5150Joker
Supreme [H]ardness
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Toyota is correct, hybrids are a smarter choice than all electric. Tesla is only good for showboating around town to show off how rich you are.
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Toyota Has a Curious Justification for Not Selling Any EVs
- Thread starter Megalith
- Start date
Backwards again. Hybrids are the short term solution.
You can play Ostritch all you want, but EVs are on the fast track to take over the automotive industry.
See Prius sales being clobbered by pure EVs.
See GM abandoning the Volt (best PHEV on the market) for pure EVs.
See just about every car company racing to build EV models.
See just about every industry insider say the future is EVs.
I remember seeing Bob Lutz while publicly slamming Tesla, at an industry round table state "We all know where the future is: Self Driving Electric Cars". Just completely matter of fact, this was years before many other companies had announced anything. Now everyone is announcing a fleet of EV cars.
It's no longer just about Tesla, the momentum has reached a tipping point and the genie won't go back in the bottle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/business/electric-cars-geneva-auto-show.html
I commuted from San Jose (near Valley Fair) to Menlo Park, and when my carpool buddy changed her schedule I went out and got an off-lease CMax plugin for the stickers. That got my 20 mile commute down to about 40 minutes most days, instead of approximately forever if I drove myself. Taking the company shuttle was about 65 minutes.
Nafensoriel
Limp Gawd
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BAHAHAHAHAHA. Your GRANDKIDS will be dead before self-driving cars figure out snow and ice.
Ok sorry had to get that off my chest.
I didn't say Prius. I said hybrid drive trains. It is currently and most likely to be impossible for EV to fully replace even half of the working vehicle fleet outside of cities in the next 50 years. There are too many factors needing on-site safe and simple refuelling. Batteries are almost the worst form of energy storage by weight on the planet. EVs only work for short simple commutes within a built-up infrastructure. The good news is EV is the optimal choice to eventually replace most city traffic. Eventually. After we spend over 8 trillion dollars to upgrade our power grid and generating capacity.
Do you see a spare 8 trillion dollars laying around?
Physics doesn't care what a person wants. Physics is an asshole. Physics says No and batteries aren't getting better in my lifetime baring some silver bullet novel invention.
EV trends are great and I've said many times I would absolutely kill for an electric drive train in my work trucks just for the torque. Toss in azipod type steering and I would have your babies.
I also would never buy a pure EV work vehicle or car where I live. The risk associated would be far too high. Thing is there are quite a few people in the world living like people like me. Toyota doesn't build cars for America only. The world market is only interested in vehicles that work. When gas prices spike again you will see another 5 % added onto the already 10% global hybrid sales. Toyota made a safe bet and in the long run, it will probably pay off for them.
I see people quoting number like that all the time, but the number is worthless without a reference to the cost of the electricity and the cost of the gas used to calculate these number.
When the number are supplied, it's usually something like 8-10 cents /kwh, and $3.00 for gas.
Try the same calculation with 24 cents/kwh electricity and you get completely different results.
That would be a serial hybrid.
The current Honda Accord hybrid works this way at lower speeds. However at higher speeds, it has a clutch the connects the ICE directly to the wheels.
Seems they found the ICE more efficient on the highway when it had a direct connection to the wheels, as opposed to gas->electrical gen->electrical motor
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Sounds like modern electric equivalent of the moped I had in college many years ago. 100+ mpg, 30 MPH.
I assume that even with the batteries, it probably weighs less than my 120 pound moped.
Nafensoriel
Limp Gawd
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It would take a bit more engineering. I worked on a project a few years ago to convert a freighter to a methanol power plant vs diesel. For cars, this would be a challenge of engineering to get the main gen powerful enough to drive everything. For a truck(especially a transport truck or F450 sized work truck) it would be far easier.
They just used ICE because a 60k kWh gen is quite large. Many of the projects to do a full serial hybrid assume the generator needs to be large enough to power the entire system. I frankly think you just need to use the liquid fuel to power the battery cell. More complexity means more cost however but it allows electric to exist where power grids do not. With proper design, a dedicated power plant is significantly more efficient than an ICE as it operates at peak efficiency at all times.
Hashiriya415
Limp Gawd
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It's 65-70lbs. I need more accurate scale.
Actually, it may be. I called Solar City, now part of Tesla,a few months back to see what a domestic power storage battery system could cost, and the guys there told me they'd stopped selling domestic power storage units because they needed every battery they could get for their big commercial projects.
