Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
One refueling station can serve thousands of customers, but a charging station needs multiple hours to charge each car. So you need far fewer gas stations. This is why the economics of gas stations worked out in the first place. Before, people bought tanks of gasoline and refueled at home. The gas station model was cheaper.
It takes 20 minutes to charge at a Tesla Supercharger. And their economics are working great, in fact Supercharger stations are more profitable than gas stations.
You mean from 20% to 80% charge? Which is realistically only 150 miles of gained range, and that’s assuming everything is working at full power. The alternative gives you 0-100% in 5 minutes consistently. And best of all, it can be scaled up to trucks and above without suddenly realizing you need megawatts of power per station.
In reality, the charging solution is much harder. We’ve just normalized the idea of using electricity to charge things when it is actually a bigger challenge than dealing with fuels.
