Toyota working on improved Prius Plug-in as part of the next generation Prius platform

Any new word on it?
The company in your other link was using magnetic resonance, not induction though.

It isn't the cost to the car that is the hurdle, it's the charging stations.
Yes, a smaller battery saves on cost, space, and weigh. But for it to work out to the best mpg improvement for most people, there needs to be a charger at the end of their trip. A wireless charger is going to cost more do to the extra equipment. In areas where vandalism, or snowplows, are a concern, the coils will need to be put under the pavement. So installation costs go up, and the charging efficiency will drop with the greater distance between the coils.

With most trips between home and work, the car owner will be the one paying for the charger, and the employer the one at work. The owner might opt for it, but the employer likely won't. Cords are simply cheaper. Mass production of induction coils won't change that.

And Toyota wanted to sell 16,000 PPI's in that time frame. They didn't hit their claimed goals, but plug in segment sales are trending up. The Prius wasn't sales winner until the second generation.

 

The great thing about the wireless is that even in the conditions you mentioned, you still get some charge, just not as much with the lower charging rate.
Still the added value argument holds, I think. It's a lot like people seeking out hotspots in the early days of WiFi....it really made your business seem cutting edge.
I would put the slow/low charging in some lots as being somewhat akin to getting free WiFi at a coffee shop, only to find that the bandwidth is really low.

 

The difference between the wifi and a charging spot is that the person has to come into the business to use it. The charging spot could bring in a few more customers, but it might also get used by a person who doesn't even come into the store. With that possibility, I don't see a business ponying up the extra cash for a wireless system.

If a person is paying for the charge, they won't be happy with a slower than normal charge rate. They might not be happy paying more for a wireless charge either.

 

I don't understand why so many people are so focused on public charging stations.
Most people will want to charge at home and/or at work...anything else is a bonus.
At home you pay the market price per kwh...at work it will be free (employee benefit) or market rate or less. Retail chargers might be free to get you into a business...but most, as shown so far will be wildly expensive except for emergency use. The cheapest ones that charge per kwh are about 50 c per kwh... 5x what I pay. And PG&E offers even lower EV night rates.

Mass market buyers won't be fooled by lots of expensive public chargers. IMO, people would rather buy bigger batteries that they don't need and charge more at home. Just so they have the longer range just in case...the same as having more seats and 4WD just in case.

Mike

 

Prius wasn't a sales loser either. The limit set is what got sold. That's a big difference.

 

See, how easy it is, you got it then!

 

I heard my name twice, so I guess that deseves an answer.

First I have no idea what toyota is thinking by charging $12K more for the phv in Europe. I know people are pissed about that.

THe question about how much toyota is paying for the batteries, I don't know. We have better information from other manufacturers. Ford actually made public what they were paying LG Chem in the low volume focus EV was $650/kwh in 2012, and surely are paying less to panasonic for more volume in the energis, from the quarterly reports, tesla is paying less than $400/kwh. These validate the McKinsey study

Battery technology charges ahead | McKinsey & Company


Toyota, if its not paying much more than Ford, GM, Nissan, Tesla, they are paying at most $600 doday/kwh. They should be paying at least $400/kwh for nimh. At 4.4kwh x $600- 1.4kwhx400 = $2100 as a worst case price toyota is paying for the lithium premium versus nimh. Now I don't believe that, IMHO it is lower, as toyota should be able to negotiate a better price as we think everyone else has in 2013. These are just battery costs, they don't include the years of r&d toyota put into the car, or the other components, but.... to make the battery bigger those costs would not be greatly increased.

 

Give a car a £5,000 subsidy and the car manufacturer immediately bungs the price up by £5,000. Simple.

The UK PIP should be £28k - £5k = £23k. Sounds reasonable.

