Featured Toyota to Debut Three New Electrified Vehicles for U.S. Market

Thanks, looking forward the EPA metrics.

Bob Wilson

 

Maybe Toyota surprises us and does something brilliant? Lol...

As they say in their press release: “We continue to be leaders in electrification that began with our pioneering introduction of the Prius nearly 25 years ago”

So where is Toyota in real life in terms of electrification? An article about world's top selling electric cars is very long and why doesn't Toyota show up in it? Here's every electric vehicle on sale in the US for 2020 and its range - Roadshow

I look at this chart below and mutter to myself yet again what happened to Toyota, why did they vanish/AWOL?



Source: Electrek

 

Because you don't know what "electrification" means. Hint: It includes any car with any type of electric propultion.

 

Just noticed this on my Google news feed:

Toyota confirms US arrival for two electric vehicle models in 2021

 

Yeah, saw the news today. I guess one is Rav4 EV-like and another is a surprise. I wonder if I should wait buying the Leaf this year. Humm...

 

I’m looking forward to finally getting a test drive in a Toyota BEV.
As for the Electric car categorization, generally people think of that as a car with a plug.
Toyota stretches the meaning of the term, almost to the point of absurdity.
May as well say my ‘76 Monday was electrified as it couldn’t start without a 12 volt battery.

 

For me, a BEV is always going to be in/near town only car, so the range is not going to be so important as long as it has a minimum of 100 miles range. A larger cargo is useful, but better efficiency is also important. I still think the deciding factor is going to be the final price after all the incentives and rebates. But it is a good thing to have choices.

Assuming COVID-19 is going to force me to work from home the rest of this year, the question is how soon they will be available in our market. If I have to have a car before they are available, I may have to fill the gap with a PP knowing that I can trade it in a short time and make a profit.

 

Toyota claims that a PHEV is more environmentally friendly and practical than a BEV and a BEV is a lot more expensive to own than a PHEV:

Toyota shared highlights of new internal research evaluating the environmental impact and cost of ownership between a PHEV and a BEV. For this research, Toyota created a tool that shows the trade-off between GHG Emissions and Total Cost of Ownership. The source code for this tool is publicly available at carghg.org for others to experiment with the various input parameters and see the movement of BEVs and PHEVs on the GHG and cost plot. The research found:

• GHG of a currently available BEV model and PHEV model are roughly the same in on-road performance when factoring in pollutants created by electricity production for the average U.S. energy grid used to charge batteries.
• Manufacturing is a component of GHG emissions. Using the “Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies” (GREET) model, researchers found that the production of a PHEV emits less GHG since it uses a smaller, lighter weight battery.
• The PHEV is much less expensive to buy and own, compared to the BEV. Without any incentives, the five-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a long-range BEV is significantly higher than the PHEV. If you include incentives available this year (2020), the TCO of a long-range BEV is much higher.

 

Hard to comment without actually seeing the research, which is why peer reviewed is the standard.
That said.

• There is no average grid mix as generated electricity isn't shared across all 50 states. The data set used by that software is based on trips done by California households That state has over 30% renewables on their grid.
• Manufacture is just part of a car's lifecycle. The in use GHG emissions will come down to what the gird for plug ins uses; in most of the first world, BEVs end up emitting less than ICE and hybrids. For PHEVs, it comes down to how often the engine is used. Shorter EV range ones will likely use it more. So there is a general trend in emitting less GHG emissions for a smaller battery ends up with more emissions from engine use.
• What exactly does "much less expensive" equal? Did Toyota include the Rav4 Prime in this study? Or how about the ID 3? Most of the long range BEVs currently available in the US are in a higher priced market segment than most of the popular PHEVs, which doesn't make this result surprising. The TCO for any individual car is going to have fuel prices as a major component, and gas is cheap here. Cheaper than electricity in some places. UBS was projecting(pre-COVID) that a BEV's TCO in Europe was going to equal that of a comparable ICE car last year. The ID 3 might so that. The base might not be long range, but long enough to meet the needs of most people.

PHEVs do make better utilization of the battery. Which is good for a buyer worried about the 'dead weight' of having a bigger battery that isn't fully discharged regularly, or if you are a car company with a limited supply of batteries for plug ins.

 

Yeah, but there are only three grids in the US - East, West, and Texas.

 

That break down ignores local time of use and transmission distance factors.

 

There's really no way to determine where a kWh injected into a grid ultimately comes out, and it wouldn't really matter a lot if you could. The mix is the mix. And when you add in resource depletion and atmospheric pollution, it becomes even more agnostic.

 

A nuclear plant would love running at higher output into the night to supply Illinois, but the local coal plant has first dibs on an average day.

Now you can't determine where a given kW came from on the grid, but we do you who a consumer is paying for their kW's, and we know what those producers operate. The large interconnection grids are divided up by wholesale markets and regulatory bodies. Because of those, the kW consumed in Illinois very likely came from that local coal plant, and not a nuclear one on the Eastern seaboard. Which is why the EPA developed the eGrid system for studying environmental impacts of electricity production.

Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database (eGRID) | US EPA

 

think the mouse button might be failing

 

Almost all nuclear power plants run at full power all the time except during maintenance or outages, which is why the capacity factor for nuclear in the US is always in the mid-90s. Nuclear plants can't cool down and heat up quickly so they're just left to operate without following diurnal variations in load.

 

Thanks, but that side steps the point of my post.

 

You must have added all that later because it wasn't there when I quoted.

 

From my other post about toyota reluctance to do EVs. <- click there for the rest of the post

It's quite likely that Toyota was legally prohibited from building their own BEV until recently.

While Tesla did a lot to popularize the electric car, Toyota did what they could within the restrictions of the Chevron patent Encumbrance settlement. They pushed the Hybrid design and managed to make a car that was not only popular but was very practical while managing to come close to the emissions (well to wheel) of the EVs of the day.

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The edit was over 30 minutes before you quoted. Regardless, the edit was just an expansion of the general point of the first paragraph.

The use of the large interconnection grids for parsing generation mix, and they become useless once considering time zones, the exchange of money, and pissing matches over territory.

Just replied there. The settlement with Chevron only involved NiMH batteries.