Posted on 01/23/2024 5:52:42 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The booming sound you may be hearing right now -- especially if you live in San Francisco or Washington, D.C -- could be resulting from liberal heads exploding as they read about what Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said during a conference this month. Electric vehicles will only ever make up 30 percent of the market or less, he argued, and politicians should get out of the way and let the markets decide which cars are preferable to consumers.
Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Al Gore have not commented.
Toyoda's opinion doesn't mean that he's completely given up on cleaner energy, though; he believes hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell cars will play a role too -- but gas-burning cars will still dominate.
With a billion people in the world living without electricity, limiting their choices and ability to travel by making expensive cars isn’t the answer, the grandson of the company’s founder said during a business event this month, according to remarks published on the company’s media platform Tuesday. “Customers — not regulations or politics — should make that decision,” he said. [Emphasis mine.]
It's been a rough week for EVs:
Electric Vehicles Enter the 'Total Failure' Phase of Their Existence
Ford Slashes Electric Truck Production, Because Nobody Wants Them
'We Got a Bunch of Dead Robots Out Here'—Tesla Charging Stations Freeze in Chicago
Toyoda has long been a proponent of a “multi-pathway approach” where customers get to choose what cars best suit their needs because the EV revolution won't be as quick as some are claiming.
From the Toyota Motor Corporation transcript of the conference:
No matter how much progress BEVs [Battery Electric Vehicles] make, I think they will still only have a 30 % market share . Then, the remaining 70 % will be HEVs , FCEVs , and hydrogen engines. And I think engine cars will definitely remain.
I think this is something that customers and the market will decide, not regulatory values or political power. [Bolding and underlining theirs.]
That's why Toyota Motor Corporation, which is competing all over the world, has a full lineup of multi-pathway products.
It's no surprise that Toyoda is a fan of hybrid vehicles because his company manufactures the top-selling car in the category, the Prius, which liberals love to cover in progressive bumper stickers.
The grandson of Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda served as CEO of the world's number one automaker from 2009 to 2023 before taking on the chairman role in April 2023.
Despite his belief in the future of gas-powered engines, Toyoda is proud of his company's record:
'Thanks to the introduction of [hybrids] in Japan 20 to 30 years ago, Japan is the only developed country to have reduced CO2 emissions by 23 percent,' he said, according to a transcript of the conference, shared by Toyota.
'Japan has its own way of doing things. I don't think the correct answer is to try to imitate the West in everything,' he said.
I have no problem with electric cars, and people who want to buy one should be able to -- by all means, be my guest. What I do have a problem with is politicians shoving them down our throats when they're not ready for prime time. Toyoda's approach to cutting down carbon emissions is much more realistic than Joe Biden's or CA Gov. Newsom's.
It's too bad that progressives and climate alarmists will ignore his message.
See: Californians Told Not to Charge Electric Vehicles Days After State Banned Gas-Powered Sales by 2035
EV owners waiting for their car to charge in < 20F weather. pic.twitter.com/3vgvEE0a0T— Frank (@bubbagump64) January 18, 2024
Only if they are hybrids. Full EV’s are not effective.
I don’t know a single person in my circle who could afford one of these EVs and the ongoing expenses of it. I know ONE person who has a hybrid.
(Are only the rich going to be permitted to drive???)
Yes. That is what they are intending.
My thought is that what is driving this amongst the billionaire class is that they are losing their relative prestige because the lives that they lead are becoming too accessible to us, which causes them to lose their status. So, by removing our ability to fly and drive and eat meat and drink coffee, it keeps their lives special.
I think that is what is driving this, at least in part. The billionaire class has an internal need to be special and to be able to do things that we cannot.
He is pretty much right.
That said, a 30% market share is still a lot of cars.
Ford and GM have bet heavily on EVs. And expensive EVs at that. Normal people want normal cars that are affordable and reliable. Pickup truck buyers want vehicles that can haul heavy, bulky loads.
Hopefully the EV obsession and greedy UAW leadership will kill off Detroit auto companies and leave the market to private sector consumers and manufacturers who operate in normal fashion.
And I have been driving Fords for the last 20 plus years. I will miss the Escapes and the Fusion hybrid from my past, but the world moves on.
I don’t know if I agree with all of that - there are lots of very wealthy people who don’t think that way.
What puzzles me is that the ones who do don’t seem to realize that if they hobble and destroy the middle and working classes, there will be nobody to support their luxuries.
