Featured Toyota BEV attitude

Some are naive about circumstances of different markets. (The devil is in the detail.) When you look at choices in China, you see a far greater variety than what we are ever exposed to. What stands as a top-seller is a BEV (Wuling Mini EV) that starts at $4,200. But with only 17.4 hp and a top-speed of 62 mph, you don't even have to know the vehicle size or range to recognize that it wouldn't be of any appeal in this market. It works fine there though and demonstrates potential for something with much lower specs here.

That close-mindedness comes from thinking we are further along than we actually are. Sales are mostly to enthusiasts still... low-hanging fruit. The more difficult audience of ordinary showroom shoppers remains a challenge. The newest subsidies are a solid confirm of the market not being able to sustain itself yet. We need affordable choices. bZ4X will help pave the way for bZ3 and bZ2.

Put another way, the attitude comes from those not being realistic. Progress is slow. Progress is hard. Progress is disenchanting. It's still progress though.

 

So I guess the take-away here is that if you're not electric, you want more pollution, more climate change, more extinct species, etc....

Seems to me that this might be the perspective from nations who are not food insecure.
In other words... people, who for the most part, take clean water, stable governments, for granted and think "supply chain problems" mean that they only have four flavors of their favorite gourmet dairy free ice cream bars to chose from instead of the usual 8.

In other words?
People who live in nations that have ALREADY benefitted from a carbon-based industrial revolution.
Toyota already sells cars to them, or did - and they might just have a perspective about might lie beyond the next few decades besides a one-solution, solution.
Or?
They might be full of crap....but I'm pretty sure that the folks in Aichi do not hate EVangelists.
They just see another thing perhaps that "goes before..."

I'd let them be THEM.
If they fail?

Fewer cars to worry about.

Besides....governments that nationalize their large scale producers have poor environmental track records.

 

Moral of the story,
no Quick Charge,
no deal.
But for the many that DO have L2 capability at home? Yeah, they can deal with slow L2 congested public charging by avoiding it. Otherwise plugins work great - as you seamlessly switch over to hybrid mode automatically once the EV miles run out.

we've had 3 EV's registered in SoCal & are unfamiliar with a penalty. What penalty is that?
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Why do so many keep throwing this red herring up. Does someone doubt that there's a fraction of the world that doesn't have reliable electricity?
If the OPP's article is what's on point, then the issue is that Toyota has only recently - been forced into building electric cars, mainly because China says you either DO it - or you get out. No one denies that Tasmania Rwanda, Tanzania or the South Pole are impractical places to run your electric car.
Isn't the, "Can't work for everybody" theme just a deflection from the millions & millions who CAN with little or no effort - use plugin transportation?
Jeez - upon last check there was what, something like a million on the wait list for the Tesla cybertruck alone? The notion that any car company should get a free pass - just because some technology won't fit everyone's needs?
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hmmmm - I guess the theme could be taken either way - possibly
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In my view the 2040 pledge is symbolic and really not realistic because many vehicle manufacturers will sell vehicles that have tailpipe emissions in 2040 and for a variety of reasons. So are we expecting companies like Toyota to lie and just sign up, when they know it is likely not to occur ?

The pledge is really just marketing. i.e countries and companies can say what they have achieved something by making this pledge but in reality it means nothing because everyone will have forgotten this in 19 years and it places no focus on achieving things now.

If you want to clean up vehicle emissions, you have to make hard decisions about emission standards and carbon pricing, with the latter set and then spent in removing the carbon emitted from the atmosphere (or making the fuel less carbon intense in the first place).

Yes Europe has increasingly strict emission rules which is good .. but how much of their vehicle CO2 emissions are they recovering back from the atmosphere ? Instead they are spending large amounts of money subsidising expensive technology, which is politically acceptable, but inefficient in terms of the carbon it reduces.

The US does have fleet emission rules .. but really they are weak and there is really no political appetite (or ability) to fix that. So instead the proposal is to spend large amounts of money on subsidies of expensive cars for people who are already well off. Yes this will drive the sale of expensive EV's and make EV company speculators rich, but at the same time people are still buying large and inefficient gassers in record numbers.

This is a political palatable approach but really I can't see how it really addresses the problem properly. The pledge is a symbolic step, but really is a smokescreen to distract from the hard decisions that have to made.

 

Who else could? Hyundai & Honda both have efficient & profitable designs, but combined they are smaller than Toyota. GM failed so bad, they gave up. Ford is toying with PHEV still, but the approach comes up short. VW was never really in the game. It is much easier just pursuing a path of nothing but BEV instead. Of course, in China that has resulted in number of startups with a wide variety of outcomes.

It's a sad reality. We have that on the other end too... symbolic BEV rollouts.

