Featured In May, Toyota Prius Prime Sales In Japan Went Through The Roof

Holy Carp!

We are 8 months into Prius Prime sales and other than the NorthEast discounts, Toyota can't get them here fast enough to come close to the demand.

Bob Wilson

 

would love to see non cali sales, seems there are owners here from just about every state.

 

Uh, Mississippi? Louisiana? Wyoming?

Bob Wilson

 

could be, who knows?

 

Note that sales for April were under a thousand, and Toyota needed more incentives to move what they did in May there.

 

a hugely successful Prime does NOT bode well for Japan's Hydrogen car project - where they want to use Australian brown coal to reform hydrogen (NIMBY) ... leaving Australia to deal w/ tons of toxic coal ash etc, just so Japan can brag they have zero emission fuel Cel cars. I suggest Toyota needs to raise their Prime plug-in pricing about 50% higher so that the Prime will be less attractive & thereby make the Mirai look more appealing.

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Of course California should quadruple electric vehicle charging so the hydrogen fool-cell will make sense. <NOT!>

Bob Wilson

 

They are still averaging about 3000 sales a month. That's twice the number of Mirai sold to date, but they are on track to meet their sales target. Toyota just needs to set the Prime's targets higher.

 

shh. The chairman of the board says no one wants plug-ins ;-) Really there is so little hydrogen coming from Australia it doesn't matter from an environmental point of view, but making the pollution in another place greenwashes the pollution ;-) I believe akio toyoda is doing a good job. Politically in the company he could not reduce fuel cell ferver. He did the tesla deal, greatly improved the camry hybrid, and greatly improved the prius phv to the prime.

Japan though is a good test bed for fuel cell tech, as the country seems willing to spend a lot of money to show it off for the 2020 Olympics. Really compared to US government waste, this is small waste ;-) But I get pissed off when Mary hydrogen from CARB gets US taxpayer money for the game, and doesn't accept that a car like the prime, i3, and volt may actually do a lot more for reduced transportation pollution in California than fuel cells.

Telsa has put good infrastructure in for its cars. Prime, volt, and i3 don't need any more charging in california. If california does do more charging, it will be because big auto wants california to subsidize other manufacturers versus tesla, which seems counter productive if you are actually for cleaner air. The policy shift should be based on how low pollution from the prime really is, and give phev vendors proper zev credits while they raise the zev requirement. Prime = 0 credits, tesla model 3 = 4 credits, mirai = 9 credits. Its a little crazy. How about model 3 gets 4 credits, mirai gets 2 credits, prime gets 1/2 credit ;-)

I believe toyota although well behind, will fire up mirai incentives to reach 3000 in US (california and hawaii) cumulative for the 3 years ending this year. Politically they will do it to save face. prime has sold 8073 in the first 5 months of this year. With more inventory and dealer training in the US it would sell much better.

I really think that with the Camry hybrid so improved. Toyota should design the next generation prius as plug in only. Maybe a small 4 kwh pack for those that want a cheaper ride with more cargo space, and a 10 kwh pack for standard pack that allows great performance in bev mode. With lithium battery prices falling, I doubt the 4 kwh pack would cost much more than current prius packs, but could seriously improve city fuel economy, and allow for more engine improvements for fuel economy on long trips.

 

• make the one-way clutch universal - it doesn't weight much and provides a significant performance improvement
• modular battery - so different capacities can be easily configured

Bob Wilson

 

different capacities? that'll never happen . . . . .
oh wait ...

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I don't Tesla is using modular packs.
They just have two different ones.

 

'Currently' ? (pun intended)
75kW, 90kW, & 100's there are several legacy's though too
40's - 60's - 70's & 85's.
7 in total
.

 

New technology combined with Toyota reliability and existing customer base?
This is what they should have done in 2010.
The Volt would have been still born, the Leaf would have not done nearly as well and if they had come out with a BEV Tesla would not have done as well.
Once the Prime goes nationwide it should stay in first place until the Model 3 gets up to full speed.

 

When I hear modular, I think of something made up of smaller units, the modules, to allow easy manufacture of different sizes. For instance, an EV company makes 1.1kWh size packs containing the battery cells and cooling structure that they can easily connect to each other to assemble packs of varying capacities for their cars. There are cost savings in doing this.
Modular | Define Modular at Dictionary.com

Tesla does not do that. They make a separate, stand alone pack from the ground up for each capacity they offer. The 40kWh was an odd case because of low orders.

Except Toyota wanted the PiP to make a profit from the start, which I don't see as having anything to do with their FCEV plans.

 

Tesla does pack the individule battery cells into modules. 16 when if comes to their 100kWh pack.
I don't know if it fits your definition. I do know of some people that have made other sized battery packs (for home backup) using some of the modules.

 

The cells get arranged into stacks, sticks, units, modules, etc., and those get arranged into larger units. Once those are wired together, the case and cooling system are designed around the final pack size. The structure of batteries makes them modular by nature.

I'm talking about including a case and cooling structure with each module or subunit. So instead of making a 70kWh, 90, and 100 pack, you make a 20 to 25 kWh module. Then you wire and plumb 3 together for the 70, 4 for the 90, and 5 for the 100.

Perhaps Tesla does this already, but it doesn't appear so in photos of the packs, and there are some drawbacks to a modular system that can make it unattractive for smaller production products. It does give up some design flexibility.

 

Our BMW i3 has eight modules that can be field replaceable but on Tessa patent refers to a series-parallel cell configuration. If one cell fails, that series string can be isolated and the parallel strings keep the car rolling until it can be repaired. Very clever solution.

Bob Wilson

 

Well there are 16 sheets each in the 85 kwh and 100 kwh battery. There are 444 cells in each sheet of the 85 kwh, and 516 in each sheet of the 100 kwh. The newer cells also have more current. The battery hooks up to the same cooling and cable, but the 516 cell sheets have different shaped and sized cooling channels in the sheet. Changing over requires simply a different spacer and software that understands the limits of the different pack. Ludicrus mode though in a newer 100 kwh car has higher current hardware to take advantage of the ability to extract more power from the pack. I believe the 60 kwh has fewer sheets (and because of it lower voltage), and each sheet has fewer cells. If I understand it correctly it simply requires a different spacer and software also, but because of lower voltage and current, it can not achieve the same performance. Non ludicrous hardware is the same otherwise. By designing it in this way, failure of individual cells have very little effect on the battery. They could have fewer cells per sheet, and make full voltage sheets, but that really doesn't buy anything in terms of modularity. you could easily replace a sheet in a 60 kwh battery with a 100 kwh sheet (6.4 kwh), and it simply would be under utilized.

In the case of a prime battery, much more expensive and bigger cells are used. You could easily divide it. Make 2 Kwh modules and connect in parrellel. Say you want the same voltage as the prime, simply make the cells 22% as big, and connect the same number in parrellel. But no real need for that. ;-) I mainly thought 2 sizes, which could use diifferent cell layout. I spit balled 4 kwh and 10 kwh, the first as small size to maximize cargo area, but still have good electrical acceleration, the second was simply to get to 25 mile epa and better acceleration than current hybrid prius despite the added weight.

I would definitely call tesla's design modular. The modules are different than you are talking about though. Only drawback is the smaller packed vehicles are over engineered, but given economy of parts, and the fact the battery is a very expensive part, it likely does not cost tesla much ;-)