* * *

No, not really -- https://www.drive.com.au/news/volkswagen-group-cariad-execut...

Electric cars are significantly easier than ICEs to develop electrically and mechanically. Car companies are notoriously bad at writing software. These are orthogonal statements.

You can custom order electric versions of random gas vehicles. Toyota can make an EV. https://www.zelectricmotors.com/tesla-porsche https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk/

But they are a lot harder to drive, mainly because you have not got any engine noise feedback.

Just like if I were to buy a Porsche with a flappy paddle gearbox, I'd ask their Sonderwunsch dept, to put a clutch peddle in, for those times I need to dip the clutch in order to gain control of the vehicle when driving on the limit because of the reasons why the 930 got its nickname the Widow Maker.

At best all I could do at the moment with a flappy paddle gearbox is try to boot the gearbox into a high gear like 6 or 7 and hope it can change gear fast enough whilst hoping the engine is not too powerful to act like the handbrake has been pulled up unceremoniously when taking my foot off the accelerator.

Now where in the controls do I alter the regen amount on an electric car, in order to stop it from contributing to an accident when driving on the limit? I bet its not a single action control, but something buried deep inside a menu somewhere. Of course the added weight of the batteries and thus increased weight of the vehicle, makes the experience much more like driving an electric train on the open road, stable and safe most of the time, but one hell of an accident when one does occur!

If you're driving a Porsche "on the limit" I hope you're on a racetrack and not the public roads.

You have heard of snow, ice, rain, mud and sand, you do find them on the open road you know.

Glad to see your default impression of Porsche is speed though, that reinforces my desire to purchase one. :-)

Thing is the 911 Dakar which is ideal for the above mentioned conditions doesnt come with a towing eye, so I'd have to have the surfboards on the roof rack or poking out through the sunroof, and I've got no where to tow some jet skis if I wanted to hit the beach but you can do anything you like between the high and low water mark on a UK beach and I know some fantastic beaches perfect for this car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqc-HPeaQv8

Maybe drive a little slower on public roads?

You're talking about a gearbox. Those aren't generally used in EVs, because an electric motor will happily put out tens of thousands of RPMs with plenty of torque at low speeds.

They arent in EV's the motors are wound to deliver a certain characteristic of a motor, but EV's nearly all have fantastic RPM abilities with max torque available through the entire rev range.

Toyota I think have announced they are simulating a gearbox in one of their new EV's which in my opinion is an admission that EV's are much harder to control because the need to feather the accelerator becomes a necessity unless the rate of acceleration is dialed back by the manufacturer. And then extra acceleration performance sold as an in car purchase like we are now seeing in some cars with heated seats can be sold unless the owner doesnt know someone who can hack the vehicle management system.

But just like many people complained about the brakes of the mk1 and mk2 VW golfs and polos, and porsche's in the 964's and earlier ie pre-ABS brakes, what those people complaining about is exactly how you want your brakes to work like if you dont have or need ABS. I could apply the brakes in such a way, I could have the front passenger side wheel locked up, but the remaining brakes not locked and then feathering the brakes so as to not flat spot the tyre.

Its virtually impossible to do that in todays ABS braking system world and I would always switch the traction control and other systems off because I could react faster than the systems could. Although I have to admit the Mercedes AMG S63 has for over a decade now, have a better braking system which enables the rear end to slide out a bit more around roundabouts in certain conditions, like what is today known as drift mode.

> which in my opinion is an admission that EV's are much harder to control because the need to feather the accelerator becomes a necessity unless the rate of acceleration is dialed back by the manufacturer

Are you speaking from personal experience here? The accelerator takes some getting used to, but most people adapt in like 30 or so seconds. What Toyota wants is something on an EV that simulates a manual transmission...for people who like sports cars, they like shifting. Sort of like EVs that put a subwoofer under your butt to simulate voom voom engine sounds. These are niche products.

No not driven an EV yet, I havent seen any that I like, and I hate driving big heavy cars, because they tend to slide off sidewise on bends, so anything over 1500kgs is pushing it for me, which discounts virtually all EV's.

They are heavy, but the very low center of gravity makes sliding off on bends very difficult.

So how exactly does the higher mass of EV's and lower centre of gravity change the centrifugal and momentum force?

I think Pirelli and Michelin will like to know this one as will half of the experts in physics!

In racing, there is something called Marbles. Now this is debris, typically rolled chucks of rubber thats peeled off tyres on a race track, but on the open road, this will typically be aggregate, chunks of stone that has been released from the road surface.

You find this on the edges of roads or on the outer edge of roundabouts.

These are an absolute nightmare to drive on, but if you have a lightweight car you can drive on these parts of the roundabout fast enough to undertake people who cut across to the inner lane of the roundabout, even in the wet.

I would not dare attempt that in an EV, the car would just just slide off the road. I dont care for the lower center of gravity that much, in fact if its too low it starts to affect the suspension and handling, where the suspension hits the bump stops.

Front wheel drive diesels have this problem over the front axle, where their suspension bottoms out on the bump stops.

You're describing undertaking people on roundabouts on wet gravel. Maybe the problem here is your driving style and not so much the handeling of EVs.

Maybe its what I've had to do to avoid people from crashing into me. I've even had someone release what looked like a small deer in front of my car one time from the central reservation armco barrier on an unlit part of a dual carriageway. I think they were hoping I wouldnt see them, and the use of a deer enables a car crash whilst being able to blame it on "wildlife"!

There really are some right royal nutters living here, thats why I hope the porsche night vision system can record these events besides showing up on the dashboard.

> I would not dare attempt that in an EV, the car would just just slide off the road.

Ok, hold up. You have:

1. roundabouts, ok, no problem, we have lots of those, I've never had a problem in an EV.

2. Gutter curbs around roundabouts. Yes driving in those is bad, you'll get a flat tire pretty quickly that way (no matter your car). I used to ride my bike in those and got flats all the time.

3. You want to race around other people in the round about. Ugh, this isn't the USA is it? I'm guessing Russia or China, or some other developing world country?

I think this is a niche case, like doing donuts or drifting.

> I drove 1200km today in a Tesla

Sorry, was this in one day, with a single charge? Or over multiple days (ending today), with charges in between?

I mean, who drives 1200km in day anyway? But it is doable with todays EVs, many of which have ranges of around 500km or more, and only need a couple of hours of charging to drive 1200km (after starting with full capacity), during breaks you would mostly take anyways. Teslas, VW's ID.4, Hyundai's Kona electric and many more come to mind. Cheers for Toyota's research, though.

In the US, long drives aren’t crazy. This year I’ve done 4 single day drives in excess of 1400km. The furthest I’ve ever driven without stopping was 2500km, but that was with 4 drivers, and I guess a “day” isn’t quite right bc it took us like 27hrs.

750 miles are still fairly rare, as a fraction of all road trips. We'll hear from everybody who does it in this thread, of course, but on average it's definitely an edge case.

However, it doesn't matter, I could do 750 miles a day in my Model 3 just as easily as my gas car. It would be more comfortable in the Tesla, too.

More comfortable than which other car?

I've driven lots of cars and nothing beats the comfort of a premium German station wagon such as a Mercedes E class for long trips followed by Volvo ones.

A model Y or 3 are in a very different tier of cars.

