Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don't Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

Toyota makes a lot of cars, so many that it’s the world’s largest or second-largest auto manufacturer every year.

So Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s comments at the company’s year-end press conference deserve notice and no little amount of respect. He knows more about cars and their economic ecosystem than just about anyone else on the planet.

“The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets… When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?”

failure to count the cost of what politicians are proposing. More EVs will demand more electricity.

Toyoda is getting at two things. One, EVs are not powered by magical unicorn emissions, they are powered by the means we use to generate electricity. In the Japan, the United States, and everywhere else

Wind is not economically competitive yet, so it’s subsidized by the government. Neither wind nor solar are cheap or reliable enough yet to displace oil and especially natural gas in our grid. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Oil and natural gas always burn.

The second issue Toyoda is getting at is that petroleum isn’t just a fuel, it’s the foundation of thousands upon thousands of products we rely on every day. Cars alone have plastic and other petroleum-based parts throughout their systems and interiors. There is as of yet no reliable or economical replacement for the petroleum used to manufacture those parts

Perhaps two of the world’s leading car experts should be listened to before Tokyo, Washington, or any other capital follows California’s lead and bans gas cars without considering the ripple effects.

According to Forbes.com, Enel X, the company that installs these machines, predicts at least 2 million charging stations will be needed for Washington State to be fully electric by 2045, about 1,600,000 home chargers and 500,000 commercial and public charging stations. So the largest part (and cost) of the covering of the need will have to be done by the private citizen in what they are saying they are capable of.

And then there are the taxes and fees that states will have to charge for maintaining their transportation infrastructure like roads, bridges and charging stations. Without gas, there’ll be no gas tax anymore, so there will have to be some kind of mileage tax or an electricity surcharge at the charging station, even if it’s at home.

This is not going to be pretty when the taxes fly out to the public if it is relative to the current gas tax. In Washington, drivers pay a 49.4 cent per gallon state gas tax. The federal government charges 18.4 cents per gallon, also. The average cost of regular gas in Washington is $2.75 per. That means they will have to replace roughly one fifth of the cost of the unit based upon higher priced standards. So the comparable cost will have to be an increase on the current high tax costs. Gas prices in Washington state are the third most expensive in the country already according to KING5.

The state has been trying to get people on to public transportation for a long time. They may finally make it when it becomes to expensive to own, or drive a hybrid.

And shutting down the use of fossil fuels has a whole lot more ramifications international and domestic that is going to create a huge gap and possible combat.

Oil is strategically important but oil is a scarce resource. The shortage of oil in the world market can lead to disastrous effects and consistent changes in the world politics and economy, to the extent that the shortage of oil is likely to put a considerable part of the world’s population to the edge next to starving. In this regard, many specialists stress that, in the last year, wheat (think flour) has risen by 130%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and corn by 31%, while there are now only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks left globally (Klare, 2008). At this point, it is important to place emphasis on the fact that the major reason for such a skyrocketing rise in the price for major products resulted from the lack of oil and high oil prices in the world market. Cutting it out is going to hammer everyone’s economy. And if it taking 25 years for one state to get independent of it, then how long will it take for countries depending on it’s sales so they can buy food, to get even with their loss of sales? Probably my great grandkids won’t see it. And a lot of hungry people are going to kill a lot of others to get food. Probably a good bet part of it in the US and also coming from other countries to us. The US is the world’s largest producer of maize (corn), the third-largest producer of wheat, fifth-largest producer of potatoes, tenth-largest producer of sugarcane and twelfth-largest producer of rice.

And people thought there was a crowd at the border now. People don’t go to a place looking for food unless it is there. And everyone knows it is here.

wy69

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