Posted on 12/19/2022 11:37:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
BURIRAM, Thailand—Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda said he is among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.
Auto makers are making big bets on fully electric vehicles, investments that have been bolstered by robust demand for the limited numbers of models that are now available.
Still, challenges are mounting—particularly in securing parts and raw materials for batteries—and concerns have emerged in some pockets of the car business about the speed to which buyers will make the shift, especially as EV prices have soared this year.
“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”
While major rivals, including General Motors Co. and Honda Motor Co., have set dates for when their lineups will be all-EV, Toyota has stuck to a strategy of investing in a diverse lineup of vehicles that includes hydrogen-powered cars and hybrids, which combine batteries with gas engines.
The world’s biggest auto maker has said it sees hybrids, a technology it invented with the debut of the Toyota Prius in the 1990s, as an important option when EVs remain expensive and charging infrastructure is still being built out in many parts of the world. It is also developing zero-emission vehicles powered by hydrogen.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
acquerie: The union of government and private industry - fascism.
Gov’t and private industry have worked together for decades, Computer industry, defense, medical research, agriculture, energy.
A++++ The best of all worlds.
I agree. My daughter has a plug in Toyota Prius Prime which is both electric and hybrid. Gets 25 miles on a charge on the electric side which is great for local and automatically switches to hybrid when it runs out of charge. Zero range anxiety and never has to look for a plugin station outside the house.
What was the total cost? When do they teach equilibrium with cost of grid electricity? How long will panels last? What is the annual solar efficiency drop off? What are the maintenance costs for system and keeping the panels clean?
How well do they work in the snow?
cyclotic: How well do they work in the snow?
I read the new panels have those defroster strips such as in the back window of your car and take minimal energy to keep snow from building up..
Don’t know about the rest. I have been seeing lot more solar panels on corporate buildings and property on my travels about. I can’t imagine private industry is doing it if they were losing money. There must be a benefit to it.
A hybrid BEV / HEV would be much simpler by being just an electric car with two power sources: battery and hydrogen fuel cell. Right now hydrogen is costly to produce relative to battery power, thus the new hybrid would have a larger battery than today's plug-in hybrids, perhaps as large as today's BEV's (what we usually call EV's, they're Battery Electric Vehicles). You could drive on battery power for local driving and for driving on trips for the first 250 miles after you leave a charging station. But for the long stretches between charging stations you can use the hydrogen to power the car.
Bonus points for those of us who live in the south and own our own property where it's becoming more feasible to have your own solar power. On some days I get such good solar that my 92kWh of home battery storage is fully charged as is my EV, and I still have solar coming in that I have nowhere for it to go (I don't put power onto the grid for multiple reasons). On those days I could run an electrolyzer to produce hydrogen -- a horribly inefficient process so it's the last that I'd do with my solar power after all other things are charged. But one thing hydrogen brings to the table in a car is it adds a lot more miles (powering a hydrogen fuel cell) without adding a lot more weight (like adding more battery storage to a normal EV would do).
So instead of getting just the first 270 miles of a trip free with my own solar power, I could get perhaps the first 500 or 600 miles free (assuming I don't take a long trip every week or so, because like I say running the electrolyzer is horribly inefficient and would be the last priority, so it'd take a while to build up the hydrogen for the next long trip). Or another way to say it, any time I have 500 or 600 miles in between chargers I could use the hydrogen to take me further than the battery would.
The problem would be refuelling the hydrogen fuel cell while on a long trip. As I say, making hydrogen is an inefficient process. That would make a hydrogen refuel more costly than charging the battery or filling up a gasoline tank -- unless the hydrogen is made from burning natural gas, which the warmageddonists won't like. So that one part of the trip makes hydrogen more expensive than battery charge or gasoline fill up.
The auto execs know the current approach is not practical short term. But like everything else these days, you step outside the liberal narrative and you get cancelled. The majority of US Auto Mfg will go along.. And once they lose billions, they will go to the government and get reimbursed.
Interesting video on the project.
Typically the cost reaches equilibrium about the same time the panels reach their lifespan, so besides the corporate virtue signaling, it’s a wash.
A few years ago at a former employer, I worked closely with a customer that produced solar panels. When I realized that they didn’t even have solar n their own roof, even at the plant in Mexico, I learned what a scam it was.
A bank required 15 acres to cover 80% of their electrical needs for lights, computers, a coffee machine, a microwave at lunch, and little else.
Try that for a business with washing machines, hot water heaters, elevators, escalators, electric ovens, air compressors, power tools, etc. Forget about a welder or a even a 220v floor buffer.
That didn’t answer any questions. Great, it’s big with 40,000 panels.
So what?
So you can power 80% of the campus. At what cost compared to current grid rates? If the cost is more, Chase is not supporting their shareholders wisely.
cyclotic:Typically the cost reaches equilibrium about the same time the panels reach their lifespan, so besides the corporate virtue signaling, it’s a wash.