Everyone likes Volvo, but I continue to find them very underwhelming. Mercedes is good, but they have really fallen behind the other German manufacturers in many ways.

A Model 3 is decidedly in the middle, I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.

But before I'd take a Mercedes E class or any other station wagon, I'd take an F150 King Ranch ;-). Truly that is the land yacht of the modern era. Inefficient, expensive, but there aren't too many cars more spacious or soft for cruising down the highway. In the US, obv.

> I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.

That's all stuff that Mercedes cars have since decades?

The first radar-based dynamic cruise control was implemented on the 1999 W-220 S class. Mercedes cars had lane centering and even automatic lane changing since 2013.

Even today Mercedes is the first and only manufacturer to offer level 3 automatic self driving.

There's lots of things that Mercedes has been doing wrong in years (design wise especially, but engine choices on AMG models have also been questionable lately) but the safety and comfort of their premium cars (E class and upwards) is still at the top end of the industry.

>who drives 1200km in day anyway?

Lot's of people all the time? Perhaps you live in a small country or have all your important people quite close to you if these numbers don't seem reasonable. I must make 1-2 road trips like this a year to attend family events, weddings, funerals, etc. It's not fun to drive 12 hours straight, but it's doable, especially with 2 drivers.

I live in North Dakota, so if I want to get anywhere I usually drive. I did Fargo to Bozeman by myself last year. Have driven Fargo to Yellowstone in a day. Fargo to Seattle in 2 days with another driver. Chicago is a 9 hour drive. Denver is 13 hours. Long road trips are a regular part of life when you live in the middle of nowhere.

I've driven 1600km/1000mi in a day multiple times. I don't find driving that far in one day fun but sometimes it's a better choice than dealing with hotel rooms, especially with pets.

Fast chargers exist. One could drive 1200 km in an EV in a day.

I've spent the last 40,000 hours on the phone. With breaks, sleep, meals, adventures, and some charging in between...

-

Personally, I want the boutique car shops of the early 1900s style to re-open - whereby they build bespoke vehicles on a standard EV sled, such as this or the Tesla sleds that they open sourced their patents for back in the day...

I'd love to be able to literally design and build my body-work around a safety-rated-regulated frame/sled - and then have these made - the problem with this idea is the advent of monoquoque frames which is the frame and major body-panels are all one-piece, which then required the advent of automotive robotics to be able to pick-up the frame and turn it at angles where the degrees-of-freedom assembly arms can reach, insert/weld things...

but I'd rather have a "tesla" or this "toyota" guts with a custome body set that I can design with a studio, have them fabricated/printed and affix to the standard mounting holes/brackets of my safety-cage.

I especially would like to do this for what would be a camper-van design where you plop the van body atop the sled, have some interconnects for internals to controls etc... and then have the van body mount in a sensible manner...

This number is plausible to reach on one day while stopping for charges.

My median driving is very short (<30km/week), but I'll make one way drives of 1800km about 6 times a year. I did lots of research about the long range capabilities of Tesla when making my last purchase.

I drove ~1050km, SF -> Portland in my model 3 in one day. Around 11 hours total with a ~30 minute charge stop every ~2.5hrs. This was before the V3 superchargers.

For additional data, when we go visit my wife's family that's a 2,400 mile trip (3,800km) that we usually do in 3 long-ish days (8am-10pm) if I'm with my family, or around 40 hours if I'm going solo. This is in a 2016 Model S 75D (smaller battery).

I've done a 1600km trip 6 or 8 times in a 2017 Model X 100D. I do it in one ~18 hour drive. About 3.5hrs of that time spent charging. Charging has never been a problem. I think the worst experience I've had was a few years ago, on a V1 charger that had > 1/2 the stalls occupied, so I needed to share a 120Kw hour charger.

Why the skepticism? It's pretty obvious from the car and supercharger stats that this is trivial to accomplish. I had an easy 700mi day trip years ago in my m3p and the range and chargers are better nowadays.

> I had an easy 700mi day trip

I'm pretty good at long distance driving (e.g. 14hrs of driving with no stops except gas and bathroom). I could drive 700 miles in a day in an ICE vehicle, but I'd never call it easy. Add in any charging time, and it gets even less so.

Might be me. I've semi-routinely made day trips of 1300mi, and I've done a few out-west road trips that involved long bouts of driving.

I'm not happy with FSD yet, but Autopilot is excellent and really helps with driver fatigue. The charging stops don't really change anything. You just stop when you would otherwise bathroom break or eat.

What FSD issues are the most problematic?

It is hard (or maybe it was hard) to average more than 60mph on US interstates, including gas/pee/food stops. 1300 miles @ 60mph is 21hrs. Unless you plan to not drive the next day, that's a LOT of driving, and definitely not easy.

Yep, 1300mi isn't easy. (I said 700mi was). You're correct, for me, it's mostly been non-stop interstate travel on a lot of midwest/western interstates.

Tesla has Autopilot. My 1200km day was the car driving itself 90% of the way. Of course I was paying attention and ready to take over, but the effort is reduced. Still, I agree... not easy. It still sucked.

One day but multiple charges. Got up at 7am and got home at 1am. Port Macquarie to Melbourne. I was bringing the car home from buying it interstate. On autopilot probably 95% of the time.

I charged 6 times that day, but those were around 40% to 90%, not 0 to 100. It could have been 3 charges if I risked getting closer to zero and spent more total time charging.

The car mapped the charging stops out for me. Sometimes multiple supercharger stops are better as the car can charge faster when the battery is low - I.e. 30% to 40% is quicker than 90 to 100, so if they're not much out of the way it's quicker to stop for 6 quick charges than 3 slow ones.

Toyota does have a couple of electric cars; bZ* plus a Lexus.

The charging performance of one of the bZ variants is so bad one could say it doesn't really do "fast" charging. See the out of spec review "The Toyota bZ4X AWD Sets A New Low Record In Our 10% EV Road Trip Challenge (US Spec / CATL Battery)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9A73U-kAO0

It's commonplace for whoever gets a throne to inevitably squander it because they get complacent and proud, becoming top dog is essentially the grim reaper giving you written notice.

Combined with other failures Japan is going through right now, it really is tragic how far Japan has fallen from its former glory.

They need another Meiji revolution.

for all this talk of tragic failures, it is an extremely rich country, and Toyota is #1 automaker in the world. So compared to wars and true craziness elsewhere, they are still facing just the first-world problems.

Toyota is a Japanese company, a country that will burn any thing to keep lights on. So, when people question Toyota's commitment to Electric, I do not take them seriously. Toyota might have sunk-cost going with Hydrogen, but sooner or later they will build electric vehicles. My take is, the complexity of Li-based battery supply chain coupled with their views on Total Carbon Footprint of Li-based cars made them wait for better options.

This is totally backwards. We will have to switch to hydrogen cars because batteries are not sustainable. It is nearly everyone else that picked wrong and will eventually have to pay the price.

Toyota's decision is based on their calculation that there wont be enough electricity produced to meet the demands of electric cars on a large scale, IIRC.

The British National Grid disagrees: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...

"Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging EVs?

The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.

Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.

The US grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1

A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for petrol and diesel. Fully Charged’s video Volts for Oil estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around 4.5kWh of electricity – so, as we start to use less petrol or diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become available."