You did at least read the one sentence you quoted? Note where it is talking about "Carbon Footprint". Carbon footprint calculations don't change as the price of gas or electricity change.
As I said, you play ostrich all you want, change is coming regardless. Every car-maker (except Toyota) on the planet is spending billions retooling for EVs, they aren't doing it on a whim.
Common rookie mistake. Pure Serial hybrids are rare because of the losses from the extra energy conversion steps outweigh any supposed savings in running at peak efficiency.
Simply converting Gen->Electric->Motor is two steps with about 10% loss at each step including the power electronics. Say 90% x 90% = 81% power transmission efficiency.
Where modern FWD car cruising with the transmission locked up is only losing about 12%, so 88% power transmission efficiency.
And that is if you vary the generator load to match what is needed. If you don't, and run at "peak efficiency" like you suggested, then you have to add battery conversion losses to mix, which makes it that much worse.
This is why cars like the Chevy Volt, which was one of the most capable PHEV/EREVs, that had a powerful enough generator and EV motor to run as pure serial hybrid (most PHEVs don't) still went with a complex system of gears and clutches, just so it could avoid the conversion losses of a pure serial hybrid when under gas power.
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YeuEmMaiMai
Fully [H]
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exactly but you know how the tree huggers are, they don't care they want the 28K fully electric cars...
change is coming and if you live anywhere cold, fully electric is a no go from the start, if you do any form of long distance travel, fully electric is a no go from the start...
in cold weather Tesla needs 240V charger just to keep the battery at optimal temps for use...
IMA aka Intergrated Motor Assist is the best route.. ie gas engine with an electric motor to augment the gas engine...
BigJayDogg3
[H]ard|Gawd
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Just for clarification, did you actually mean 60 mWh? 60mWh is on par with some small power plants. 60 kWh seems a bit low, but 60k kWh is such a large number I'm a bit flabbergasted.
It would be cool to have solar at the house to charge your car but I don't and most dont. The Rav4 Hybrid is something I was waiting to see but dunno. A clean burning Diesel is something to consider as well but diesel is a ton more the Regular gas now. It didn't used to be that way years ago
"clean burning diesel" is something of a joke bad joke after the VW fiasco.
I am really interested in seeing Mazdas new Skyactiv-X engine hit the road. It's a partial compression ignition gas engine that is supposed to have diesel like efficiency.
Wierdo
[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, EVs sold more because gas prices got cheaper? Or that people weren't actually holding off on purchases, knowing what's around the corner? Why would a $45k car outsell a Honda Civic at under half the price? Why do some financial experts call this the "Tesla stretch" phenomenon?
Back to the original topic, here's an interesting nugget showing lack of vision on the part of the Toyota CEO before he started scrambling recently to catch up:
https://autoweek.com/article/car-ne...-crisis-era-zero-emission-and-autonomous-cars
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Because it still has to comply with government safety regulations. You'll never make it as light as you'd like.
Thing is, Toyota isn't what it used to be. Look at the Camery now and what it was in the mid 80's. What's more, Toyota is actually working against all of this green shit. If You have the funds to buy a brand new 2019 Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro for $50,000 without a loan, you drive it for 2 years, keep the mileage under 20,0000, and you can sell it again for about $48,000. $1,000 a year, maybe even less. You can do that over and over again as long as things stay the way they are, and your brand new, very nice vehicle, will cost you very little and always stay new. Same thing for the Tacoma TRD Pro, neither has had a real refresh in many years. But people buy them, love them, and they are not fuel efficient. My Challenger with a small block Hemi gets better millage if I don't play with it and keep my foot out of accelerator.
The value of the vehicle, what the vehicle is, and how comfortably it "fits" sells it. And for many people, that's worth far more then fuel efficiency or green issues.
Toyota would like nothing more than to pull off the same thing across all their vehicle lines. That's what Toyota is today. I don't see something like what you propose as fitting into their scheme.
I think the solution to a serial hybrid is a battery with a decent range (40-100 miles) combined with a range extender generator.
The generator doesn't need to be powerful enough to power the car completely at 80 mph.
It just needs to produce enough power to maybe supply 75% of the power for freeway driving.
This would allow you to drive 400 miles at highway speeds when you need to (gas+battery) with only a 100 mile battery.
Around town you don't need that much power, and the ICE could just keep the battery topped off.
And the carbon footprint of a Prius is much less than the carbon footprint of a large SUV.
