Uh, okay.
That Toyota has no foresight or the belief that they haven't invested billions in the future of the auto industry - hydrogen and EV - sounds like an "unpopular desire" of your own.
They thought they could dangle the hydrogen carrot and just keep riding their oil infra into the ground, and Tesla screwed all that up.
That's true.
But EVs have a massive infrastructure problem in developing countries which won't be fixed anytime soon or even ever, and somebody has to make cars for them as well.
Tesla spent $1B on their global Supercharger network. Does Toyota not have $1B to invest? Their market cap is $226B, so clearly this isn’t the case. Get building y’all. You just need a charger team to identify locations, coordinate plans and permits with the local AHJ (authority having jurisdiction), and to engage local electrical contractors to receive the equipment and install. Every Toyota dealer is a possible location to operate a charger installer team out of if so desired (for residential and level 2 requirements).
(Tangentially, make sure your fast DC chargers actually work in the cold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq0RAjJ1PKQ ["Kyle finds out that the new Electrify America chargers that they co-developed with BTC don't work in cold temperatures. He also heads to ChargePoint, EVgo, and other EA chargers to see if they have similar issues in this cold snap."])
Norway’s ban on new combustion vehicle sales goes into effect in 2025; registration data shows they’re almost at 100% EV and hybrid sales (with hybrids making up less than 10% of new car sales), and their mobility story hasn’t come to a grinding halt. The evidence is overwhelming that challenges raised (cold weather, charging infra) can be solved for with time and resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
Which is the big problem with top down, ‘lifetime job’ type environments - or authoritarian ones. Thought sometimes they can be flexible, ironically, by blaming ‘the other’ or similar tricks.
I only see a big future for hydrogen in energy storage if it can be made competitive with batteries. It has the advantage of requiring less manufactured mass and costly materials to store more energy and perhaps would be better able to warehouse energy long term.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense as a general-purpose transport fuel, however, in a world where cheaper and more efficient battery EVs already exist.
For hydrogen you have to do much more significant build out. Apartments already have grid connections.
It's not just that. The grid is nowhere up to what is needed to support the majority of vehicles being EVs; take a look at this study[0] done by National Grid in New England, which shows the problem clearly. "Already have grid connections" is not enough for electrified long-distance travel or cargo-hauling, simply due to the amount of power required that far exceeds current capabilities.
Wires are just cheaper and lower maintenance. They are also more general purpose. Improving the grid will improve its robustness generally.
You are aware that liquids can be transported over land, not just in pipes, right? Like we already do for gasoline, in case you need a very concrete and relevant example. At least GP provided data, which is too rare around here.
You lose a lot in oil and gas trucking too, which is part of how you end up with stuff like "driving an EV powered 100% by coal emits less carbon per mile than an average gasoline car." It's not just the vehicle efficiency but the whole end-to-end system efficiency. Trucking fuel around is very expensive.
If you look back a bit, you might see that this whole thread started with me saying that I wasn't that keen on hydrogen. This is one of the reasons that I was suggesting ammonia or swappable batteries instead.
> Trucking fuel around is very expensive.
So is transmission over power lines. Transformers and wires are not free, nor are the rights of way they sit on, or maintenance of same in remote locations. 5-7% is lost in transmission, and more within consumers' homes. Sometimes there are fires. Let's not be too selective about which advantages and disadvantages we focus on for which alternative. That's called cherry picking.
sigh People presenting their personal, and often anomalous, experience as some sort of universal rule is the absolute worst HN habit. You took a statement about two categories of people for whom L1 is not enough, stripped one off, and only addressed the other with an untrue statement (clearly messing up on the difference between L2 and L3 in the process BTW). Are you that sure there isn't one person who's not getting by fine with level 1? That's all it takes for your statement to be false, and in fact statistics show there are many, making your excluded-middle pseudo-argument a bit pathetic.
Let me introduce you to the concept of thresholds. It's not necessary for everyone to need more than L1 regularly for lack of same to be a problem, nor did I claim that. There is simply some percentage of people being "left out in the cold" because of a bad ratio between vehicles and chargers, and we're already hovering right around that level. Availability of charging is already a major limiting factor in adoption, which wouldn't be the case if anything you said were generally true.