Parts of the US grid are barely able to handle the load today. Rolling blackouts have been used in some areas. There may be enough total capacity to handle more use, but peak demand levels are already straining the system.

power outages that aren't weather related are not increasing. https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/surging-weath...

Where did they say they were?

You may be referring to California who had issues last year during an historically high heat wave. This year, they are not having the same trouble. Part of the reason is that they increased production capacity since last year.

The main reason is that this summer has been much, much cooler in CA. In SV, for example, we've had a handful of days over 90 this year, whereas last year there were probably 20 days over 90 at this point in the summer. Our AC has only kicked on a few times all year, whereas last year it was on much more frequently.

There may have been increases in production, but it would have been shocking if we'd had rolling blackouts this year, given how mild the summer has been. Other parts of CA are warmer than SV, but AFAIK (having family in Sacramento and LA) this summer has been cooler than last summer all over CA.

California is very close to seeing blackouts right now. If there's another heat wave on the scale of last year, there will be blackouts again.

But that’s highly localized. And one of the most reported areas where this happens is Texas, who decided to roll their own grid, and is now paying the price for that stupidity.

I'm skeptical of a narrative where concern for the electrical grid's ability to handle load is only considered for EV growth over several years versus the air conditioning use in the current unprecedented heatwave.

Anecdotally, my A/C energy usage (compared to last year) far outweighs my energy usage in an EV.

Not to mention radical increases from demanding everyone switching to heat pumps plus demanding industry switch to electrified versions of everything too. It's seriously a complete fantasy to think the grid can happen all that with minimal upgrades.

Dominion Energy in Virginia has an even worse problem than EVs to worry about: datacenters

https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/2022/RD216/PDF

If you scroll to page 66 of the PDF, it’s insane how much more demand is needed for datacenters. It completely dwarfs forecasted EV power usage.

The US is a huge exception, your power grid is from the age when cowboys roamed the lands. Literally.

There was a huge fire that was caused by a power line slowly mechanically wearing down its connector. OVER A HUNDRED YEARS. Nobody bothered to check or replace it.

Also you have exceptions for oil and gas pipelines. 1-2 permits on a high level and the land owners can pound sand if they complain.

For power lines you need levels on a dozen different levels and even after that everyone who can even see the power poles has the irrefutable right to veto said wire or at the very least sue and slow it down to a crawl...

It's weird how the US went from the "fuck it, let's visit the Moon" country to the "electricity stuff is too hard, wah" country. Snap out of it!

A) you can charge your EV at off-peak times.

B) the US electricity grid is uniquely unreliable for a developed country.

Also, this weekend in the UK https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/latest-fleet-news/electric-...

This question depends on the specifics of local energy generation, so you’re not going to get good answers without zooming in.

Japan’s electrical grid has some unique challenges that explain why they are so interested in hydrogen. An article about the UK isn’t all that relevant for that,

Talking about the US electrical grid as a single entity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it’s not a single, nationwide market. There can definitely be local problems as we saw in Texas and California.

Since when does Toyota only sell in England?

Or they gambled that there would be enough hydrogen generation and distribution, which seems like an even worse bet. It's not that they decided to stick with ICE, it's that they chose an even worse fuel source.

A lot of this is because of the Japanese government itself.

To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot.

To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to

1. An early lead in hydrogen technology

2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels

3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources)

4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.

These are a good overview -

1. Japan’s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy - https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...

2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic...

3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper. It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso...

Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy. What do you think of recent developments of high efficiency electrolysis of sea water without precious metal catalysts? [1]

Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as electric power can't generate temperatures high enough and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good energy storage system that does not need any special metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01195-x

[2]https://gcaptain.com/man-reaches-milestone-with-successful-t...

First, I want to stress that I'm a Policy Wonk turned Cybersecurity practitioner. Though I have a STEM education, I haven't touched chemistry or physics in almost a decade.

That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used in Nuclear Energy.

Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be great, though I'm curious about the cost of productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.

That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be wrong

> Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.

Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to use brown hydrogen in the meantime.

It's interesting that I just watched a video[0][1] on Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage.

Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and utterly dependent on the US for their national security, without any remaining meaningful popular movement to divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty, but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.

[0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust the content.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zG-ZrC4BO0

[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E6%B1%A0%E4%B8%8A-%E5%BD%B0-e...

> I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan

It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.

Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the global market because it will take 5-7 years for production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.

For critical technologies, it's important to have some level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar, Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.

Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy similar to Japan for this reason.

> Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage

I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would take time to scale out.

For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost effective for most other countries to match the prices China was providing.

Japan depends on continuously imported oil and gas.

The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.

And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to oil money.

Also : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-half-of-c...

That's complete nonsense. Almost no lithium is recovered in recycling, and we will need a truly massive increase in virgin materials to even get the process started. It will be just as big of a problem as oil for a very long time to come.

Lithium and metal recycling doesn't exist on earth?

Wow that's some FUD, I didn't expect this one...

https://electrek.co/2023/03/02/tesla-cofounders-redwood-show...

"These packs weighed a total of half a million pounds, and Redwood managed over 95% efficiency in recovering important metals from them. This is incredibly high efficiency – especially compared to the 0% recycling efficiency of gasoline, the energy storage device for competing vehicles."

Note: I just took the first one from https://www.recyclingstartups.org/top/battery/

That’s the claim, but no such process has been implemented yet. At best we’re in the early stages. One thing to be aware is just how much BS there is around this topic. It is classic greenwashing and it is similar to the plastic recycling story.

> The batteries are valuable and recyclable, but because of technical, economic, and other factors, less than 5% are recycled today.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

Of course recycling 0.02 kg smartphone batteries is not viable, but 500 kg BEV batteries is (plus it's mandatory in lots of the world including where I live).

And the redwood process is in production since last year with so "no such process has been implemented yet" is just a blatant lie. Quantities are modest because number of BEV being scrapped is tiny due to their yound age.

Article you cite is from 2019, we're in 2023 in case you don't know.

And the BEV world moves really fast.

You should just stop continuously spreading FUD about BEV in all HN discussions, this is boring...

So it’s impossible at small scale, but suddenly it’s doable as large scale? A risky bet.

Also, the battery chemistries and pack structure are wildly different between different cars. One of the reasons why lead-acid batteries are recycled is because they’re always the same design. But it’s the Wild West in the BEV world. Nothing is the same between any two car models. How the recycling process could even work is not at all explained.

We heard this story before with plastic recycling. But then we found out that only pristine plastics can be recycled. The rest is just trash. In the li-ion battery world, you’re guaranteed to get a giant mishmash of different chemicals and metals in the end. It’s almost literally just battery shrapnel because they have to grind it all up to get at the metals. So it sounds a lot like the stories of plastic recycling.

More FUD, I'm starting to believe you're a hired PR pro.

Here is what the DOE experts think about scaling up battery recycling with a cool 2 billions dollars:

https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/lpo-offers-conditional-c...

"Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks—comprised of critical materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—to produce approximately 36,000 metric tons per year of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil for use as the anode current collector, and approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of cathode active materials"

"At full production capacity, the project’s anode copper foil and cathode active material output is anticipated to support the production of more than 1 million EVs per year,"

And this is only for one plant...

