Why America Must Build the Car That Overtakes a Tesla

I'm not claiming any moral or intellectual superiority here. I'm simply accepting reality. Frankly, USB, you sound like an evangelist on a mission.

 

Right. Just tell me to shut up and go away. Again. Talk about unconstructive.

 

Your laser focus on emissions is missing the fact that emissions isn't the sole reason for the government to support adopting plug in cars. Coal is a dirty fuel, but using it for cars in some states doesn't buoy up the demand for petroleum and increase the profits of countries that aren't our friends. And since the tax credit became available, overall coal use for electricity has dropped.

Then your metric for carbon emissions, the Prius, is an unreasonable one. First, it is a standard no other car has to meet, and isn't by the vast majority of vehicles sold today. Second, its sales make up about 1.5% of all light vehicles sold. The hybrid segment, not all of which are as clean as the Prius, struggles to stay over 4%. Delaying adoption incentives until cleaner grid emissions arrive to an area, just forces the majority of car shoppers into higher emitting vehicles. The unrealistically high bench mark can be seen as a way of slowing plug in adoption to the same crawl H2FCEV have waiting for hydrogen infrastructure.

It is a moot point anyway. As pointed out in other threads,

 

I think nissan and chevy were claiming around a third back in 2012. I doubt its close to a majority today. Plug-ins are selling much better than prii are being traded in, probably because people like to keep their prii. Since most new plug-ins in the US go to places where they are much lower in ghg than a prius, how would increasing work. How many people in Indiana or west Virginia trade in a prius on a plug-in? Not enough to make the numbers work.

Hope you have a happy and Healthy new year, and enjoy your prius phv in 2016.

 

And toss a perfectly good hybrid that I hardly drive? That doesn't make much sense to me. Besides, I'd have give up too much of the walking, cycling, and working from home that I do now, in order to drive more, so that I'd get my money's worth out of a plug-in.

 

Sure they can, but only half as much.

Interesting claim. Is there any evidence to support it?
For example, while credits were in place for hybrids, did hybrids surpass the 3-4% market share they are stuck in?

Keep in mind, a plugin saves twice as much gas as a Prius.

This is where you loose all credibility.
A majority (51%+) of plugin owners were never former Prius owners.
Well, OK, perhaps in the first few months of sales of the Leaf and Volt. Certainly not now.

 

You honestly don't see the fault in your logic, do you?
You are comparing the gas savings of Prius over a 25mpg car and comparing it to the gas savings of a plugin to the Prius.

When in the context of gas savings, both the Prius and plugin should be compared against the same reference point.
So, the BEV saves 6000 gallons.
The PHEV saves, on average, 5000 gallons, but could be anywhere from 2500-6000 gallons.
The Prius saves 3000 gallons.

If you want to compare to a Prius, then the Prius saves nothing and the BEV saves 3000 gallons while the PHEV saves about 2000 gallons.

That is quite a stretch, don't you think?
The U.S. And Jappanese markets are very different.
Why did the Japanese market jump in 2008-2009? I'm guessing oil prices, not incentives. Also, does this include pickup/SUVs?

You have posted these before and I have corrected you before. Update coming soon ...

Update...
Here is a thread where you made the same claim.
You were given the correct information, yet you repeat it...

Does anyone know what the future of the plug in Prius is? | Page 7 | PriusChat

 

Hybrids simply don't appeal to the majority of new car buyers as long as gas is cheap and an ICE version is available, and they simply don't prefer a smallish, midsize hatchback. The window sticker called my gen2 a sedan for a reason.

A hybrid incentive would likely just cover the cost difference for the hybrid system. So we could have sales like what the MKZ sees; which are about 40% for the hybrid, IIRC. It isn't half like the same price as the ICE model would suggest because people pass on it for the full trunk with folding seats, and the V6, with or without AWD.

Perhaps Cmary hybrid sales can double, which would still leave @300k ICE versions, with a larger percentage of V6s, being sold. Which would all be bested by a plug in in any state on carbon emissions. Then what happens after the incentives end? If the fuel prices are still low, people will just go back to the ICE.

For hybrids sales to grow, they need to expand to other segments. That is the SUV/crossover, minivan, and truck ones. So far, all the attempts there have been disappointing, with a high price versus the smaller gain in fuel efficiency. I'm hoping Toyota gets aggressive with the Rav4 hybrid pricing, but I won't hold my breath.

It only looks bad to you, because you only focus on a single facet of affect and ignore the over reaching goal. That goal was to improve the cost and performance of traction batteries for private cars. Plug ins simply see a bigger benefit because of battery size, but this also impacts the cost of hybrids and FCEVs.

For $35k in 2011, you could get a Leaf with about 80 miles of range. For that price in the next year or two, you will be able to get a BEV with 150 to 200 miles range. The costs are reaching the point were these cars won't need the incentives in order to compete with ICE cars.

Are you saying people without a plug in, didn't make use of home solar PV incentives?

Japan also has much higher fuel prices and higher fleet mpg requirements than the US. The Camry equivalent there doesn't have an ICE version anymore. Any non-commercial trucks or vans are already smaller than the ones sold here. They have an entire class of cars smaller than the smart fortwo. There is more than incentives at play there.