Toyota UK want it to be their trophy model, so £28k suddenly becomes £32k - £5k = £28k = nobody buys them. The UK Leaf costs between £21k + £25k after the £5k, so how a Prius with 15 mile range costs £28k after rebate is beyond me. (unless price manipulation has been going on)

 

This is the company to keep in mind: WiTricity
Using MIT technology, allowing wireless electricity up to 2 meters w./ minimal losses.
Their technology appears to be superior to all the others

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wireless energy promise powers up

Also, see:

Wireless EV Charging Could Be Embedded in Highways


This is an even more sophisticated setup, allowing 10kw while the car is in motion


See also:

In-Road Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging Breakthrough Yields 90% Efficiency | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

Wireless charging may be key to electric vehicle success, BMW and Nissan already developing technology - NY Daily News

 

What was in this table back in 2003?
Overall sales of ICE-only Pick-up and SUVs have plunged in 10 years presence of hybrid vehicles?

Time runs against but takes its...time...

 

Take a look at this wireless system. Can you honestly say it would cost more than the wired ones your company added? From the specs, it actually appears to be cheaper. And it doesn't require digging up pavement to put a charging pad underneath:

Magnet-based wireless EV charger could be smaller, safer, and cheaper


This is a real product with impressive specs:

WiTricity Corp. — WiT-3300 Electric Vehicle Charging Kit

On this, we are in agreement.

Imagine that a wireless standard is agreed up sometime in the 2015-2020 timeframe.
Well, starting before 2025, there will be massive incentive to deploy stations that can sell electricity to the millions of wireless-enabled hybrids out there.

If the work of installing a public wired L2 station is being done, then the cost of adding wireless is marginal.
Yes, there may not be EV's for years that can use the wireless, but there is precedent for this sort of thing.

- In the early 2000's, bluetooth was sold as a value-added feature in many phones and devices even though many people didn't know what it was or how they could use it. But they wanted to have the feature to be "future-proof"

- When I bought my first 4g phone and tablet, 4g service had not yet come to my area, so they had to operate on 3g. So, technically I was 'overpaying', but I was happy to do so, I didn't have to go out and upgrade devices when the 4g finally arrived

- Early smartphones had 4g, 3g and 2g. Once the network was more robust, the 2g was dropped completely, because the phone company (Verizon) was confident 3g/4g could handle all traffic.

Similarly, all public charging points deployed, say post-2025 could be exclusively wireless, as the non-wireless EV population becomes a tiny minority.

Some fun with numbers:

Gen 2 Prius has 1.3 kwh battery pack, but uses 50%, or 650 wh

Most journeys end with 6/8 bars on the display, meaning 162.5 wh could be topped off

Imagine stopping at a business.......convenience store, dry cleaner, pharmacy, whatever for only 5 minutes.
A simple wireless system outputting 3kw would provide 250 wh in that time......enough to completely top off battery to 8/8 or full green

250 wh is good for 1-1.2 miles in a Gen2, or enough in my case to make the roundtrip to the convenience store without 1 drop of gas.

This would be a very simple and cheap system (on the car).

The infrastructure side would be more expensive and take time.

And yes, I do agree that in the short-term, the most logical & economical solution is corded L2 chargers at both home and work.

 

Got what? That plug in sales are low now, but are climbing. Following the same pattern as the first hybrids. So showing disdain for the segment based on current sales numbers is short sighted.

A snow plow on a 2500+ pick up will rip that WiTricity pad right up. And I see winter as the best time to have wireless charging. The other system should be fine with the marker posts. But there several competing systems out are now. None of which would seem compatible. With the various plug standards, there is at least a possibility of an adapter between them.

The price difference could come down, but for the short EV range plug in to displace more gasoline, there needs to be many of these chargers installed. Compare it to Tesla's Supercharger network. With Tesla, you only need the charger bank about every 150 miles apart. It is only needed for long trips. The day to day charging is covered at home. Maybe at work, but I hope a Tesla owner would let the shorter ranged Leafs and such take those spots.