A tooling company a county over has installed solar panels. I really doubt they are doing it for virture signaling. Competition and such makes dollars tough to come by in private business. I am sure they did it because there was a benefit to it.
That's the crux of it all; they're gambling with peoples' lives AND their money.
It's korporatism, also known as fascism, and it has to stop.
Electric cars are like the mercury filled CFL light bulbs.
A bad solution rushed through that won’t last.
LED lights are a much solution.
Hydrogen powered cars is where things will go. Electric cars will go away like CFL light bulbs
It was -37F here in Fairbanks this morning. I was driving and wondering how on earth these EV’s could possibly work for all us working folks in these temperatures. They just can’t. Never will. It is sheer insanity to think it is possible.
How well do they work in the snow?
All good questions and to be honest, only a few of us with solar panels and EV's take the time to research those things because most people who buy them are virtue-signalling warmagedonists. But to answer your questions, my payoff period is 10-11 years from now, which is 11-12 years after I installed the first half of my system. (I'm in Alabama, unlike Chase Bank's Ohio campus, so I'm sure their payback time is a lot longer). That assumes a 3% inflation rate for all energy costs I'm either totally avoiding (no more natural gas) or mostly avoiding (I buy little power and gasoline) in my overall energy project of making my house more efficient with insulation and such, converting my two natural gas appliances to electric, installing solar and batteries and studying them for a year to make sure I like it before I went all in and doubled my solar and tripled my battery capacity and doubled my inverter capacity and bought an EV and my wife and I do most of our driving in the EV, though we still sometimes use our ICE pickup. (Some of us conservatives are serious about weaning our families off of things the government overregulates, like energy LOL).
And I have little snow to speak of (though it happens occasionally). The only cleaning I've done to my panels is wash them off with a water hose 2 or 3 times per year during pollen season. The little bit of ice I get on them on a few winter mornings in Alabama cleans them as the ice melts off better than rain. There are no maintenance costs so far, perhaps because there are no moving parts except for the fans in my inverters. My overall throughput is about 80% of all the power I need in my all-electric, two-story house is provided by solar, including charging the EV (for our local driving, obviously). I buy the other 20% of power I need from the grid but don't put power onto the grid when I have excess (for multiple reasons). For example, in my November bill I pulled 426kWh from the grid, which is less than the 1,154kWH I pulled from the grid in November 2020 (before I went solar and got an EV). That 1,154kWh I pulled from the grid in my pre-solar days is on top of the natural gas bill I had (because I had 2 natural gas appliances back then) and buying a lot more gas at the pump (because both of our cars were ICE cars then so all of our driving required gas, unlike now in which most of our driving is in the EV).
As far as how long the panels last, in my case they have a 25-year warranty guaranteed to have only a slight annual decline in throughput so that they're still producing 70% in the final year. (Actually the ones I bought in the upgrade have a 25-year/80% warranty.) My batteries have a 19-year/50% warranty. These are pretty standard warranties. My pay-back calculation takes into consideration the slight decline in throughput.
Half of these were made in U.S.A. (half of the panels and one of the inverter in Texas, the other inverter in North Carolina) and the other half made elsewhere (half of the panels were made in the nation of Georgia and all of the batteries made in Cheyna).
You ask how well they work in snow. As I've said, I have had only slight snow and ice that wasn't worth me trying to brush off (unlike Chase bank's Ohio campus I'm sure). But one nice thing cold weather brings to the table is it makes the solar panels more efficient. Of all the things I own, the solar panels are the one thing that every now and then performs above spec, and that's when they're cold. To be fair, one additional cost I added recently was doing better weatherproofing of the garage and putting a small space heater near the batteries to come on when the temp inside gets below 45°F to keep both the solar batteries and the EV's battery from losing charge in the cold. It doesn't have to come on much where I live, but the little bit of power it consumes saves me from losing a lot of charge on a cold night.
I’m mostly saying there is a progression that takes place.
Evs are like trying to go from the invention of the radio straight to pcs.
There’s a lot of research and development that has to take place in between.
Rocket technology to landing a man on the moon.
Rotary phones to smart phones.
Yes, the hybrid would seem to be the logical progression but due the costs the auto makers are actually moving away from them. What the Toyota guy is saying is if the Government wasn’t putting a gun to everyone’s head there would little to no movement to EV’s and he’s right.
T.B. Yoits: A bank required 15 acres to cover 80% of their electrical needs for lights, computers, a coffee machine, a microwave at lunch, and little else. Try that for a business with washing machines, hot water heaters, elevators, escalators, electric ovens, air compressors, power tools, etc. Forget about a welder or a even a 220v floor buffer.
This building has 13,000 employees.
The facility—¼ mile from end to end—houses approximately 13,000 employees in a space equal in square footage to the Empire State Building. At 2 million square feet (190,000 m2), it is the largest JPMorgan Chase & Co.
McCoy Center - Wikipedia
Yep but unlike EV cars she repaired herself guess it’s where MoPar or no car came from.
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