have to be numerous enough so that it is not inconvenient to go "out of your way" to fill up. I wouldn't buy a car that required me to drive halfway across town and back to fill up every week or so.

(4) FCV's have all the components (i.e., cost) of PHEV's and CNG ICE's without any of the advantages. They have motors and batteries, like PHEV's, but PHEV's surpass them by adding a plug which increases the potential fueling spots by literally 1,000,000 x. They have expensive 10,000 psi carbon-fiber tanks, but those same tanks could hold CNG which would give more range (even when burned in an ICE) which is still cheaper $/kw than a fuel cell stack (not to mention existing infrastructure, and cheaper to build more, including potential in-home re-fueling)

(5) As mentioned, H2 infrastructure will be very expensive and likely require public support. Battery-swap infrastructure, on the other hand will cost much, MUCH less (and is likely to attract financing from utilities, as the stations can be used as grid storage for wind and solar). The main obstacle to swapping is standardization of battery, but perhaps this could be overcome by having 3 different "carriers" for different size vehicles. The station would then just refill the "carriers" with modules, on demand....no need to have one standard battery, or carry multiple batteries of different size.....just have all 3 carrier in sufficient stock, each of which could use a standard 1kwh module.
In order to have a 300 mile range:
Small carrier: 60kwh, or 60 modules
Mid-size carrier: 100 kwh, or 100 modules
Large carrier: 150 kwh, or 150 modules.

Each automaker could then design their EV around one of those sizes. It also opens up the intriguing possibility of battery leasing. Perhaps Tesla or some other company could offer a battery lease that is priced (including electricity) to approximately what the monthly gasoline bill would be in a comparably sized ICE car.
That way, you buy the EV and lease the battery. An EV sold w/o battery would be much cheaper than an FCV (and indeed even an ICE).
I don't really see the need to own an EV battery.....no one buys $10,000 worth of gasoline the minute the buy an ICE car.

FCVs are a total waste of time.

 

Not quite. Toyota Group holds other businesses, which include high-voltage batteries, for example lift forks.
And besides your calc numbers, that I agree total capacity aggregates, there is experience in other chemistries other than Li-Ion. Toyota has released the first mass passenger car with a traction battery in NimH...9 years before Tesla lauched its first niche roadster.
So, IMPOV, I see Toyota having longer, broader and deeper experience than any other carmaker.

 

Toyota does have a lot of experience with NiMH, but they also have a large investment in it as well. It is what gave them an edge in hybrids; the low battery cost to them. It may be keeps them from expanding out into other chemistries like lithium though. When the Prius PHV first came out Li-ion batteries did cost more than NiMH. Currently though, they are about the same, with lithium set to become cheaper. That isn't going to happen with nickle.

BASF did have the announcement about potential improvements for NiMH, but those are based on lab work. So effect of products and the market are farther out than cheap Li-ion.

 

well, toyota uses lithium in europe, pip here and supposedly an option in gen IV lift back.

 

on a couple occasions, I spoke with a fellow working on NASA subcontrcts. He hates Tesla, though he loves EV's. Reason being, Tesla - via high pay, cleaned out a ton of NASA's battery / software / engineer talents. Don't know how much that talent pool is/was worth, but I doubt Toyota accounted for it, when they made their brag. NASA tech goes back what ... neary a half century? Not too many Toyota batteries going on back then.

.

 

Well they missed me!

Bob Wilson

 

Did you want to move to California? Tesla and SpaceX are hiring.

 

I would not mind Salisbury MD but Florida is a no-show. As for California, could I commute from the Russian River area? Reno NV would be OK too. <GRINS>

Bob Wilson