I'll believe any time DOE experts to judge wether an existing proven process is scalable or not over a continously FUD spreading forum poster.

And for your information lead-acid batteries are not all the same, see various electrolytes in AGM (fibers...), Gel, ...

Since when did we trust the government to give a correct answer on a complex technical subject? The person is just repeating what he was told.

There's no evidence anything of significance being recycled. All of this is projections of future recycling achievements.

Like I said, it's the same story as plastic recycling. No one should believe any of the claims made.

AGM and gel lead-acid batteries are recycled in a separate pathway compared to flooded lead-acid batteries. This is okay because there aren't that many variations and the chemistry is basically the same. Li-ion batteries on the other are effectively hundreds of different chemistries spread across many different packaging methods. It is a complexity nightmare and no one has given any answer as to how it will all be solved.

DOE has a good track record, better than a random forum "poster".

Evidence about recycling taking place has been given multiple times, you just choose to ignore it.

Ah then there's different lead acid battery recycling methods, you said the contrary in the post above ...

And since you obviously didn't read or learn anything about lithium battery recycling you make a fool of yourself.

DOE has no “track record.” It just funds things based on government policy.

Again, no evidence that this recycling is happening at scale. And given the enormous complexity of the problem, something no one has even bothered analyzing, it seems unlikely to be solvable anytime soon.

At this point, I can just proclaim that plastic recycling is 95% effective with the same amount of evidence. You’d have no choice but to believe me on this since you already believe the same thing about li-ion batteries.

Good point.

I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but because this was a battery tech related convo I decided to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion. Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai

Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil shocks a la 2008 and 1973

Wrong. It is the smartest choice we can think of. It is batteries that is just an irrational reaction to oil shocks of the 2000s. Hydrogen is actually a fully sustainable idea and will eventually be adopted across the board. Batteries are just going to be a temporary stopgap.

I was responding to his point about Oil dependency.

His point is backwards. You want to switch to hydrogen if you want to avoid future crises. Batteries just create the same situation.

It's incredibly short-sighted to think like this. There will be a huge supply of hydrogen at some point in the future. This is due to it being the only truly sustainable energy storage technology. Nearly all others will have to be abandoned.

> in the future.

Yes, and that's where it will stay in the future. Unfortunately, we need solutions that exist in the present.

I thought it was that it’s a more efficient use of lithium to make one hundred hybrids instead of ten EVs?

I always think it’s weird to believe in either of those things (that we can’t make enough electricity, which can be made in like a dozen different ways whether coal, oil, gas, biomass, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, etc, and that there won’t be enough lithium, even tho lithium isnt burned up, is extremely plentiful from conventional sources plus can be practically extracted from the ocean not to mention recycled indefinitely) and then be like “therefore, since we’ll have unlimited fossil fuels, let’s make more fossil fuel cars.”

I kind of get it.

A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains, courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you having two cars you use equally and someone offering to magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with taking the latter option.)

B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to the environment and the developing world.

If you look at the amount of oil and gas that is extracted vs the amount of lithium that would we need to mine; it is like comparing the size of the Sun to Pluto. Mining lithium has downsides but there is just no way it could be as bad as oil and gas due to the orders of magnitude difference in quantities needed.

Are you talking about pure lithium quantities? Those are small indeed, but... the concentration of lithium in the ore mined is low (some mines work with 0.2% ore), so you need to move 500kg of rocks to mine 1kg of lithium.

Most “mined” lithium doesn’t come from ore but rather from brine.

Then where are all their Prime vehicles that have had a huge waitlist for years?

Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the Prime versions.

Given that it takes about the same amount of electricity to refine a gallon of gasoline as it does to power an EV over the same distance an ICEV would travel on that gallon, I think electrifying transportation isn't going to be a big deal. The grid will evolve for changing patterns of consumption, just as it always has. Even if we made 100% of all new car sales today EV the grid could keep up.

But the gallon of gas isn’t refined in my neighborhood, every night. It’s made in a centralized location, in advance, and if for some reason that location loses power, another location will make it and distribute to my local gas stations.

“ and distribute to my local gas stations.”

If you are having a widespread, long term power outage, those gas pumps will not run due to not having electricity.

Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages, then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more power transmission lines underground?

Yes, PG&E cuts power proactively via their PSPS program. It doesn't affect most gas stations though, as they are more centrally located and not in neighborhoods. I believe they have looked into burying transmission lines, but found it to be economically infeasible.

If your power grid is unreliable, then maybe work on fixing that rather than just giving up on climate goals.

Defeatism never accomplishes anything.

I'm not defeatist, just pointing out that it's an oversimplification to say "it takes as much electricity to refine a gallon of fuel" given that the refining process happens in industrial areas where electricity may well be more reliable and less expensive.

Agreed, the grid will need to adapt to the changing consumption pattern, but the capacity is a solved problem. And we're building much more anyway.

Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable generators are now all dual fuel.

Keep in mind these “calculations” are based on biased data to help support the overall goals set forth by the leaders of the company.

and what "goal" would that be? to not sell cars and make money once the biggest markets all mandate them in under a decade?

Large companies have difficulty making changes. The reason is exactly that: the goal is to make money, and doing what has made heaps of money for heaps of time already always seems like the best option.

> The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones.

I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.

To continue to sell cars which are unreliable and have huge supply chains.

Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance.

Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US.

I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol.

Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts?

The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts.

It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.

Which calculations? What data? What biases? What goals?

Opel, Peugeot Sticking To Bicycles - Motorcars Will Never Have Enough Petrol Stations.

I've always argued this is a Field of Dreams problem. In that if you build it they will come. The electric will expand to meet demand.

Numbers that I saw recently: The largest US solar electrical generation plant right now is about 400MW. To electrify fast enough to get to about-as-close-to-net-zero-as-we-can-imagine by 2050, the US would need to build one of these plants and bring it online ...

... every two weeks.

The US installed 11.8GW solar last year. That is 453MW/every 2 weeks. :-)

Yes, that’s nameplate capacity, so you can’t count on solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal when you add in …

… wind.

Yes, because the grid is static and never can be expanded.

And peak demand is 24 hours a day :p

It is more likely to be contracted.

The grid is going to explode. Let's start with California. Because they're a large economy, a large population centre and a famously leading on environmental issues, they tend to run into scaling and environmental problems first.

Do you remember news about the California grid straining under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text messages to every Californian asking them to minimise their power usage? Power consumption across the state* reached 52GW.

Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of new projects that people want to build and connect to the grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021, cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power generation. This was so many submissions that the state couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of all of the proposed projects in time for the new submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15 back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14 and 15, that's a little over 10× our current maximum power generation. You could argue that maybe some of these projects won't get built, that always happens in every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications is a smaller percentage than usual.

Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our current power generation.

The glut in new power construction is not a California-specific phenomenon. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-proposes-intercon...

* technically across the California Independent State Operator, https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for geographical reasons.

There's reason to think otherwise: Natural Gas is being replaced and is due to see price increases. It will likely be replaced by electricity (namely Heat-Pump HVAC systems, and induction cook tops).

In some states some developments aren't even hooked to the gas network, and the homes standards are such that electrification is the default.

