Here is intelligent advice for Toyota, one of the world's leading automakers. Take heed. GM is virtue signaling with its announcement to all of its internal combustion engine (ICE) cars by 2035. This will NOT happen.
Click on the link at the bottom to read the entire article.
Is Anyone Listening?
By Bryan Preston, Mar 19, 2021, 12:50 PM ET
Depending on how and when you count, Japan's Toyota is the world's largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen came to the title of the world's largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That's including Volkswagen's inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota's four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.
GM, America's largest automaker, is about half Toyota's size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the US right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you're driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn't been afraid to change the car game.
All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn't grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn't failed and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades. When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it's probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.
Toyota's Head of Energy and Environmental Research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability. ” Wimmer's remarks come on the heels of GM's announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.
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The scale of the switch has not even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on US roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota's RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the US market in 2019, with Honda's CR-V in second. GM's top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the US market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the US Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.
Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren't there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 US government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That's about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars. Simply put, we're gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.
But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The Power Outages in California and Texas—The Largest US States by Population and by Car Ownership—exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this does not exist yet.
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Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota's addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard. Toyota isn't saying none of this can be done, by the way. It's just saying that so far, the conversation isn't anywhere near serious enough to get things done.
Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?
Click on the link at the bottom to read the entire article.
Is Anyone Listening?
By Bryan Preston, Mar 19, 2021, 12:50 PM ET
Depending on how and when you count, Japan's Toyota is the world's largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen came to the title of the world's largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That's including Volkswagen's inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota's four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.
GM, America's largest automaker, is about half Toyota's size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the US right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you're driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn't been afraid to change the car game.
All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn't grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn't failed and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades. When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it's probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.
Toyota's Head of Energy and Environmental Research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability. ” Wimmer's remarks come on the heels of GM's announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.
(clip)
The scale of the switch has not even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on US roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota's RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the US market in 2019, with Honda's CR-V in second. GM's top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the US market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the US Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.
Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren't there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 US government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That's about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars. Simply put, we're gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.
But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The Power Outages in California and Texas—The Largest US States by Population and by Car Ownership—exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this does not exist yet.
(clip)
Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota's addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard. Toyota isn't saying none of this can be done, by the way. It's just saying that so far, the conversation isn't anywhere near serious enough to get things done.
Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?
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