GM played the game for over a decade. There was no next-step for either Volt or Bolt. Neither targeted their own loyal customers or did anything to bring about change at their dealers. Ford took an entirely different approach, but there is nothing obligating them to do more than offer F-150 Lightning in low volume. Token gestures like that should be a warning. Notice how VW has no intention of offering ID.3 here and how Tesla is still years away from an small vehicle offering?

People claim that Toyota is kicking & screaming, yet we see the stage being set for RAV4 Prime and a smaller choice (likely a Corolla Cross Prime) along with bZ4X and at least 2 smaller choices (bZ3 and bZ2). No pledge. No promise. No hype. Just progress.

It would be great for things to just happen. There is no direction though, no clear messaging. That's why the push forward with hybrids continued. Toyota's design makes it easy to add a plug and remain profitable. Ironically, the mocked "stop gap" approach is actually what we need to move naysayers forward. There's far too many excuses to not purchase a BEV that don't apply to an all-electric capable PHEV.

Who making a 2040 pledge now will be held accountable then for failing to deliver?

 

Yes in absence of real Government action, it's left to the manufacturers to do the best they can but they know most buyers will only pay a certain amount additional for a clean car and many will not. So Toyota's hybrid and PHEV strategy is good solution to attract widespread adoption of cleaner vehicles, with minimal impact in terms of price and capability.

 

How Toyota sneakily spreads anti-EV propaganda in Japan (electrek.co)

 

beware of warring factions, unfriendlies while keeping a vigilant eye on friends, family and countryman.
Just read any commercial / retail / gov / watchdog web sites privacy policy and believe. Watch one of the favorite new TV shows on a channel (or 2 or 3 channels at the same time) funded by commercial ads.
$500 for the new age bean bag lounger ---- god help us / them! Hey, it looks like the deal of the century to somebody, it must!
Does this have anything to do with Toyota BEV attitude? got me... Might have a little to do with stable grids if you stretch the truth a bit, or just out and out lie "til the skinheads grow hairy". <- 6th grade classmate J De.
Releasing new technologies for public consumption has always been a complicated mess, unless one believes the masses get it as soon as it discovered.

Why would anyone truly give a hoot what Toyota BEV attitude is? seriously?

 

Yes, there is regions where there isn't infrastructure to support plug ins. Hybrids can be a solution for those regions. But lets ponder some things.

• How big of a market are these poor plug in regions? In 2019, global car sales was 74.9 million. The US. Europe, and China made up 53.7 million of those sales; that isn't every market were infrastructure for plug ins exist.
• In the regions were electric infrastructure is lacking, is the extra cost for a hybrid something the car buyers can afford?
• Is there a reason to doubt the electric infrastructure improving in these regions as the general wealth improves?

We should make viable options available for lowering emissions to these reasons, but viable plug in options are needed for the majority of the world too.

Shame it was coming from Toyota.

Why? Because Toyota gives millions to politicians to protect their profit margins. Most of the time when a corporation does this, it is against the public good. Programs trying to help the public good is why you are driving a Prius Prime now. Toyota would likely have not even made it, if it weren't for such programs and regulations.

 

Every country has a different CO2 intensity of its electricity grid and so the difference in CO2 emissions between a hybrid and EV will vary. Japan's grid is still fairly CO2 intensive at 0.49 kg/kWh and using a typical EV efficiency of 132 g/km, the CO2 emissions of the EV are 65 g/km. Compare this to a Corolla hybrid at 84 g/km.

So yes the hybrid has higher CO2/km of about 24 g/km or 31%, however the hybrid is significantly cheaper. Clearly EV's will get cheaper and grid will get cleaner but both are clean outcomes compared to conventional ICE. PHEV obviously reduces this gap a fair bit.

If I were the Japanese Government, I would be setting hybrid as the minimum standard.

 

How can that be? In your previous post you just claimed how some people couldn't buy an EV because the available choices weren't adequate for them. Wouldn't more manufacturers mean a bigger diversity of options?

Mike

 

millions=a bilp on the radar screen billions=a blob on the radar screen trilions=the radar screens been jammed. raspberries

Thank god for small favors and Prius plug in. If the US ever gets a plug in Prius C, I'll eat my hat.

 

Would add that the excluded grid support constrained market is much smaller than that regarding the need for new ICE vehicles.

How many shiny new ICE vehicles do we see in the poorest developing economies? Each year there is a greatly diminishing need to produce any more ICEs. The population in the US, EU, and Chinese markets who currently have ICE vehicles won’t junk them when they trade up for a BEV. And long before BEVs, many used vehicles ended up across international borders and many will still be around 20 years later.

Much better to accelerate the BEV transition and can move to biofuels for old ICE stock that will be around in 2 decades and help build grid/microgrid infrastructure in the poorest developing economies.