FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

.....a reality check for those with over 1/2 a brain. If less than 1/2 a brain, go buy one and tell yourself what good you are doing for the planet. The realities of an all-electric auto fleet.


It appears Toyota is a lot smarter than the rest of the car companies. One would need a massive upgrade to the grid to support electric vehicles AND a lot cheaper electric cars.


Not going to happen.


Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos.

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 vie for 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 U.S. 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 undergone bankruptcy 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 overcoming 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.




Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.


Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.


The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. 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 U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 doesn’t exist yet.


We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.


I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.


Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch.


Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.


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.




YOU CAN IGNORE REALITY,

BUT YOU CANNOT IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING REALITY!

tramsey Loc: Texas

You might like Toyota and that's OK but where does the money go? Into the president of Toyota's pocket who is sitting in Japan. GM might has its problems but I still will buy from them.

JamesCurran Loc: Trenton ,NJ

Please note that this article is based on ONE SENTENCE (taken out of context) by Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research. Everything else is just the opinion of a PJ Media columnist.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-preston/2021/03/19/toyota-warns-again-about-electrifying-all-autos-is-anyone-listening-n1433674

FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

You are right, after they pay workers and taxes here they can do what they want with their $$$$$$$

Better re-read it and see if you miss something important.

FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

So, did you agree with with the following?

Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don’t Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

DennyT Loc: Central Missouri woods

Hmmmmm..

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/19/22391738/toyota-electric-vehicle-strategy-bz4x-concept-subaru


https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/19/22391738/toyota-electric-vehicle-strategy-bz4x-concept-subaru

FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

Strategy.....2025 ..... another 4 years to wait and see if we will have enough juice .

Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don’t Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

JamesCurran Loc: Trenton ,NJ

Another commentary, by the same author from the same conservative site. And still misrepresenting the CEO comments the article is based on.

What both Toyota and Tesla are saying is the "We ARE going to all-electric cars. Therefore we must build up the electrical grid." This is what progressives (and other sensible people) have been saying for years.

letmedance Loc: Walnut, Ca.

I don’t think we have enough batteries to fill the bellies of 300 mil. EVs.

fantom Loc: Colorado

Progressives are mired in the Russian Communist revolution of 1917. The last thing they are is progressive.

FRENCHY Loc: Stone Mountain , Ga

And the amount of electric to filled them.

wilpharm Loc: Oklahoma

Toyota has MANY MANY employees in the USA...thats where much of the money goes

wilpharm Loc: Oklahoma

dpfoto Loc: Cape Coral, FL

I've owned cars for the last 60 years... 3 of them were Fords (They were CRAP!!), several were Chrysler products (Mostly good, but the dashboard on the last one started crumbling and falling apart). Several were GM's (Mostly good). The last 3 were Toyotas (Sienna minivans), and are the best vehicles we've ever owned.
The one I drive has over 140,000 miles on it and still runs fine.

I know the net profits go to Japan, but they were built in the USA, and a lot of the $$ went into the American employees' pockets.

wilpharm Loc: Oklahoma

no problems with my Fords....or Toyotas