Featured It turns out that Akio Toyoda was right

That's exactly what PHEV will thrive in this next decade. Being a wealthy industrial nation, getting any type of investment in the future was a painful & disappointing process. Elsewhere, there are even greater challenges. Households jumping onboard with a PHEV is a big step forward. It enables the purchase of an entry-level BEV offering, which is a win for everyone since that carries the entire market forward.

Unfortunately, we have had the supposed BEV leader resting on it laurels. Tesla completely ignored the entry-level market, handing over the opportunity to BYD. We knew of the profound impact that could have long ago, when Toyota made statements about the entry-level market. We were told how an affordable BEV would be cheap to fuel & maintain while also delivering performance formally exclusive to performance ICE vehicles with the silence of luxury vehicles.

That paradigm-shift was not taken seriously. Cramming more battery into the vehicle to compensate for efficiency shortcomings was key... hence Tesla's fall from grace with Cybertruck, now an industry icon of what not to do. Seeing Toyota strive for balance, hence the modest range & power for bZ4X, has been reassuring. Next will be a boom from RAV, where an expectation of an HEV base with PHEV becoming a common choice, there's great potential. It's reasonable for a BEV model to become the next-gen version of bZ4X too.

So whether or not 3-row BEV offerings attract a large market share, the core consumer-base... those shopping for RAV4... are being targeted. That makes the enablement of smaller offerings realistic... Urban Cruiser on the BEV side and something leveraging the Prius/CH-R platform for PHEV. It's all about being diverse & flexible. That's an approach Toyota thrives with while others struggle. If all you have is level-1 for charging, that's ok.

 

Because you got to choose where you live?

It's true that the range of our vehicle choices is influenced by government regulation. These regs look to have been especially hard on the small, cheap car part of the market and gotten new car buyers to a point where getting a big and expensive truck is seen as normal.

If you and I are steered toward $80k three ton trucks made of airbags and wifi transmitters so we can watch videos while we crash into each other and walk away, it's great that we can walk away from it, but what got us to that point is to be regretted.

 

Free the coal rollers!

 

Last I looked...none of the examples "I gave" are currently illegal in the US....and I don't guilt others for their choice.

 

I think I get what Isaac meant. Used to be a pretty good streetcar system in Detroit. The governments (to whatever degree local, state, fed were involved) never made it illegal to ride the streetcar, it just got a lot harder to do after the decision to pave over the tracks. I'm sure it would be fully legal to ride a streetcar now if you could find one.

(Well, now recently, after all these decades, there finally is one—one—again, going up and down Woodward. And maybe connects reasonably easily to the 3-mile elevated circle that goes one direction around downtown and opened in 1987 without anything to connect with.)

 

Well, you did give quite a list. But it is still limited to what manufacturers and governments have strived to offer and incentivize.

Exactly. There used to be a train that ran though here, I and I know people that used to use it too. But no more, and public transportation towards the west doesn't exist any more.

Not just that, but it's kind of hypocritical to say that incentivizing and disincentivizing certain parts of transportation are "forcing them upon us" while others are "perfectly fine to do." Why is incentivizing EVs "forcing them upon us" but incentivizing gasoline production isn't? EV's aren't illegal, neither is gasoline, but why change their price and then say people have free choice because it's the price the government wants them to have?

Another one was bailing out auto companies that were going bankrupt. Will they bail out Rivian and others if they go bankrupt producing EVs?

 

Pick your poison...let others pick theirs. It's not that complicated.

 

If you don't like the political process that pulled up streetcar tracks and influences current prices, why would you trust that process to conveniently and efficiently transport you?

I've used public transportation for big chunks of my life. I think it gets romanticized.

 

There is a big gap between a hybrid and EREV. The Ramcharger example has an EV range 4 miles short of the 40kWh Leaf, and has one pedal driving. It is also built on a BEV platform. So Stellantis did all the BEV development for the EREV. Which raises how the article left out the fact that the EREV was always planned with the BEV. It is making news of a change in introduction order sound like a major back pedaling on BEVs.

That change in order is happening because real world results with competitor BEV pick ups while towing has shown what the range reduction can be, which is compounded by lack in highway charging. There are roles where a BEV doesn't work now, and possibly never. Customers want the Ramcharger for hauling, towing, and trips. In day to day use, it is going to be a BEV with that 145 mile range.

The Wrangler 4xe is the top selling PHEV in the US. It isn't like Stellantis was going straight to BEVs and bypassing hybrids before this news.

As for Akio, EV sales are still growing faster than ICE ones, and BEV market share in the US is about the same as noplug hybrid.