You have to measure electricity demand over years, not months, because seasonal changes and or weather can really corrupt your data.

We're adding capacity to the grid literally every day, both at the transmission and distribution level. It's not going to 'contract'

This makes no sense to me. Take Los Angeles. Almost everyone has AC. If you can power AC, you can charge an EV, and the loads peak at different times. (AC peaks around 3pm, EV can peak anywhere from 7PM to 5AM depending on programming)

Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is cheapest and demand is lowest.

And so they decided to go for hydrogen? If there isn't enough electricity, that means hydrogen derived from fossil fuels. So their hydrogen take was even more evil that it first appeared.

This is pure spin. Toyota cannot make this claim for every region in the world where they sell cars. It is especially disingenuous when they have been pushing their hydrogen vehicles and there is not enough hydrogen production either, in any region, because it makes no sense to overproduce when there is no market.

Agreed. If they started releasing EVs en mass tomorrow they could stay relevant. If they wait another 3 years they’ll decay away

>Toyota somehow develop this magical battery for an EV but forgot to develop an EV.

The Prius in 1997 doesn't count? Sure it was a Hybrid mainly because of no charging network. A decade before Tesla. And selling ever since.

They could have a dozen models in development ready to release who knows. It's a huge company.

Nokia, Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft had years of experience making smartphones with keyboards…

In hybrids the electric motor doesn’t have to be maximally efficient, because the electric range is only a nice to have, not the key selling point.

Hybrid battery density doesn’t matter much, because it’s 1/10th of BEV's size anyway.

In hybrids the charging speed can be an abysmal trickle, and still suffice to charge the tiny battery. In BEV you need to work with 4x higher voltages, 10x higher wattage, and push thermal management to the limits.

That’s why bz4x sucks. Its efficiency is meh. It charges at below average speeds, and still overheats.

In hybrids the battery is used primarily to lower average fuel consumption and lower (a lot) noise and fuel consumption in cities (where hybrids run generally a large amount of time on electric).

Maybe for modern hybrids. For my 2005 Hybrid, the engine is an Atkinson cycle engine and that is where most of the efficiency gains come from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AZ_engine#2AZ-FXE “The large valve overlap leads to a reduction in cylinder charge and reduced torque and power output, but efficiency is increased. This combination makes the 2AZ-FXE suitable for use only in hybrid vehicles, where peak torque and power demands can be met by the electric motor and battery.”

So the hybrid battery is used for acceleration. Note that my Hybrid battery is a 200V 50Wh Nickel metal hydride battery - Note I think Toyota Hybrids didn’t start using Lithium batteries until late 2010’s).

When town driving it doesn’t seem to me that the regenerative braking makes much difference: It is very noticeable that the engine is in use during acceleration from a dead-stop. Certainly regeneration is insignificant on hills because the

> The Prius in 1997 doesn't count? Sure it was a Hybrid mainly because of no charging network.

A hybrid is not an EV. It gets 100% of its energy from gasoline. Plug-in hybrids have a better claim to being an EV.

Prius has a PHEV version...

Not in 1997. And they still don't sell the PHEV in my region in 2023, just the non-EV hybrids.

One trick pony. Been sitting on their hands since the hybrid synergy drive.

> One trick pony.

Care to explain? Because by this metric every carmaker is a one trick pony. Tesla even more so.

Tesla innovates at a rapid pace, even if judging solely on the battery architecture and cell chemistry between their platforms over the last decade. The tech in my Ys is far superior to my earlier S and X.

Toyota invented the hybrid drive when the US planned on imposing how CAFE standards years ago, and have barely a half hearted effort to build EVs. Their earlier RAV4 EVs used Tesla drivetrains, for example.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g15377976/what-came-be...

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/toyota-once-partnered-with-tesl...

Tesla model 2023 is worse than earlier years simply because they removed USS.

Sales and revenue matter, opinions don’t. USS deprecation is unfortunate, but they still sell the cars so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tesla is the ultimate one-trick pony. There will come a day when the BEV is abandoned. Tesla has shown no ability to move past that event. Toyota will make whatever car is in demand in the future.

You are aware that there is no hydrogen refueling infrastructure in most of the developed world and lots of jurisdictions have banned new combustion vehicle sales between now and 2035, yeah? What proven technology would you use besides batteries? Hydrogen infra that doesn’t exist?

Toyota isn’t dying tomorrow, but if they don’t switch to BEVs, they’ll die like Kodak or Xerox. There is no light vehicle hydrogen future.

We can build hydrogen infrastructure if we had to. None of those ICE bans are going to happen by 2035, at least not without massive loopholes. We will be driving ICE cars for a very long time to come. The correct pathway is finding a sustainable alternative to ICE cars that could happen organically, not fantasize about instantly turning everything into a zero emissions car tomorrow.

Tesla is the company that is going to die. The BEV is not going to be the only car in the future, nor will last forever. If anything, it is an outdated idea, and was an overreaction to the 2000s oil shock. Toyota will just make whatever cars people want.

> None of those ICE bans are going to happen by 2035

Many of the bans are happening by 2030. In Norway, 83% of new cars are already BEVs. I don't think they will look back, the market will make selling new ICEs in that country at least, impractical.

Hydrogen probably has a future in goods transportation (trucking), but even there they have to compete with a fully electrified rail system that goes to the arctic circle.

And either be reversed or will have loopholes. And Norway is one (small) country that is not representative of the rest of the world. And I don't think the political situation in Europe is all that stable either. A lot of the movement in European politics is about abandoning many of these absurd green energy ideas.

Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply because it is the only sustainable idea.

> Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply because it is the only sustainable idea.

Hydrogen is a horrible idea for personal vehicles: it takes a bunch of new expensive infrastructure to even get going (gas stations, but with compressed hydrogen tanks), it is energy inefficient (a lot of energy lost in compression, keeping it compressed, and then turning it in to electrons). It is just not economically viable when compared to BEVs where the biggest worry is finding a power plug.

It might make sense for trucking given its power to weight density, and the fact that trucks can have huge hydrogen tanks without much consequence.

It is cheaper than building out the grid needed to power all cars. In fact, you use basically the same land that gas stations current use up. It is quite straightforward.

Attacks on efficiency are anti-hydrogen FUD arguments. They were made up by BEV companies and are almost entirely false. It's important to realize that fuel cells are electrochemical systems just like batteries. FCEVs are also EVs just like BEVs. There is no fundamental downside. The upside however is that you avoid the huge amount of raw materials needed for the batteries. So this will be a far cheaper solution once we hit mass production.

In short, it is pretty much guaranteed that we will eventually switch to hydrogen cars. It is only a question of when and not if.

It really isn't. The grid is literally already there! The only new infrastructure needed is at the end point. If you are going to be generating hydrogen from electricity anyways, it isn't any different, except maybe you need less electricity because going from electrons to hydrogen back to electrons again you lose 40% energy.

The BEV companies aren't pushing FUD. They are just choosing the option that they see the most demand from, and can make the most money from. Japan has tried to make hydrogen happen for 20 years now, and it simply isn't going to happen.

Batteries don't require much more raw material than the fancy cyrogenic compressed hydrogen tank and fuel cell you need for a hydrogen car. Those batteries are also than those two things also.