The reason I know this is that I own an EV myself. The ad hominems elsewhere in this thread about discouraging EV usage made me laugh. I'm personally doing fine because I own my own home and had my own dedicated 240V circuit put in for charging, but I know many people for whom that's not the case. I'm well aware of things like how cold or speed affects range, or the actual availability of L3 chargers. I want EVs to succeed, and (unlike some here) I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is.
When you see someone claim that working unoccupied public chargers are plentiful, there's always a good chance you're dealing with someone who doesn't even own an EV (the most common case), hardly drives it at all, or works at a FAANG where free charging is a perk. None of those are the real world of most EV drivers.
Please don't parrot lies pushed by the fossil fuel industry. I've seen far too many people on this site that have clearly never been within 100 feet of an EV repeating obviously wrong "information".
There are plenty of first person accounts on YT, Twitter, and other social media where people report being unable to charge their EV because the energy needed to keep the battery warmed exceeds the available power for charging
Please stop blaming everything on some kind of conspiracy by the evil oil industry, you sound like qAnon when you do that.
This bad behavior is well-documented. Start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Please stop trying to dispute facts. If you're going to argue, you should at least attempt to not be ignorant of the basic relevant facts.
Your car is likely going to be using 400-450 wh per mile until it’s warmed up and maybe down to 320 wh per mile for the rest of the trip. That’s ~10 kWh for your one day commute.
Now this is assuming basically a lot of perfect conditions for winter time driving. Also it’s assuming no traffic, because once you add waiting in traffic while heating up the interior of the car the power use skyrockets.
Also this is assuming you’re even able to hit 90% charging efficiency on 110V which honestly I’ve never seen personally.
It helps that I've got a 62 kWh Leaf, so I've got lots of range to start with.
I don't know what your situation is, but you'll honestly probably have good luck with just finding a regular outlet somewhere at work and trickle charging. I've done several vacations where I just asked where an outlet was, and left the car to charge up to 100% for the return trip. It's a lovely trick that gas cars can't duplicate.
This is one of the things non North Americans don’t have to worry about.
Think for a sec. Large concrete structure right?
So you can't lay your wire in the concrete parts, which means you're putting it in conduits...that are exposed, and open to be harvested by people looking to repurpose the copper wiring for other things.
Or you're doing inductive charging via copper loops in parking spaces, but then maintenance is potentially impacted.
Point being "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Nothing is technically complicated about it, but a great many landlords are unwilling to incur even the tiniest expense. Have you never seen an apartment with inadequate insulation? With leaky plumbing? I've seen plenty, even when it was the landlords themselves who ended up bearing a cost greater than simple improvement would have incurred. Sometimes it's a liquidity issue, sometimes it's "boiling frog" syndrome or pure laziness, but no matter the reasons it's reality.
> My apartment in Brooklyn had plugs 3 years ago
How nice for you. Are all of your experiences universal?
Which is to say, nobody made cars for them, but cars made their way there, and they still developed the infrastructure to support them. A solution to the problem will likely be found once there is a problem to be solved.
Once there are sufficient volumes of cheap used EVs being exported to Africa, the infrastructure will naturally emerge to support them.
Thailand has just gone from near-zero charging infrastructure to nationwide fast charging networks and being the leading country in South-east Asia for EV sales, in about 2 years.
It doesn’t take long to turn things around once the right policies and incentives are in place.
Charging networks in the US need ALOT of work, and it appears the stations can not even properly report there outages as there are countless stories of charging spots being reported by the apps as operational only for the EV driver to find them unusable on arrival.
BEV's have a long way to go to build trust with cold weather drivers, and for me this winter has removed any desire I had to buy a BEV in the coming year.
In which case, perhaps this article could be retitled to the exact same thing but with less use of the “tactic”: Toyota CEO talks to other carmakers, warns many of them are cautious on EVs.
Is that a mistake? Would it not be fairly safe to assume that if someone had hard evidence to back up their big claim they would not resort to crediting "a silent majority"? Until they make a falsifiable claim, I'm going to err on the side of "probably bullshit."
By all means, forego a car entirely and ride a bike if you can get away with it.
On the other hand, a lot of people can charge an EV at home, but you cannot fill gas at home.