IMHO that's one reason they're doing it. Another reason is it'll later be easier to control the EV masses through one utility company (local power company) than it is to control the ICE car masses through a handful of oil and gasoline providers.
I agree with that as well. They can disconnect you from 3000 miles away and you’ll have no means to travel the country to get to them.
NTSA.
:Mixed Messages pt 1:
:Mixed Messages pt 2:
:Mixed Messages pt 3:
Control freaks don’t think logically. All they want is control, even if they screw themselves in the process.
My wife and I are happy doing most of our driving in an EV. As many miles as we drive it's cheaper. IMHO, with prices of gas and power in Alabama last year (ranging from $2.60 to $3.00/gallon, 15¢ to 16¢/kWh), the threshold is you ought to drive at least 12K miles per year to consider the next car being an EV. My wife and I put 26K miles on our last year, with 16K of those miles charged at home.
But this thing the Dims do of pushing it onto people is stupid. There is no warmageddon to save us from. And EV's aren't a good fit for a lot of people (i.e. live in cold climate, or can't charge at home, or is single and need just one car, etc.). Even for those of us an EV is good for, I'm not comfortable being solely dependent on EV's (our other car is an ICE pickup). Last but not least, the gubment ain't got not business anyway telling us what we can and can't do.
While not every millionaire or billionaire supports the agenda, all of the ones that do support the agenda or millionaires and billionaires.
To answer your question, I have two answers.
1. They think they can still enjoy a billionaire lifestyle while driving the rest of us into feudal poverty because we will still be generating enough economic activity to allow for this. Billionaires don’t mind dropping to become millionaires, if the rest of us drop to nothing.
2. They are being stupid, because you are correct. Once we are destroyed, they will be easy to destroy themselves. They just don’t think it will happen to them.
Well, let’s see how it all turns out :-)
(We on the bottom of the ‘Totem Pole’ have better survival skills than most of the pampered rich do :-)
My husband and I have about 40K miles on a 2013 car. We’re just not the market (or the tax bracket) for an EV, and wouldn’t want to drive out to get it charged.
(I’m hoping our little car goes on another ten years :-)
30%?
That’s being generous. I don’t see even 10% ever.
Unfortunately, the "kill switch" legislation was for all new cars, not just EV's. But I was talking about the Dims making regulations to limit how much power you get for charging or powering your home (think social credit score for getting more than X kWh per month). If they want to do that they have one point of access they have to control: your local power utility. But if they were to try to do the same kind of thing with gasoline they have to implement it with many gas stations you can choose from, all supplied from a handful refineries (not many refineries, but more than one unlike most of us having having only one power utility).
One reason my wife and I have both an EV car and an ICE pickup is because I want security through diversified energy dependency for our transportation. If the Dims make gasoline hard to come by or too expensive: we can do most of our driving in the EV (which we do now, including long trip driving). If the Dims make power hard to come by or too expensive: we can do most of our driving in the ICE pickup, especially long trip driving. If the Dims make both power and gasoline hard to come by we'll still do local driving in our EV on most days (since our home solar makes our home energy independent on most days, including charging the EV).
I view hybrids as an improvement over ICE vehicles, if they engineer them such that you can pop out the batter pack and replace it by popping a new one in with relative ease.
That fits the needs of most people, who do daily commuting. But I don’t view full EV’s as better than ICE in any meaningful way. You need fuel to get anywhere that can defined as a road trip and EV’s will never meet that.
“I don’t know a single person in my circle who could afford one of these EVs and the ongoing expenses of it”
I know maybe a dozen people who drive Teslas, two since 2014. Not unusual for Southern California where EVs are now as common as Mercedes once were.
The Tesla Model 3 sells here for $35,000 new.
The only ongoing expenses that they seem to have are tires and windshield wiper fluid.
The “brakes” are the motors running in reverse. There is no oil to change. No radiator fluid. There’s nothing to tune up. No smog checks.
Unless they run into something, which is hard to do with all of the sensors and cameras, there’s nothing to fix.
They “refuel” in their garages overnight. I don’t know of anyone owning a Tesla who doesn’t have a garage to park it in so that seems to be a limiting factor.
These aren’t going to be practical in rural areas, and probably not for people who can’t garage them, but in a lot of California they make financial sense. I’ve only heard of one person here who returned one, and that was within a week of buying it. The rest seem to think it’s the best car they’ve ever owned.
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