Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs: Company President Akio Toyoda says electric vehicles are just one option alongside hybrids and hydrogen-powered cars

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.

"Question - is the cost of converting the natural gas appliances to electric factored into your payback calculations? As well as the cost of going to EV's."

Yes. The entire energy project is the payback period, including the cost for the natural gas appliances (and their installation) and the savings from having no natural gas bill, but not a 100% savings because they added some to my power bill, but not fully adding to my power bill because the solar took up a lot of the slack. LOL Other things I paid for in this project with the HELOC are overall energy savings chores like adding insulation, adding duct work to my new hybrid water heater to duct warm air from the attic into the water heater's air intake (so it doesn't have to work as hard) and having a wye lever in a duct with the cold air coming off the water heater (to put the cold air into our living space during the warm 8 months so our home's variable speed heat pump doesn't have to work as hard to cool the house, but in the cool month's direct the water heater's output to the attic so it doesn't make our heat pump work harder keeping the house warm).

I'm a soon to be retiring software engineer, with most of my experience in the back-end data processing than on the front end building screens and apps. I'm not specifically a data analyst, but most of my software has been for analysts and statisticians and accountants, so I think a lot like them when I take on large personal projects like this. What I'm saying, if anyone expects to replicate my results for themselves they need to first do a detailed analysis of their energy consumption habits and driving habits and average peak solar hours per day in your area and how that changes in your area each month of the year (for me it's 5 peak solar hours per day in the summer months and 3.5 in the lowest 2 winter months). By doing that I was able to determine the threshold of how much solar and battery storage to get without running into the law of diminishing returns. Also, I assumed a 10% loss in efficiency because nothing ever works as advertised. I predicted in the first year of having solar (before getting the EV) that it's save me 50% to 60% of all of the power we consumed. On the 1 year anniversary I analyzed the telemetry from my inverter (which includes power consumed regardless of how much had to come from the grid, as well as how much it pulled from the grid). The results: 58.5% of the power we needed was "free" from solar, the other 41.5% pulled from the grid. After the solar upgrade is one year old I predict it'll show me 85% to 95% of all the power we need was from solar, even charging the EV, pulling 5% to 15% from the grid.

I didn't put this in my original post, but it also pays back the interest on the HELOC I took out to pay for most of the energy project. It also pays the interest on the EV (the 4 year car loan). So it cost me almost nothing up front from our investments we've built up for retirement. At this point the energy project "owes" my savings/retirement about $2,500. That'll soon be "paid back" by the saving in my budget anything in energy costs beyond what I was paying for them in 2019. Thus, as long as my budget pays off the car payment and HELOC as though I'm still living on year 2019 home energy and car costs, I will have accomplished my primary goal.

My budget "feels" like it's costing me $850/month. $400 of that is the car savings my wife and I did each month for years to repair our cars and eventually replace each one with the next used car. I've suspended that while making car payments and will do that for 3 years later (a total of 7 years) to help pay down the HELOC because the car we bought has some nice luxuries for a little bit higher end than if we got a cheaper EV that was equivalent in efficiency and range (but not as comfortable and as many features). Basically I'm counting the luxury cost of the EV as coming from my retirement/savings, but the "base" cost of the EV as part of the energy project (and thus paid by my HELOC to help supplement my normal car savings allotment's ability to make car payments).
The other $450/month is how much we were spending on average in 2019 for power + natural gas + gasoline for one of our ICE cars. I used one car instead of two for comparison because with my wife retired and me working from home a lot, we now drive the EV about as much as we used to drive one of our two cars in 2019. IMHO 2019 is a good base comparison for energy costs because 2020 is weird and after that is the Brandon years. If I can make our budget feel like it's costing us $450/month the rest of our lives, I will have beaten energy inflation. That is my goal: to make it so our retirement investments aren't drained quickly from energy inflation (except of course how the Dims' energy policies indirectly raise my other costs like groceries).

The way I work it each month is: my tiny power bill + HELOC payment + car payment is well past $850/month. So I pull the difference from my HELOC, which makes my HELOC balance go up and also makes my HELOC payment go up. Then when I get the EV and solar tax credits in my tax refunds over the next few years (I hate the tax credits because I hate government trying to force behavior. Besides, all they did was artificially raise my costs anyway so they didn't help me. But it is what it is.) I'll put the tax refunds into the HELOC to pay it down, which brings it down a little more than a years worth of monthly withdrawals from my HELOC brings it up. I'm not putting my entire tax refunds into paying down the HELOC, just the portions related to the EV tax credit and home solar installation tax credit, with the solar tax credit being carried forward into future years until my tax liability has used it up.

