Toyota, Honda, Nissan and other Japanese automakers are serious about rolling out battery electric vehicles to catch up with the world’s frontrunners like Tesla and BYD
“We love battery EVs.”
Takero Kato, the executive in charge of electric vehicles at Toyota, said that not once, but twice, to emphasize what he considers the message at this year’s Tokyo auto show.
It’s a message ringing clear at the Tokyo Mobility Show, which will run through Nov. 5 at Tokyo Big Sight hall and where battery-powered electric vehicles are the star at practically every booth.
Good. More EVs on the market will lower prices for people buying their first car or who are worried about making the jump to EVs.
Obviously public transit is better for dense urban areas but for people living rurally or in the suburbs, EVs need to be more accessible.
Maybe public perception is skewing my opinion, but Toyota had a massive head start on EVs with the first Gen Prius. Then they let that platform stagnate and bemoaned the advancement of EVs once Tesla had brought them to the market all in favor of hydrogen. They put all their eggs in the hydrogen fuel cell basket hoping that storage and range would be worked out despite clear disadvantages due to physics. Now they “love battery tech”? I love their reputation when it comes to ICE and reliability, but I’m challenging them to persuade my negative opinion of their EV commitment before I buy a Toyota EV.
While from a technical point of view it would allow for the continuation of combustion engines, and is thus an attractive alternative for car makers, it doesn’t make sense to use hydrogen on such small scales. Making hydrogen cleanly requires a lot of energy, so the idea generally is to use renewable energy to generate hydrogen from water. This works for industrial applications like steel making, but on a small scale it just doesn’t make economic sense because it needs to be cooled down so much.
The main reason why hydrogen is pushed is because it is also a byproduct of natural gas exploitation, so called blue or grey hydrogen.
Yeah, but all these traditional car makers had all this expertise designing and making ICEs so they blindly stuck to the idea of continuing to make ICEs, by just moving to hydrogen.
They hobbled themselves since making electric cars requires a very different skill set which Tesla and many Chinese car makers were able to break into without the high entry cost that making quality ICEs has. Now they’ve set themselves to play catchup at the risk of being steamrolled by newcomers.
Toyota knew they blew it and won’t be able to catch up on their own. Because of that, they have to create a partnership with Idemitsu Kosan which already have a headstart in solid state battery technology.
Even if they mothball an EV early on, at least in the US, auto manufacturers are required to produce parts and provide maintenance for 10 years of the vehicle’s life. That and Toyota isn’t Tesla, they want to stand behind their brand.
I can see where they’re going with hydrogen. With projects like that Australian seawater hydrogen project making hydrogen generation “free”, it’s just a matter of time before it becomes cheaply accessible. A fuel cell/battery hybrid that could be filled up in minutes would be much more analogous to how gas cars currently work, versus the heavy flaws in current EVs like limited range, heavily degraded winter performance, and rapidly aging batteries in Nissans specifically due to lack of proper thermal management. Statistics are showing 57% of current EV owners don’t even want to buy an EV for their next car.
Deploying a hydrogen storage network would also not tax the already fragile power grids as an EV charging network would. Economically, having fuel truck networks, fueling stations, etc. continue to exist, would make hydrogen likely less disruptive to the existing model of transportation economics in countries like the US. Jobs could be retained.
The 2023 Toyota Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid available now, has an estimated 402 mile range on a full tank. Tesla Model 3 estimates 333 miles of range and have also been caught lying on their range gauge so that shouldn’t even be trusted.
Countries like the US are just pushing EV tech so heavily because it is available “now” and they think we can capitalism our way out of climate change. The more boring methods like finding ways to continue utilizing existing vehicles but limit driving frequency with augments like actual public transportation don’t interest the shareholders.
having fuel truck networks, fueling stations, etc. continue to exist, would make hydrogen likely less disruptive to the existing model
That’s crazy:
— US gas 140,000 EV chargers and it’s nowhere near enough, even with most charging fine at home
— US had 57 places to fuel hydrogen, all in California
— we don’t even have a cost effective way to produce green hydrogen yet, most will continue to come from fossil fuels for decades
And you think it’s cheaper and easier to build entire industries across the US and worldwide, for a fuel source still dependent on fossil fuels, at a cost probably in the trillions of dollars? And it’s desirable to save large oil companies trying to hold desperately to their existing business?
Millions of people will never have the option to charge at home. The problem with BEVs is that you need tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of charging stations. That is really expensive and likely unfeasible.
Hydrogen stations will basically replace gas stations, sometimes on the very same piece of property. That makes a replacement infrastructure very straightforward to deploy. It makes more sense than having charging stations everywhere. People are just angry that their favored idea isn’t working out, so they attack this idea.
The generation of Hydrogen was never the hardest problem.
Compression, storage and transportation - those are the big problems.
How is the car driver in Kansas refilling their hydrogen powered vehicle without major efficiency losses?
The barriers haven’t changed much in decades, and cyclically someone pretends those are all minor.
The new play is: Maybe Ammonia?
Hydrogen works basically the same as natural gas. The problems of handling it are readily solvable.
Oh Nissan… the sex data collector lol
Fuck telemetry is not something I expected would be a thing, but I should have guessed.
Hey! That telemetry that we didn’t agree to and a good chunk of which was buried in lengthy legal jargon that you have to accept to use the car was necessary. Like Goku’s crowdsourced Spirit Bomb, Nissan collected our sex data to… make sexy cars. Yeah that’s it. Nothing insidious! /s
Toyota and others have been promising solid state battery tech. It’s time for them to deliver yet these plants won’t be ready until 2030. (If they can make it work at all.)
I wish them luck. But they are coming from the rear and have a long way to go.
Don’t worry Tesla will start losing features to bring in parity with it’s competitors