That's complete nonsense. We will need vast amounts of grid upgrades to be able to be able to power all cars. And if the grid needs to be purely renewable, that problem explodes into something far harder. In fact, the problem becomes so hard that you will need hydrogen-based energy storage systems to make it work. But that completely undermines any efficiency arguments against hydrogen cars.

BEVs are over 100 years old. It is just a repeat of an obsolete idea. The moment we get serious about green energy, hydrogen cars will happen.

Hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. They require very little raw materials compared to batteries. Fuel cells are tiny compared to batteries, and use up about the same level of raw materials as catalytic converters. Everything else is basically the same between FCEVs and BEVs. So you can quickly realize that the FCEV will be the far cheaper of the two ideas.

> That's complete nonsense. We will need vast amounts of grid upgrades to be able to be able to power all cars.

That is complete nonsense:

> A typical EV would require about 3,857 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. For 26.4 million EVs, that's over 101 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year or about 2.5% of what the U.S. grid produced in 2020. Although it's a small percentage, it's much more than what we're currently asking of the electrical grid.

https://www.evconnect.com/blog/can-the-power-grid-handle-ele...

Let's say we have 100 million cars, that is 10%.

You keep saying hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. I get it, you don't believe compression is necessary, so no cyrogenic cooling at gas stations (powered by the grid of course), no fancy compression in cars. Is that what you actually believe?

Now do the math with 300 million EVs. Also, assuming SUV sized ones being popular too, alongside many commercial vehicles too. It is not that simple. Especially since so much of it will be DC fast charging and not slow speed charging.

Compression is not that energy intensive. It's more BEV FUD to make this to be a big deal. If done correctly, it is only a few percent loss of energy: https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/9013_energy_requirement...

Also, it is recoverable energy. Compressed gases are energy storage mechanisms in their own right. In the long run, this will be very minor loss of energy.

> Especially since so much of it will be DC fast charging and not slow speed charging.

Will it? Why?

What do you think is going to replace BEVs?

In the long-run, likely FCEVs. They are also EVs, just without the huge batteries. Advances in production are likely to reduce cost to ICE car levels. Advances in hydrogen production will make green hydrogen follow the curve of wind and solar, which is extremely cheap.

The Prius has also been a PHEV for years now. I doubt it would require a huge change in manufacturing processes to make a pure EV version.

But it's manufacturing the actual battery modules that has been the hard problem for Tesla competitors as I understand it. I guess it's not surprising if so that Toyota would want to have their technology choice set for a while before ramping that up, since it probably affects many of the surrounding design choices.

It is hard to develop the knowledge and processes to build batteries effectively. You need to start doing it and refine your process as you learn more and expand capacity along the way. Tesla went through this phase several years ago. GM, Ford, and others are currently in this phase. They will work out the kinks. Toyota won’t learn how to do this until they actually start building batteries at scale and work out the process using the continuous improvement techniques that they learned from Deming.

Investing in electric engines is still much cheaper than investing in combustion engines.

As a reference, R&D for Mercedes' 2017+ OM654 diesel engine alone costed the company 3.5 B $. And that amount is relatively low because Mercedes had a huge know how in building diesel engines.

But in EV those amounts are much smaller, catching up is no longer a matter of decades and hundreds of billions, but years and ten times smaller investments (see Korea).

This is why China was never competitive in the ICE era, but companies like BYD are booming.

Also, I strongly believe that from now to 2035 multiple companies will be selling their electric powertrains to dozens of different automakers.

Cheap for developing, expensive for massive manufacturing. That's what developed world company doesn't want.

There is a good Munro and Assoc video going into the packaging differences between ICE and EV vehicles. The Prius (of which I am a happy operator) is ICEV packaging-wise. The battery is relatively high, small and not integrated into the frame.

As a huge company Toyota may well have the people with ideas about EV transition. Unfortunately as a huge company there are a thousand interests that will be harmed by EV transition. Can Toyota (or VW, MB, Stellantis, etc) overcome those internal conflicts to produce something out of their wheelhouse? Or will it take an acquisition that moves with distinct branding that eventually becomes the entire company?

No, it doesn't count, as the Prius in 1997 was entirely powered by petrol.

It was a great car. I drove a Prius for ten years and only sold it because I moved overseas. But it was no EV. Even the plugin Prius is not what we mean when we say 'EV'.

?

They developed an entirely new platform for EVs [1]

They started a subsidiary for self driving with around a thousand employees [2]

They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ

Current battery technology is a huge reason why people don't switch to EVs. Everyone I know talks about the charging times, needing to find a supercharger route when going long distance.

A 10 minute charge on that massive range would convince me to switch easily.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_New_Global_Architecture...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woven_by_Toyota,_Inc.

Yeah, but not until 2027 or so it seems, and then you’ll have to drag around an ic engine as well. Seems a bit of a waste for a car with that much battery range.

My dad just bought the bZ4x, I’m not particularly impressed, but that’s just my opinion. My dad likes it, mainly because he wasn’t comfortable using the touch screen while driving to adjust things like windshield wipers etc, which I think is a good decision for him. But what poor marketing department came up with an unpronounceable name like that.

Ah, yes, the renowned bz4x, or busy forks for the initiated.

It's called "the captcha" in China

Hyundai/Kia needs about 20 minutes of charging per 3 hours of driving.

The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.

I've taken road trips across Europe, and it's been fine. 20min is about as much as I need for a bathroom break and to get a coffee.

Hyundai/Kia do have great maximum charge rates...but the rub is finding a charger that supports those speeds, is not broken, and is not occupied. Is this trivial in Europe? It sure isn't here in the US (even in CA, which has relatively higher adoption rates of EVs).

It is trivial in the US if you're able to use Tesla's supercharger network.

Telsa's proposed, future v4 standard is still only capable of 250kW and meanwhile CCS stations have been deployed for years now that can do 400kW, with 700kW chargers being demonstrated.

It's an outdated, proprietary standard in both form and function, even if Tesla claims it's a public standard; they exert total business control over the plug and their charger network. There's no way they'll allow a random car to plug into a supercharger ('safety' and such), no way they'll allow any other payment methods on their network. There's no way they'll support configuring your Tesla to work with third party NACS chargers and payment systems.

The only chargers that exist with NACS connectors are in one country and controlled by Tesla. The only cars with NACS plugs are (at the moment) Teslas and the only proposed additional users are companies that have signed agreements with Tesla.

This is why it's so infuriating that Ford, GM, and Tesla did what they did. They just effectively killed CCS, and thus dealt a major blow to EV adoption in the US for the sake of a market share grab. 800v architecture meant EVs finally could lay claim to being practical for long distance charging. Plug in at a rest stop, everyone hits the bathrooms, maybe a snack, stretch their legs, and the car is nearly full again. A lot of errands and such fit into the 18-20 minute window a nearly-full-charge takes. "NACS" can't offer anywhere near a 18 minute 10-to-80 charge.

The US version of CCS is far from perfect; the weight of the cable causes connection issues due to the poor mechanical design of the socket, and we never should have had a unique CCS connector from Europe to begin with. But Tesla's "North American Charging Standard" is outdated and their supercharger network in addition to being outdated has been woefully underfunded and undersized for a while; with Ford and Chevy piling onto the network, that's going to get even worse.

