Posted on 03/20/2021 9:54:12 AM PDT by bitt
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, .
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Swapping batteries is infeasible. You’re exchanging >$10,000 boxes of unknown prior possession.
We drive our gasoline-powered cars for years and years. Most every car we’ve ever owned racked up over 200,000 miles. My Honda Element had 309,000 when I sold it. (Gosh, I miss that car / truck/ whatever...)
I have absolutely no interest in electric-powered vehicles. None. They won’t last as long as our old dinosaurs.
And if that makes me a dinosaur, so be it.
“What makes the typical American car or small SUV ideal for electric power is that our power grid has a lot of excess capacity during overnight hours in most parts of the country.”
No longer true as we move on a rocketsled to wind and solar.
And peak excess at night is a thing of the past as we race towards wind and solar.
Tesla is working like crazy right now to fix wait times and charge times.
Two big problems are these:
1. Infrastructure availability and wait times
2. Power & compatibility. What I mean by that is that the bigger charging stations might push out 100 - 150kW, but the cars can only suck in about 25kW at one time. Longer charge times.
They are working on this. The newer cars will be able to take in all 150kW and cut that charge time down to 30 minutes or less.
All of this takes time to build/design.
If you are ever needing to drive on a 5 hour plus trip, I highly recommend mapping out and ensuring the charging stations you plan on using are in service. I would never recommend doing this on your first EV rodeo.
Having driven them for 6 years I know what to expect and where to go. I have driven my Nissan Leaf from Atlanta to Charlotte once. It took me an extra hour an a half due to charge times, but I had a fast charger on my car. Most people don’t have thouse.
Another thing to remember is that Tesla connectors are unique and not compatible with the standard industry connectors. You need to get an adapter to make those work. Friend of mine rented a Tesla for a drive from N GA to Savannah and he forgot to get one from the rental car company (Enterprise). His trip was a disaster.
Still wondering how to generate heat in the winter in an electric automobile. Electric trains are at least connected permanently to their power source, whether third rail or overhead wire, so resistive heating is readily available. Internal combustion cars use the heat from the engine (via heat exchange from hot coolant to heater core) to heat the car’s interior; no such device for electric vehicles.
It’s not about the environment at all. It’s all about restricting the freedom to travel and live a free life.
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under that regime, it will drive people into 2 or 3 dozen mega cities (see: Paolo Soleri, arcologies) were EV cars are economical, but even there, only the wealthy will be able to afford the vehicles and the power. Other city dwellers will be forced to use some form of electrified mass transit (see: frogs on slow boil). The rest of the country will be for the mega-Gates-class super rich.
No, they’ll sodomize us on electricity rates and taxes.
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you’ll wish it was that nice
Come back to me in about 4 years.
Folks in the 1880s or 1890’s hated electricity.
15 years after that it was what everybody wanted.
There’s no maintenance with an EV. Co-worker of mine has one that is over 100k in mileage. Only thing he’s ever done to it is rotate/replace tires, change windsheild wipers, and flush the brake fluid.
It’s going to catch on, it’ll just take some time. I love my EV’s.
Going all electric will be a disaster. Merge electric with “self driving” and you have mindless chaos, high power costs, and total control of the population.
At one time it wasn’t economical to drive across the U.S. because you needed to bring your own gasoline or diesel fuel with you.
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Because the roads were so terrible spare rims, tires and other parts were needed along the way. Until Eisenhower began the interstate highway system
Big wind, sleazy solar, and suppressing nat gas.
We’ll have electricity on the Zimbabwe plan.
California and Texas are not models of energy market DE-regulation. They are models of centralized control and anti-capitalist market interference by subsidizing substandard renewables.
Ozone tax
My wife and I are in our early 80’s, and we got refunds back on insurance for our two vehicles for our low mileage due to the so called pandemic and lack of driving.
Last year the battery on my wife’s Lexus died from lack of use, and we got a new one under warranty.
The battery on my Ridgeline just died & had to be replaced. It died past warranty. The AAA guy said we needed to drive each vehicle about an hour at least once a week.
We could get by with one vehicle and in a few years sell the last one and use UBER and cabs.
However, our parents, both sets gone now, said to never give up your cars. As that was giving up your freedom.
Giving up our vehicles is all about restricting/losing our freedom to travel and live a free life to go where we want to and when we want to. Sometimes just to take a pleasure drive with no real need to drive.
Our siblings, cousins and friends in about our same age group, say that they will never sell nor give up their cars/vehicles. There are a few who should give up driving.
“At $7/gal gas, a maxed out Tesla Cybertruck will pay for itself in about 160,000 miles”
DO you even hear the failure of America in those words. If government fails America to the point you have 7 dollar gas, you can buy a heavily subsidized, 40,000 dollar and up truck that is ugly as homemade sin, and it’ll pay for itself if you drive it 7 to 10 years.
I just did a search on GM hybrid plug ins. Feb of 2020 the CEO of GM said There would be no hybrids in the future at GM.
A Dec. 2020 article touted GM’s plug in hybrid trucks coming.
I prefer to get a gasoline fueled car and drive where ever my whims may lead me, knowing there will be gasoline anywhere.
You may have misread the post, as I did. “Battery car”, not “car battery.”
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