PHEVs don't cost less in several cases. The Rav4 PHV is about $6000 more than the bZ4X in starting MSRP. The Kona Electric is about the same as the Prius PHV. Same with the base Leaf and Prius hybrid.

The battery cost for the PHEV is less than a BEV, but it adds an ICE, and supporting equipment, to the cost. That includes the cost to test and certify the car for emissions. Plus, it adds to those costs for efficiency ratings. Then the owner will likely see higher maintenance costs for a PHEV over a BEV. Combined with differences in fuel costs, a PHEV that is cheaper to buy could end up near the same in total ownership costs to a BEV.

Toyota had talked about expanding hybrid options years earlier than they actually did. They could have made the last Camry generation hybrid only, like they did in Japan. They talk about hybrids being a great solution, but delayed their introduction in order to sell more ICE models. They now want to get more profits out of hybrids, because they greatly underestimated the growth of plug ins.

Not being prepared and underinvested for those plug ins is why Akio is talking up hybrids now. It is also why he was fired as Toyota CEO.

Maybe the others should have done more with hybrids. Though making an EREV is cheaper to do when you have a BEV platform, than trying to make a competitive BEV on an ICE platform.

 

And, at least those in Toronto Canada, they were purely electric!

 

I'm not saying one is better than the other. All I'm saying is you can't say the government is becoming more fair by taking away incentives for certain vehicles and disincentives for others when it keeps incentivizing and disincentivizing other parts of the transportation sector.

 

For me it's not trying to save money vs. gasoline. It's more about avoiding gas stations and fill-ups. As car-jacking and stuff is getting more common, I don't want my wife at a gas station. And not in cold weather either. So she got a BEV. Yes, it was overpriced, but it has Toyota reliability. It's great around town.

My Prius is getting old. I retired and no longer need a car for a very long commute. She is still working and can not take the pick-up to work. So I am replacing the old prius with a RAV4 PHEV. Also overpriced, but will get us back and forth to our second (soon to be retirement) house, where there are no charging stations along the last half of the 3-state drive. So we will have an ICE, a PHEV and a BEV, and all options are covered.

Economically, I should keep the prius and drive the truck. But 13 mpg vs 45+ makes a lot more trips to the gas station.

As a note, electricity is fairly cheap for us. I guesstimate we have saved about $2,000 buying electrons instead of gas for the BEV in a year and a half. Will it pay for the overpriced portion of the car? Maybe, eventually, but that's not the point!

 

I had to stop at this quote which I've slightly edited:

Toyota has gained ground by prioritizing hydrogen fuel cells, and hybrids over battery electric vehicles,​

Regardless, the local Toyota dealer has nothing in their new car inventory that I find attractive. There is an ancient 2013 Model S which may come with free, lifetime charging at SuperChargers.

Bob Wilson

 

These days, at least in this region, Vehicles are allocated to a dealer by the distributor and, many times sold before hitting the dealer lot. That is how I bought my Camry. I put down a deposit in October for a car that was built early November and I picked it up slightly after mod November. Before that there was a vehicle allocated to a different dealer but, when I called them, I found out they had already accepted a deposit on it.

 

I'm on a similar page. Gasoline is reasonably cheap. Not cheap are hybrid Toyotas, insurance and tires. If you just want to save money, a bigger, faster better handling VW Jetta for 22k USD is a better bet. A car you hate that saves you a little money is a burden, while a car you are happy to have is a cost that's easier to accept.

I find the drive system interesting. Toyota have deleted the clutch and accessory belt and reduced most of the inefficiency associated with AWD.

 

It's almost comical Toyoda San would think he was proven right. The Ram Charger has a hundred kwh battery pack considering buffers. And Toyota still doesn't have the resources to provide even that any vehicle.
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There might not be any process that I blindly "trust" to conveniently and efficiently transport me, taking into account knock-on effects and externalities and all. Abdicating it all to private CEOs isn't a process I trust all that much more. Maybe the political process, to borrow from Churchill, could be the worst such process except for the others that have been tried from time to time.

 

Funny part is BYD in China is building sodium-ion electric cars that are just as affordable for the world as the lowest priced gasoline powered vehicles and how does the world market respond? The lobbyists for auto-makers claim affordable electric vehicles are a national security risk and get them banned in their countries.

Yet again, a better way forward is met with excuses and condemnations. Not really any different than the same stupid belligerence auto-makers had when their lobbyist successfully fought and prevented for a decade that all vehicles be required to have seatbelts.

 

Ironic that so much ado with the EREV now - Ah La the Ramcharger. And now - even GM is looking at reviving its Chevy Volt, in a bigger platform. How times change.

 

Do not forget the sedan market either. Not everybody wants an SUV or a hatch.