What's even more infuriating is that in Europe, there is no such thing as "Superchargers", because the EU forced Tesla to use CCS2. And meanwhile, congress hasn't even noticed that Tesla just effectively captured the US EV charging market.

Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong giving the world's richest man - an unhinged narcissist to boot - exclusive control over how electric vehicles are charged in the US?

This is incorrect. I’m not sure where you’re finding 250kW as the max for a V4 Supercharger but they’ve been shown to charge at more power in the wild.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/19/23689247/tesla-v4-superch...

And while not deployed in the wild, NACS supports up to 1MW with a forward and backward compatible larger 1000V connector in the NACS spec: https://www.tesla.com/support/charging-product-guides#techni...

CCS1 has no advantages over the Tesla plug. If we're not going to use CCS2, we should use NACS.

You're wrong about the limits. v3 is 250kW, and the limiting factor is the vehicle voltage. Take it up to 800 volts and that's already 400kW. Pushing the amps above 500 is possible for both connectors, with similar levels of difficulty.

"CCS stations have been deployed for years now that can do 400kW"

There is no reliable CCS network in existence in the US. Can you show me a video of someone using these mythical chargers at 400kw to take a long road trip?

Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong depending on Electrify America who only exist due to court ordered action and have no incentive to actually do a good job?

But that’s not compatible with Hyundais or Kias, which is what GP was talking about.

Yes, 300kW chargers from Ionity and Fastned are pretty common. FR, NL, DE have especially good coverage.

More and more so it appears that the US is falling way behind the EU (and probably China) in terms of charging.

150kW charging is common in France. I hear it’s even better in other EU countries.

My impression was that Hyundai/Kia EVs can take much more than 150kW — more like 350kW. Since 350kW chargers aren't yet common, I don't consider that an advantage when thinking about purchasing. There are plenty of EVs that charge in the neighborhood of 150kW, and a lot more chargers that are able to provide that throughput.

They peak at ~245kW. Charging from a 150kW charger isn't too bad either, because they can sustain that speed most of the time (unlike cars advertising 150kW max where it is only a peak of the curve, and the average is less).

For road trips charging speed is IMHO even more important than the range. My breaks take 20-25 min typically anyway, but a 45-minute car would keep me waiting.

> The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.

That's a disingenuous take. ICE fueling takes significantly less time. So it's not an advantage that you can take a 20-30 minute break away from your car when you can just gas up your car in a few minutes (attended) and be on the road again.

It is an advantage when you were going to take a break away from your car anyway. Fueling up, and then parking, and then getting coffee / food / break means you spend just as much time stopped with an ICE during a road trip as you do with an EV.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve just quickly filled the gas tank and kept driving. I know all people are different but I suspect not people are closer to me. I know many people who never do long road trips at all.

What I have experienced is having to take 10-15 minutes to find a gas station somewhere around my destination to fill up for the next day. I’ve also had plenty of stops where I’ve stopped for food or drinks and not filled gasoline because there wasn’t any gas station right there.

What’s remarkable with EVs is that on road trips I never find myself going somewhere I wouldn’t be going anyway. Instead of driving to a gas station at my destination, I just park at the hotel/resort I’m staying and charge right there over night.

In Norway almost every road side McDonalds have some fast chargers. As a father that’s where we tend to stop, and where we probably would have taken the kids for a break anyway. If we filled gasoline, even if there was a gas station right next by, that’d be an annoying distraction from what we want to be doing.

As a father with an EV I don’t recognise the situation in the article at all. Maybe Norway and even Denmark (where we took our road trip last year.. they’re a bit behind Norway) is ahead of USA in infrastructure. But it’s not that much ahead. 5 years at most.

Family road trips in EVs is fantastic because you’re encouraged to take breaks at places with playgrounds where kids can burn off some physical energy. And since the car is charging at the same time it doesn’t feel like a waste and you don’t feel any mental pressure to keep driving to get to the destination as fast as possible.

> They started a subsidiary for self driving with around a thousand employees [2]

Lots of 'self driving' investments have invested a huge amount without much benefit.

> They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ

Their total EV sales are tiny. The bZ4x is universally mocked at one of the worst EV in class and not actually cheaper then the competition.

> Current battery technology is a huge reason why people don't switch to EVs.

And yet huge amounts of people are switching to EV and the actual limit is batteries supply limitations not battery size.

You forgot their most famous joint venture clusterfuck

Made in Japan. Designed by Tesla in California.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV

Car manufacturers can't make enough EVs to keep up with demand, so you might not be talking to the right people.

Depends on the car\manufacture...

Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/10/unsold-electric-cars-are-pi...

Having tried to buy one recently I think the discrepancy is that dealers wasted their allotments on high-trim EVs expecting people to be willing to pay 15-20k premiums just to drive an EV. If you want a lower trim model you are going to be waiting weeks to months for it to arrive.

For me, it’s the price and look. I just want a normal looking vehicle that doesn’t cost $80k. An EV Toyota Tacoma for like $30-40k would be amazing.

I just drove from Brisbane to Melbourne in one weekend (1,800km in one weekend) -- to pick up a model 3 I bought interstate, actually -- and I assure you, charging was not an issue. The car automatically adds supercharger stops to the map and I didn't need to stay at one for longer than half an hour.

Okay, Toyota has technically released EVs. Still a half assed effort, and I think still a fair criticism - I can't buy one, as they don't sell it in Australia, and they barely promote them. They're not behind EVs in any meaningful way.

I mean, the fact that I just bought an EV and have never even heard of any of Toyota's says something. No mention of them on their Australian website. Never heard of them on social media either, and I'm constantly watching videos about EVs.

Kodak released digital cameras eventually. Blackberry released Android phones eventually. Didn't mean much, it was too little too late -- they ignored the writing on the wall for too long.

When there's a gold rush sell shovels.

The last time I've done calculations it was something like x2 of energy production increase is required to satisfy 100% migration to EVs.

Not that big of increase.

And spread out over several decades

Seems a massive one for me, I had blackouts in recent years both at my house in Italy and Poland. Electricity in Poland is still highly coal dependent in my region in Italy it's 90%+ gas.

Toyota and its fellow Japanese car makers were betting the bank on hydrogen based green cars. This was wishful thinking but they had a reason. A regular ICE car produces several post sales revenue streams. For example, regular oil changes, brake replacements, engine issues and etc. EV's produce almost none of these ongoing revenue streams and therefor the ongoing value for Toyota would drop significantly.

With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance. It would require complex 'hydrogen stations' to refuel. If there's no battery then brakes will continue to wear out on schedule. In short, everything a ICE car offers except the CO2.

It's not surprising that this is the future that Toyota had its eyes on for way too long. Group think. Now they're playing catch up and they're far behind.

I don't believe this maintenance argument, maintenance on EVs is insanely more expensive when it comes to battery replacements. Replacing an entire engine on the average sedan is an insanely cheaper option. Even the Nissan Leaf's engine replacement is like 14k $, that's the cost of a new car ffs.

By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a fraction of what it costs today. Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.

There has been no evidence of this, not to mention people just get cars with even bigger batteries. It is likely to always be an expensive replacement problem.

How many times an ICE has its engine replaced on average?

