Featured Toyota President Says 'Silent Majority' Not Convinced on EV-Only Future

you've been dick nixoned

 

The ‘silent wallet’ majority.

Bob Wilson

 

It could just a cover to not actually having support. An appeal to having the consensus without providing the evidence. Like politicians do with policies they are promoting. Toyoda's past statements were more about the views of Japan's automotive industry; they might actually be this silent majority.

As for the customers not being able to afford EVs. Cars weren't affordable at first; it was twenty years between first car sold and Model T. The affordable EV will come. Waiting for all the pieces to fall into place for it, while the others are actively working towards it may not be the best plan.

 

Ding, ding, ding.

I wonder how many folks participating in this thread have ever worked in motor vehicle sales. Anyone?

 

The majority of his customer base can’t afford a hybrid Sequoia (55k), yet Toyota sells them. Heck if you want expensive vehicle, just look at Lexus.

Toyota doesn’t care if everyone can afford all of their cars, just that they can offer a car that matches a buyer’s wants and/or needs.

 

Agreed, they don't care if everyone can afford it.

But I think they very very much care if enough people can afford to buy at least the volume that they are built, mortgaged and staffed to profit from.

Going full EV isn't terribly hard for Volvo; they only make luxury cars at corresponding prices and volumes. They've been retreating from the middle of the market for 25+ years.

Toyota could be a profitable EV-only manufacturer if they wanted. They'd just have to sacrifice a huge amount of their overall market share and sales volume.

Makes perfect sense to me that they'd rather stay big and sell a lot of somewhat-electric cars in the hopes that full EVs get cheaper better subsidized later on.

 

That's a great write-up. Thanks for sharing it.

I worked for the phone company when I was young. Back in the 60's and 70's we were indoctrinated in much the same way at AT&T as you were at Toyota. They pushed hard to ingrain the concept of safety first, followed by the best service at the lowest possible price. People working there really drank the koolaid, and were proud of the service they provided.

 

as far as I understand it - Japanese culture is just a bit different than ours in the western realms.
How well are our western policies handling the issues of seriously old problems that keep repeating.
It must be nice to be one of the biggest car manufactures. Just look what can be tried when business is booming. Toyota to Build Prototype City of the Future | Corporate | Global Newsroom | Toyota Motor Corporation Official Global Website
Toyotas woven city - youtu.be/ng3X39lenvg
Just a couple of things to get our minds ready for in the days to come.

 

I get the sense Japanese cars in general, and for sure the Prius, are designed primarily with Japanese domestic market in mind. One example:

I've heard that road salting is rare or non-existent in Japan, so underbody and suspension components are ill-prepared for North American winter environment, rust like crazy.

 

rusting cars are like a box of chocolates

 

Yeah, its easier for a more niche manufacturer to go all electric, but the criticism leveled against Toyota isn't about the all part. They are slow to even do partial electric. Their plug in EV plans were based upon slower growth in that market. Well, the silent majority was apparently was much smaller than expected, and EV sales are taking off. Now Toyota is working on major changes to their EV plan.

 

I haven't heard much talk about what we're going to do with millions of spent lithium batteries. The process to recycle them seems to be very troubling.

Interesting read: https://www.science.org/content/article/millions-electric-cars-are-coming-what-happens-all-dead-batteries

 

One of the early Toyota management quit and started a battery recycling plant. Now Tesla is said to be going to do it too. By the time most batteries wear out, they will be recyclers waiting. Just as there are for lead acid batteries.

 

The info is out there if you want to find it.

There's a pretty strong case for using them as grid storage once they aren't fit for cars. They still have useful capacity and lifetime, they just aren't up to the demands of a mobile application. We can put sheds of them next to wind & solar installations to make them capable of producing stable output all day/night/year. So then we get a few more years out of them while they are still assembled as modular packs.

Then they can be disassembled to component cells and recycled for materials. More than one organization is working to develop automated dis-assembly lines to take the standard cell sizes and properly strip, separate and sort each of the materials within- a heck of a lot more advanced than anybody is doing for other battery types.

And nobody out there has a gadget for recycling used gasoline (car exhaust) into anything useful. So, I'd say they're doing okay.

 

Well......
We have gas concentrators to extract the CO2 from the air. Add to a reactor with water which essentially runs steam reformation in reverse, and we can make methane. Once you have the methane, it can be converted to methanol, syn crude, or other compounds.

Audi had pilot plants making the methane and syn crude. They called it blue crude. It was a more refined product than petroleum. It worked as is in fuel oil power plants, but it taken take much to get diesel from it. Porsche is building a wind powered plant in Chile with an Exxon process that takes the water and CO2 to gasoline.

With enough renewable electricity, we could replace all our fossil fuel products with such technology. The logistics and economy of doing so without require changes in our consumer behavior just mean it isn't possible as a drop in. That gasoline Porsche will make will run around $10 gallon. Which will work for cars used for pleasure, which is their end goal, but not a daily driver now, even a hybrid.

Now a PHEV that is 80%, 90%, or more EV, maybe that will work.

 

I'm aware that the chemistry and physics are possible, but there still isn't a gadget, or purpose-built machine to do this.

 

Gadget, no, but there is a factory.
Porsche pumps first synthetic fuel as Chilean plant finally starts producing - Autoblog
"Porsche's initial plans were for 130,000 liters of the stuff by the end of 2022. Given the date, and the size of that 911's tank (67 liters at the most), it seems clear that goal will come later. Porsche's next target is 55 million liters per year within the next three years. At that volume, Porsche's Michael Steiner says the production cost will drop to roughly $2 per liter."
They announced the beginning of production on Dec 20, and this report didn't include the current production level. If the ramp up precedes as hoped, that $2/L is still more than the taxed price of $1.75 at the pump in Germany. Still going to need batteries and plugs for this to work for most people.

 

You have to pick one or the other. There are no purpose built machines available to recycle the Li-Ion raw materials, nor is there one to recycle exhaust. All attempts that I'm aware of to recycle Li-Ion battery packs have done it by disassembling to sub assemblies and then trying to match degraded cells so that they can be charged in a standard configuration without starting fires.

The Li-Ion battery packs are also further complicated by manufacturers making proprietary form factors and using proprietary formulas and mixtures. I'll pick on Tesla for a moment, simply because there has been a lot of buzz around their new battery design that is integrated into the structural supports of the car. In that case you can not predict (before disassembly) what the battery will be nor how it will be sealed, glued, encased, etc.

A nearby power plant has a large battery installation that experienced a fire last year. It's using new battery packs designed for this purpose. The toxic smoke closed the main road through the area and triggered a shelter in place for the area. They reports said that only "one battery cell" caught fire in the Elkhorn storage battery installation. The amount of smoke would tend to indicate that it was a battery module that had a cascading failure, not just one cell.

More info here:
Recent California Energy Storage Battery Fire Draws Renewed Attention to Storage Safety Issues | American Public Power Association

 

Someone should earmark a Bil for a new study on how many batteries actually make it to a recyclers machine / employee.

With all the different types of recyclable batteries in everyday use, the study could have a field day with the statistics.

 

All I know is our red leaning little poor county recycling takes all the lithium batteries separate from trash...or at least all that residents place in the container. Now what happens after that I don't know.