What you envision would require wireless chargers to be installed at nearly every location a person might drive too. Even at the same price as a corded charger, this network is going to cost more to build. And by the time it looks like it will be in place, the cost savings of a smaller battery will be smaller. We are looking $200 a kWh for a lithium pack by 2020, and super capacitors are starting to show up in cars now.

 

no, they are not following the same pattern at all... it is completely different as now you have many manufacturers and much lower sales than estimated which made some battery manufacturers go bankrupt.

and these sales that we have are fueled by record discounts because manufacturers need credits.

Right now, nobody but Tesla is meeting their sales goals, even half of them, and Tesla is doing 20k cars a year.

Dont get me wrong - if i could buy plugin for $1k extra, and if I could charge it everywhere, I would buy it right now. What I am saying is that people are not buying it - I personally would... heck, i would buy a Tesla right away.

 

Not so sure about this. Further research on their system shows ability to charge up to 2 meters away @ 40% efficiency, and progressively higher closer in.
Not sure a snow plow is going to dig up that much pavement!

 

Plug-in sales are way ahead of where hybrid sales were 31 months after introduction : TreeHugger


Absolutely, plug-ins are growing much faster. It isn't even close. There are more than 2 players, and things are starting to stick with a bredth of different cars things are much better than hybrids when introduced in Japan, Europe or america.

Kind of smashes the prius when introduced. It took the prius 5 years to get to 20,000 in sales, and that was at a big loss. Tesla is there already, there, and profitable, and a brand new car company starting with no dealers or customers. It kind of turns that no body wants an plug-in into a giatnt lie. same as gm saying no one wants a hybrid its all a trick about subsidies when the prius came out and was subsidized.

Perhaps 100% growth isn't enough for the nay sayers. THat 5 companies need to exceed expectations, but that seems rather silly to me.

They aren't for you, sorry.

Sure, you can have heated spots to melt the snow. The question is do you want to realy on people building those spots for you. Put in a biger battery and you don't need the government to pay companies to put chargers everywhere. I parked in a garaged downtown this afternoon. One of the 2 charger spots on my level was iced by an escalade. A leaf was parked next to it charging. The leaf driver left a nasty note. It was just sad, but I'm sure the leaf could have parked somewhere else to charge if both spots were iced.

 

Sure, burying it will protect it from the plow, but then that jacks the installation price up. There isn't going to be a low price and safe from harm installation with these things.

Impressive that there can be such distance between the car and charging pad, but 40% efficiency is horrible. You want notice it in regards to cell phone charging, but a charging plug in has a power draw along the lines of a hair dryer and large vacuum.

Yes, the individual companies have missed their optimistic sales projections, but the segment as a whole is growing in sales.

The credits only really apply to sales in California, and some of the discounts may be driven by that. More of the BEV models for sale are available, or will be, for sale outside California, than not. Tesla went through a lot of trouble just cash in credits for a few years.

 

Yes but those extra features only cost $5 or $10 to put in...not $1000-$2000.

More fun with numbers...all this trouble just to gather 2 or 3 cents of electricity?
Not going to happen. The market will move towards bigger batteries and Superchargers.

Mike

 

Ummm....Ok.
Do you see any difference here?
Hint:
Cell phones are about $200, so bluetooth $5 - 10 = 2.5 - 5% of total price
PHEV with decent range: $40k, so $1000-2000 = -wait for it!- 2.5-5% of total price

Ummmmm.........No.
Again, do you see a difference?
No one is "gathering" electricity for its own sake. They are DISPLACING gasoline. And it really adds up.
And the trouble is really with your own view.
You have trouble imagining how this wireless charging system COULD evolve, so you are looking for any excuse for it to NOT happen.

I'm sure sending DVD's through the mail seemed crazy in the early 2000s. too.......