Then after the car payments end and I'm still using $850/month for 3 years to pay down the HELOC balance, I'll be paying down the HELOC a lot (because my HELOC payment + tiny power bill will be barely over $850, so I'll withdraw only a little while the payment pays down the balance a lot). On the 7th anniversary of owning the car I'll resume putting $400 /month into the car savings account to help pay for repairs and eventually replace the EV's battery at about 10 years ($10K if I had to pay cash to do it today, assuming a 3% inflation rate it'll be $13,500 10 years from now). From that point on, I'll use $450/month instead of $850/month for my budget's allocation for home and EV energy costs. If the tiny power bill + HELOC is more than $450, I'll pull the excess from the HELOC. But even with that the HELOC's balance will slowly be paid down, which makes the HELOC's payments go down too. So eventually I'll reach the point where the tiny power bill + HELOC payment is less than $450 -- at that point I'll be paying extra on the principal of the HELOC.

This also assumes 3% inflation rate on oil changes every 5,000 miles that cost me $61 the last time I did it. This also assumes a 3% inflation rate on the cost of gasoline compared to 15 mpg (what our used cars were getting before I replaced one with an EV, and like the used car I was planning to get my wife to replace hers before my solar system passed a year anniversary and I liked the results enough to get her an EV instead and upgrade solar).

Every month when I get a power bill I add the total cost of the power bill and # of kWh I pulled from the grid to a row in a spreadsheet and a table row in a TSQL database I made for this project. I export from my inverters a nice report recorded in 5-minute candles for power coming in from the panels and power pulled from the grid and power stored to batteries and power pulled from batteries and overall load to my electrical panels, etc. I run a C# app I made to import that data into another TSQL table I made. I then run a few TSQL queries on views I made to calculate how much overall power I consumed during the date range of the power bill's billing period, how much of that had to be pulled from the grid (the record representing the power bill), calculate the difference (which is how many kWh that month my solar system saved me from having to buy from the grid), how much my power utility costs me per kWh with all their hidden riders and the tax (by first removing the fixed amounts from the bill and deducing the rest must be the overall usage charge for the month and dividing that from the # of kWh the utility says I bought from them to get the true cost per kWh I'm being charged). The related row in Excel for the power bill that month has a row 12 rows down for the same month next year assuming the same kWh consumed and slightly more kWh will be pulled from the grid a year later (to account for slight degradation in my solar equipment), and a 3% inflation rate on the cost per kWh. Because I no longer get a natural gas bill I can't do this kind of analysis per month on determining the true cost per cubic ft I'm saving. I just assume a 3% inflation rate since the day I shut off my natural gas (I'm sure my true savings is a lot more with how Brandon made nat gas spike.)

Also every month when I get my power bill I record in a spreadsheet my EV's odometer reading so I get the total # of miles driven that month, and in that same row I put the dollar amount for the cheapest gallon of gas that day at the cheapest gas station in my area (and assume that's the cost for all the miles driven that month). This calculates how much it would have cost me for gas at the pump to drive those same miles in the kind of used ICE cars we were committed to drive the rest of our lives. In another sheet I track every time I charge the EV from a charger away from home (both the kWh I bought and how much it cost me). The main EV sheet uses that information to calculate how much kWh charging the EV at home added to our overall demand that month's billing period (thus adding to my power bill, but in another sheet I calculated how much of that is saved from solar so I don't double count that part by counting it in the EV sheet too). 12 rows later it assumes I'll drive the same # of miles (and charge on the road and charge at home) in that month a year later, but with the gas savings be 3% higher. It also calculates if I cross 5,000 miles (thus saving on an oil change that month since that's how often I've religiously done that in ICE cars). It also calculates replacing my EV's battery on the 10th year, but saving me money on the 7th year by not having to buy another used ICE car (our average for replacing them is every 7 years), again assuming 3% inflation rate for a decent used car then compared to now.

When my HELOC is paid off I'll still have many years left on the warranties for the solar panels and solar batteries, so they'll be nothing but assets for me to save me money (because the debt on them will be paid off). It's my intention to keep budgeting as though my energy costs are $450/month. (By "energy costs" I'm talking about for the house and the EV, not the little bit of energy I buy for other things like the little bit we drive the ICE pickup and gas for the lawnmower.) At that point my only expense (at least related to this project) will be a small power bill, I'll put the difference each month into a simple investment account of mutual funds like our retirement investments are. This is to build up cash to eventually replace parts of the solar system, much like our $400 monthly transfer to our car savings account has always helped us with eventual car replacements. Hopefully the trend in solar equipment costs will continue and they'll keep going down in price relative to their throughput, much like computers keep going down in price relative to their increasing speed and storage capacity.

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