Hanging out at the charger station pre-smartphones would have been a challenge. I don’t see the challenge now. It may require a little adjustment to existing behavior patterns.
I also rarely charge anywhere other than a regular 110V line at home, no need for hanging out at any charger station. Please stop spreading misinformation.
A quick back-of-the-envelope makes clear that a pure EV future that's structured similarly to what exists today isn't viable. There's ~1.44B cars world wide. Replace them all with EVs, and you and up using something around 130MT of copper just for the cars. Currently commercially viable copper reserves are around ~900MT.
Given that you also need a charger infrastructure, and that humanity has a few other uses for copper, that's problematic.
Thinking about alternatives besides copper-based cars is simply hedging their bets. And while not all car manufacturers have a hydrogen hedge at hand, they all employ plenty of people who can do the basic math above.
EV only is not going to happen without significant shifts either reducing total number of cars by a large number, or reducing the amount of copper needed by a large number. Clearly, car makers don't care about option 1, and there are not that many option 2 alternatives.
“Not that many” alternative metals? Alloys are everywhere.
Also, resource shortages are not a problem you easily engineer yourself out. You need copper. (What do you think is the major component of those alloys?). Conductivity requires copper or silver, and, well, copper is the cheap and plentiful one. Sure, make copper/zinc alloys, but that's not reducing the fundamental need for resources that are scarce at this scale.
(Well, scarce when looked at through a commercial viability lens. If we revolutionize copper mining, things look different. But, just in terms of sustainability, what do you think that will look like? And, yes, "asteroid mining". Which will not happen in the next 20 years, either)
So, no, within the next few decades, the chances for a global EV future aren't high enough to bet a company on it. You can bet on luxury/status EVs. There's even a good chance a large percentage of freight in industrialized countries might move to EV.
But unless you're a boutique car maker, you have a much wider audience than that. And you need to plan for that.
Also, access to aluminum means trading with China, Russia, or India - which means inherent geopolitical threats to your supply chain. (Copper is Peru and Chile, so somewhat less contentious)
Are these issues solvable? Likely. They are, as the adage goes "just engineering problems". But they aren't solved yet, and that means, if you run a business, you hedge.
I’m not surprised your narrative is present within extant automakers because with the exception of perhaps Nissan they are in this market having been dragged here by others’ innovation.
The reason status is winning is not because EVs need to be expensive. It’s because EVs like the Model S Plaid completely destroyed the performance segment of the market. For $120k you could not only beat but outright embarrass any ICE vehicle. ICE vehicles could not compete, and the fast EVs were profitable at lower volumes. EVs redefined the status segment.
Once the market wakes up, which the pandemic has largely accomplished, the transition will be as fast as we can produce the necessary vehicles, and as soon as people can afford them. Global oil conflict only helps the situation.
From the perspective of the USA, the fact remains that we are right on the line of consuming more power than we generate, yet we've made building and operating new power generation facilities unfeasible for mercurial reasons. It takes just one winter storm to trigger rolling blackouts. That should not happen in a modern civilization.
I fail to see the reasoning behind the EV push, not only from a supply standpoint, but an environmental one, as well. How can we expect the grid to go from handling around 2,000,000 EV to 250,000,000 just in under 10 years? And how much strip mining will nations (mostly China) need to do to create (non-recyclable) EV batteries?
When the Gov of CA tells you that you can't buy a ICE vehicle, that only EVs will be allowed to be sold, but then in the next breath, tells you not to charge your EVs, you have to ask yourself if what you're advocating for falls within the realm of sanity or lunacy.
Akio Toyoda recognizes this. It is physically impossible without a complete rework of the grid, new power stations, and a network of charging stations that rival the network of gas stations, untold reserves of rare earth minerals, and a host of other concerns managed ...all in under 10 years.
The infrastructure isn't there. The money isn't there. The generation isn't there. The rare earth minerals aren't there and we'd have to destroy large parts of earth's surface to find them with no guarantee of success, PLUS use incredible amounts of electricity and diesel fuel to mine, transport, and process those minerals.
Terrible priorities and terrible long-term leadership got us here. We're careening head-long into a man-made disaster on a civilization scale.
In this case, it's transparently obvious that Toyota is regretting wasting the past 30 years foregoing battery research in favor of their hydrogen boondoggle.