A bold prediction! (And a tad arrogant since there are no qualifiers (or evidence)).
I'll make one too:
And, even though I personally don't want it to happen, I am not going to cook up reasons that it won't.
I will, however, offer the qualifier that it COULD happen, and that is fuel cells:

There have been very successful efforts recently to lower or eliminate platinum use, which was the main drag on lowering price. Add to that low natural gas prices for cheap hydrogen and FCV's coming from Toyota and Mercedes by 2015, it's anyone's guess where the market goes.

Read this:
Toyota Sees Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car Prices Dropping Dramatically - EVWORLD.COM

You might want to upgrade to a Tesla since they agree with you where "the market WILL move towards..................." but the manufacturer of your car does not

 

Wanted to make point about the wireless charging that I don't believe has been elaborated upon.

I think we have to evaluate Toyota's decision to include wireless charging in the upcoming Prius through the right lens.

That is, we need to view it the way Toyota views it. As has been discussed here (and which seems consensus), is that Toyota is going for the mass market at this point, not necessarily technological leadership or novelty.

They did the hard work on the Prius, and now they want to leverage the tech to pay dividends. The tech-leading models are now the Volt, Model S and VW XL1.

Toyota's technological progress in the near future is not coming with a plug, it seems. And I don't mean "not with a plug" as in wireless charging, I mean:
2015 Toyota hydrogen fuel cell car will have 300-mile range, Tokyo debut

So, the relevant question is, why put in wireless charging?
Clearly, Toyota is not trying to be "cool", I really think everything they have been doing with the Prius lately is aimed at expanding its appeal to a wider audience.
And I really believe -I know it's going to sound sexist (but I'm sure companies do consumer research on this sort of thing)- that women will really like the wireless charging!

So, obviously it would help the industry to move towards a standard in wireless charging. A bigger battery or supercharger -even battery swap- cannot possibly hope to compete with this:

Wireless EV Charging Could Be Embedded in Highways

And this is the logical destination if we take the first step of making every hybrid wireless.

Couple more things:

EV/hybrid/early adopters are very interested in things that the median consumer is not.

example:

Let's say a midsize Fusion Energi/Accord-type PHEV-20 costs about $40,000.
Let's further say that PHEV-10 version (with wireless charging) costs about $35,000.
ask yourself: who is doing more to advance the infrastructure (through demand for public charging) for Plug-in cars?

It's not the $40k sedan. Sure, those particular drivers are highly motivated to charge up, but as others have pointed out, they are more likely to charge up at home or work, and they don't 'need' the public charge with their gasoline backup. There will be fewer of these sedans, too, because of the higher price.

Meanwhile, the $35k PHEV-10 sedan has sold more, and could achieve mpg on par with the PHEV-20 if there are frequent charge ups. This seems to be the direction Prius is going.
Wired Frequent charge ups = inconvenient
Wireless Frequent charge ups = convenient (and cool!) (and cheaper!)

Right now public L2 stations are at malls, restaurants, movie theaters and other areas where you spend a few hours, (and lots of cars congregate) but once millions of cars out there have this tech, stations will migrate to other types of businesses.

It's all about throughput.
(1) An L2 charger at a restaurant can sell electricity to 1 car, 1 hour at at time.
(2) An L2 charger at a dry-cleaner can sell electricity to 10 cars over the course of 1 hour, as each entered and exited the parking spot.

In both cases, the amount of Kwh's sold is the same.

Obviously the industry starts as wired L2 stations in mostly (1) and similar businesses
later, it migrates to wireless, and when the feature becomes near-ubiquitous in cars, then (2) happens.

By that time, people are going to demand wireless because almost everywhere they go there will be one, and plugging in will either be a hassle or something that they forget to do. Also, there could be stretches of roadway where they could pick up a charge, which the wired cars won't be able to do.

 

This is a poor analysis. The chart simply shows that the spending on EV is growing faster than HEV. You can't draw the conclusion about sales rate without actually using sales numbers. So from this data how can you measure the number of LEAF, Prius or Tesla sales volume?