Plus, the continued hybrid incentives hurt the sales of plug ins. What happened to 'established technologies shouldn't get any more help'?

The funds weren't routed to plug ins. The hybrid incentive was written to end with or without plug ins coming to market.

And here is why I started a thread, with link in my signature, in the politics section to discuss these incentives:
Do you truly believe that Congress would have continued the hybrid incentives? A law that was giving most of its funds to a foreign company, for a product not even manufactured within the US. No matter how many threads in which you bitch and moan about the plug in tax credit, you will not see a hybrid credit that will just further enrich Toyota or Hyundai.

As long as the buyers don't mind a smaller trunk, and lack of folding rear seats or spare tire. How about we just pass a gas or petroleum tax. That will encourage fuel efficiency regardless of technology, which will help in segments in which there is no hybrid option. It is just as likely to pass Congress.

We'll see when it comes. Until then, Toyota is going to put a 5L V8 Cummings turbo diesel into the Tundra.

IOW, we'll ignore the larger, more profitable market in the hopes we get a breakthrough that is sellable there.

The hybrid technology is pretty much established with only incremental improvements happening now. The improvements for ICE efficiency will find their way into non-hybrid cars, so the manufacturer can spread the R&D costs for that over more units has is already done in business. The biggest step for improving the electric side for overall vehicle efficiency is adding a plug.

How about we hold off on any hybrid credits until they come to a segment that needs them, like trucks and minivans, and the fuel efficency improvement looks small due to our use of MPG on the sticker, making sales harder.

Perhaps they hated the flying bridge, and they'll come back to the gen4? It is just an assumption they wouldn't have moved on to another model without the Volt being available. Many did buy a Prius because of the incentive and high gas prices, but some of them still saw it as a compromise over the car they really wanted.

 

My claim was that, if ever, former Prius owners were a majority of plugin buyers for the first few months.
I would say that is exactly the case.
The Prius may still be the most commonly traded in vehicle, but no where near a majority.

So you point is still valid, if by "valid" you mean "wrong".

 

So that confirms nothing more than a feigned interest in America building a H2 car for him to go gaga over. Evangelism is right.

PS. That link in your sig is broken. I would never venture blindly into the politics section. I would get in too many fights with liberals.

 

Works for me. You have to opt in to view and post there.

 

Oh, that's right. I think I'll just stay put. Don't want to start off the year on the wrong foot.

 

Compare Side-by-Side


It doesn't appear like the average car gets 25 mpg. Prius competitors appear to be around 31. Its not as if a prius really is replacing pick up trucks or sports sedans.

It looks like if we average these cars would use 476 gallons in 15000 miles. A 52 mpg gen IV prius would use 288 gallons, a gen II volt 30% gas at 42mpg is 107, a tesla model S 0. The prius saves 187 gallons, the volt 369, a model s probably does compare to that 25 mpg vehicle so it saves 500 gallons. A prius doesn't save twice the gas as a phev unless you really are doing funky math.

Now plug-in incentives are capped at $1.5B or less per manufacturer. With toyota selling over 2/3 of hybrids they would be capped very quickly at 3000/car, much less than 2 years. The odds are toyota would not sell 1 single extra hybrid with that incentive, they just would pocket the extra profit. You would need to provide much more maybe 6x more tax money to get toyota to sell more hybrids. It would have some other manufacturers do it, but what would we get to 5% market share for hybrids, hardly japanese figures, and then it would die. 20% of the 17 milion cars likely sold this year is 3.4 miliion which would be $10B a year. Likely at least half of that would go to imported cars if the market stays the same. I can't see that flying for even 1 year. The plug-in incentive is around $1B and will stay that way for a short time before declining.

With low oil prices I don't see taxpayers going for this type of scheme, and don't see how it would lead to energy independance. It seems much worse than the flawed current program. New tech should continue to lower the unsubsidized price, and these cost savings should make it to hybrids too. The 2025 cafe standards encourage hybrids. A higher gas tax would also help sell them.

 

Bringing the OP back around for a moment - it dawned on me that the article's author - vested interests in hydrogen & all - would have done much better to put forth an article about "Why America Musk Build the car that Overtakes the 50mpg Prius" because the US can't even seem to get that right! Toyota won't even let the US build the Prius here - sadly. Yea - let's see uf the US auto industry can out-do the 50mpg prius. Baby steps. Wait .... the US DID overtake the 50mpg Prius ... it's called the Tesla...

.

 

During the bad days for toyota the ABE government in Japan bent over backward to help the company. Keeping the prius jobs japanese was part of the quid pro quo. The only way to get the prius made in america is to put up a tarrif. The US and Mississippi government already paid toyota to move production to the US, but toyota went back on it.

Yes indeed in terms of fuel economy the tesla, volt II, and american built but foreign owned leaf beat the prius.

Lots of anti tesla people out their. Mitt Romney had it as part of his 2012 losing campaign, congressman Mike Kelly chevy dealer t-party favorite oil baron hates to model S, now this solar failure company probably because they can't compete with solar city, hate the tesla. One thing they all have in common? They are losers.

 

When the original author calls the Ford F-150 America's favorite car, that makes it pretty clear he is addressing an audience that is not too keen on accuracy.