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
EVs are boutique cars and the boutique market is full-up.
The automotive industry is apparently run by fools who can’t
do math.
What about the batteries?
So my wife's 10-15 minute breaks every 200 or so miles is conducive to charging the EV on road trips. Of course, we don't live up north where it's cold (which makes charging take longer) and the road trips we take up there aren't in the winter.
Another thing is here in the southeast the few people who own EV's do most of their charging at home. That means when I travel around the southeast and stop and road-side chargers, there's never a line, there's always more chargers than EV's. Why? Because the few people at the road-side chargers are travelers like myself, not the locals. This is not the case in the densely populated urban areas (i.e. northeast) where many EV owners can't charge at home (they either live in apartments or they live in houses stacked so close to each other that they have to park in the street). They fill up the road-side charging stations to charge up for local driving (just like when you stop at a gas station most of the people there are gassing up for local driving, not road trips).
Because I do most of my charging at home, I probably spend less total time waiting at chargers through the year than I used to spend waiting at a gas station through a year when all of my driving was in an ICE car. A gas fillup might take only 5-7 minutes, but I had a lot more gas fillups than I now have charging stops because I had to fillup multiple times per week to handle the local driving. But again, that's probably the case if you do lots of local driving and can charge at home. If someone doesn't drive a lot or can't charge at home, an EV's not a good fit. Likewise if someone is single and doesn't need 2 cars -- I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being totally dependent on EV's -- everyone should have at least one ICE car. IMHO an EV at best is good for a couple that drives a lot, can do most charging at home, is in the market for a car anyway, doesn't live up north and have to put up with bitter cold, and the car you're in a market for is not a pickup (don't get me started on EV pickups having poor range when loaded down). That situation exactly describes the situation my wife and I were in 2 years ago when it was time to replace her ICE crossover. We got an EV crossover and it has greatly reduced our operational cost (even after adding in the extra monthly and annual costs an EV has).
But that's a free market perspective -- not how the Dims push EV's by forcing them. I can't stand the control-freak Dims.
Another thing I didn't think about until I got the EV, on road trips the first charge up takes no time because you charge at home before you head out the next morning. When we take the ICE car on a trip, I always had to decide if I wanted to take it to fill up the night before we left, or in the morning on the way out. With the EV that's not an issue at all because it charges up while we sleep and is full when we wake up in the morning before we head out on the trip. Of course, that's just one fill up it saves, so on our road trip to Canada and back that was immaterial. But if it's a weekend getaway trip, having that first fill-up automatically done at home is a convenience I didn't think about until I was experiencing it.
“Consistent with EPA’s traditional approach to establishing pollution standards for power plants under section 111 of the Clean Air Act, the proposed standards are based on technologies such as
carbon capture and sequestration/storage
(CCS)low-GHG hydrogen co-firing”
“Base load affected facilities that follow the CCS pathway must meet a second phase standard based on 90% capture of CO2, using CCS, by 2035”
“Baseload affected facilities that follow the low-GHG hydrogen pathway must meet a second phase standard based on co-firing 30% low-GHG hydrogen by volume by 2032 and a third phase standard based on cofiring 96% by volume low-GHG hydrogen by 2038”
Why not do things the smart way; let the Capital System with supply and demand determining the market?
Between the subsidized price/tax credits, subsidized electricity to charge them, and subsidized roads to drive them on (with access to HOV lanes too), they are cheap to own. They are a good deal for those who own them, assuming they fit their use case. Probably a lot better fit here in SoCal than most of the country. They’re not such a deal for those who don’t own them, but pay to subsidize them.
These simpleton who think that their pixie dust dreams are stronger than the market. The unfortunate thing is that they’ll continue to use state power to enforce their dreams, the market notwithstanding. All the while dialing to improve the grid to support their state-enforced green conversion. Recipe for economic disaster
That so-called 30% will get what they deserve, good and hard.
Personally, I would never get one, but I can see how an EV could just about meet your needs IF you live in a big city and don’t plan to take any long trips or drive outside the city much. (this would be a lot easier in a 2 car family if the other car were an internal combustion engine car).
Its impractical for me and impractical for most people due to needing to haul things, needing to take long trips or living in places that get extremely cold. So I will never get one.
This push by government and Gaia worshipers to get everybody to buy an EV is both laughable and insane.
Oh by the way, we don’t have anything like the capacity needed in the electricity grid to charge up everybody’s cars if we went fully electric for our cars.
Bingo! You’ve hit the nail on the head. The peasants can afford too many nice things. So their solution is to take nice things away from the peasants so that only they - the aristocrats - may enjoy such things. Don’t forget only they and their bodyguards are to own guns. Those must be taken away from the peasants as well.
All the Save Da Erf! stuff are just modern sumptuary laws. The elites think the peasants have gotten above their station and want to push them back down.
Not unusual for Southern California where EVs are now as common as Mercedes once were.
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~25% of all new car sales in California were EVs through the 3Q of last year. Here is a web page that keeps tracks of EV sales county by county.
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