The capacity retention of a Tesla battery from a decade ago plateau at 88% after 200,000 miles. That's for nickel-based battery, and most OEMs are switching to iron-based (LFP) which degrade even less.

I bet that zero EV will have to replace their battery in the near future.

ICEs can be fixed. It's pretty rare to have a truly dead ICE. For non-luxury cars, even a replacement is no big deal.

Zero is a pretty low number. A lot of them will have to be replaced. Especially for commercial vehicles where they often drive 100k miles every year.

This has already happened with Nissan Leaf. It debuted with 24kWh, and now you get 40kWh for the same price, and there's 60kWh option.

>> By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a fraction of what it costs today<<

There is absolutely no guarantee that it would be the case. The cost of batteries is largely determined by raw materials such as lithium, nickel, etc, and the demand for those minerals will exceed that of supply for some foreseeable time -- at least not until 2030.

>> Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.<<

Yeah, that's only if you get a brand different battery with improved energy density and chemistry. Your EV is stuck with the same old efficient and expensive batteries from the date/year of purchase.

> With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance.

That's utter bullshit. A fuel cell is literally an electrochemical system no different than a battery.

A fuel cell is not a closed system, a battery is. A fuel cell need a supply of hydrogen (obvious) and oxygen from the air and in return it produces heat, water, and some electricity (with pretty terrible efficiency). A battery produces electricity and heat (depending on load).

That's widely inaccurate. The fundamental advantage of an electrochemical system is that you are no longer limited by Carnot's theorem in the same way as heat engines. As a result, the efficiency of both systems can be the same. Not to mention you don't have to deal with all that heat either, making operation much simpler.

In the end, a fuel cell is basically a metal-air battery, and has the same level of efficiency.

Except it does not have the same efficiency when you compare how many kWh you have to feed into an electrolyzer so that you make 1 kWh of electricity out of the fuel cell in a car.

You cannot get every kWh from renewable energy into a BEV no matter what. The intermittency problem guarantees that a lot of it will be lost or never captured. An idea like hydrogen that lets you store energy for long periods lets you utilize energy that otherwise would be lost. As a result, the full cycle efficiency of a hydrogen car can exceed that of a battery car.

'... lets you store store hydrogen for long periods of time' is not as easy as you suggest. It's well known that hydrogen makes most (possibly all) metals become brittle over time. Hydrogen also leaks easily through metals because the atoms are so small. Consequently very expensive tanks are require to '..store hydrogen for long periods of time...'. It's a near certainty that storing energy for long periods is more effectively done with Megapacks of batteries. A little googling will show that Tesla (and others) are now making a booming business in this technology whereas, to my knowledge, not one substantive hydrogen storage plant has been built to date, because of the problems stated above.

> It's well known that hydrogen makes most (possibly all) metals become brittle over time.

It's not "well known." In fact, this is bullshit. Only some metals have this problem. Even then there are ways of preventing the problem via coatings and the like. Nor is it even necessary, as geological formations can be used to store hydrogen in the same way we store natural gas.

You are simply reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. These are solved or are easily solvable problems.

> As a result, the full cycle efficiency of a hydrogen car can exceed that of a battery car.

No it does not. Efficiency is about energy in at the source versus energy out energy out at the wheels.

I don't know anything about cars, but is an all electric really that much different from a plug in hybrid?

Well, do you know much about physics?

What do you think happens to overall system efficiency if you need to carry an internal combustion engine, a gas tank, and gas along with you, in addition to a battery, inverter, and electric motor?

Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure except range, and most customers do not need the range they claim to need.

But salesmen are not paid commissions to explain why customers don't need things, so we have hybrids.

>Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure except range, and most customers do not need the range they claim to need.

Thats the benefit of a plug-in Hybrid. Most people don't need to drive much on a day to day basis and the smaller battery can handle that fine. For longer driving you have the ICE engine. The ICE engine can weigh as much or less than a comparatively "long range" battery.

* * *

What I mean is, if they've been making plug in hybrids for years, couldn't they easily make an all electric?

My 2023 Corolla Hybrid is a great vehicle as someone who cannot go electric - wish they had gone further for the people who can.

Bullshit. All car companies will have to abandon batteries because it is not a sustainable idea. It is Tesla and not Toyota that is facing a disruptive risk because of that.

Tesla is shaping up to be the next Blackberry. They are stuck with just one idea: The battery powered car. An idea that predates internal combustion BTW.

If you think so, what's the major technology that they're ignoring that the industry is in the process of switching to?

In the short-run, just more practical cars such as hybrids and plug-in cars. In the long-run, it is the inevitable plunge in cost of hydrogen, which will make fuel cell cars the cheaper type of car to own.

What's unique for Toyota is that their hybrids are sold like a pancake. Hybrids also uses batteries but it uses far less. Battery supply is the current constraint for xEV. Since they can sell many hybrids for less battery use, I understand that they don't want to "waste" batteries for BEV, but it makes bad reputation for slow BEV transition.

It's the classic innovator's dilemma, but hybrids are also great vehicle for who can't afford BEV for some reason now. Still, I think they should released moderate BEV (like Nissan Aria?) in 2021, even if they ship very limited count.

You may want to give some benefit of doubt to unarguably the most successful car company of this world.

Unlike USA (and Europe?) public charging infra' is nonexistent in most part of the world. Compounded by unavailability of affordable home charging devices and easy/affordable installation logistics. Toyota perhaps does not see sense in riding the 'hype', instead continue to focus on where demand is - conventional cars.

However, they seem to be investing for the future when charging infra catches up. They started on electric car tech in 1992 (way before anyone else), and continue to invest in R&D; infact had released mainstream electric vehicle - Rav4, which they discontinued in 2014 as the "charging time was slow".

Toyota couldn’t convince the world it wasn’t reluctant about EVs, in part because of Toyoda’s straight-shooting, plain-spoken approach. He (new CEO Toyoda) outlined insufficient clean energy and charging infrastructure as a “limiting option” for customers. At the end of last year, Toyoda said “it takes time,” while also noting that they’d “been investing in electrification” since they “started working on hybrids, with our sights on building BEVs (battery electric vehicles). [0]

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/this-is-toyot...

Btw Europed DC fast charging story is much stronger than the USA's.

You could say all this about Kodak in the early 2000s - they were incredibly successful, demand was still mostly for film cameras, people didn't have PC for transferring photos etc...

I'm not saying it makes business sense for Toyota to drop ICE sales immediately. But their feeble, half assed EV effort is going to turn them into another Blackberry if it doesn't change quickly.

I don't think Toyota has lost anything. I think they understand the mid-range market better than other care makers and are executing on a strategy that pushes most people's first EV purchase out into 2030, with hybrid and plugin-hybrids dominating until then. I think that's probably the right bet.

My basic thought on TSLA's long-term prospects and the EV market in general is that the legacy auto makers are patient, not sclerotic.

(Also, toyota has several EVs: the Toyota-badged BZ4X, the Subaru-badged Solterra, and the Lexus-badged RZ. Branding aside, those are all Toyota EVs.)

The plug in hybrid is a better choice for most people honestly these days. Fiat only sold the 500e in california where every other new parking garage sees a dozen ev charging spots put in. It’s hard to imagine that being viable in other parts of this country.