Hashiriya415
Limp Gawd
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But if used is $48,000 and 2 years old, brand new is $50,000, why not just buy brand new?
That is exactly the problem, new is expensive, used is almost the same price as new, but they do not make very many. In short, if you want a TRD Pro, you may not have many choices. Every year they make the TRD Pros in three colors only, Black, White, and one color that changes every year. TRD Pro trim is available in the 4Runner, the Tacoma, the Tundra, and I think they are offering it for the first time in the Highlander soon. They are all proven for better than 200,000 miles. They are mechanically tough, and capable vehicles.
I want one, but I don't like this year's color, Voodoo Blue, I don't want Black, that leaves White. But I like Cement and Quicksand much better. I think they are dropping Quicksand for 2020. So if you hate the current year's colors a person can be convinced to buy used. These vehicles, in 2017, with less than 80K miles, have asking prices of $40K ish.
Zumino Zufeilon
Gawd
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We ran into this when we were looking at Rav4/CR-V's for my wife.
A 2-3 year old was less than $1,000/yr less than brand new (e.g. 2 year would be $2,000).
We bought new. And these were this "super-awesome-rare" care like Icpiper is talking about. This is bog-standard Honda CR-V EX (which is what we went with).
Nafensoriel
Limp Gawd
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Did you miss the part where I professionally converted a freighter? Yeah.
The purpose of using such a method is not top end efficiency. Its total efficiency. The "rookie" mistake is automatically assuming the generator itself is the sum total of the efficiency issue. Most commonly weight is the deciding factor in a vehicle of any kind.
Serial electric systems allow you to use a far more dense fuel as a power source. 30 gallons of gasoline is about 2 tons of weight for a modern top of the line lithium system. That's just physics. Batteries are god damn terrible at energy storage. Their saving grace is that their "fuel" can be acquired without a chemical reaction, the cell can obviously be reused, and the action used to provide power from a battery is not as self-destructive as an explosion found in ICE.
If a system has the weight budget to allow for it hybrid serial generally will provide the better range(by weight), better power(weight over distance), and better overall utility than a pure electric or ICE. Getting a 60k kWh system into a car though? That's rough. They are also very expensive generators compared to something like diesel. When you are a transit truck through or a remote worksite truck that's an entirely different ballgame. Losing 500lbs of individual hauling capacity but gaining the ability to tow an extra 5 tons AND getting double or triple the range of gas? That's a tradeoff anyone who actually works for a living would make.
Also just a fact check for you. They aren't retooling jack and squat at the rate you claim. Right now production is 80 million cars a year roughly. EV is about 4 million. The projections are 30 million by 2030. ICE aint being replaced by ANYONE for decades... again because physics doesn't give a rats ass about someones idealistic dreams. We can HOPE all we want. Doesn't mean reality cares.
The point wasn't Serial vs Pure electric. The point raised was Serial vs Parallel-Serial. The latter gains efficiency by connecting the output of the combustion engine to the drive and saves on energy conversions. You made the common mistake of stating you can skip the physical connection and have greater efficiency by running the combustion engine at peak efficiency. That simply isn't true. The energy conversions eat your efficiency.
Which is why nearly every single PHEV connects the combustion engine to the wheels during combustion engine operation, when pure serial would be cheaper/lighter/simpler to build.
2030 is only 11 years from now, which is nothing, you were going on about dead grandkids, That would be what 50-100 years from now and think this still won't be a done deal.
Reality doesn't care, but consumer demand matters. After one couple in my circle of friends bought an EV and others rode in it, and saw the low running costs, just about all of them want EVs.
There will of course be holdouts that insist on combustion cars till they die, just like at the dawn of automobiles, holdouts stuck with horses till they died.
Some people can't have their minds changed, but that is only one generation, once the holdout generation is gone, it will be an EV world.
Nafensoriel
Limp Gawd
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Again for cars, I have yet to challenge this. I've repeated multiple times it would be an enormous challenge to put a 60k kWh generator into a car period dot end. Considering 30kish kWh is about the minimum amount of power you'd need to have a vehicle operate at the "extremely sluggish" acceleration category there is just about no way to build a system for a compact car or even a full sized sedan. Look at the hoops tesla has to jump through and they don't even carry a generator!
Once a vehicle reaches that magical weight allowance through your entire statement about efficiencies is inaccurate. This is mostly due to batteries weight ratios being god awful. 500lbs of gen and fuel beats 2 tons of lithium any day of the week for efficiency.
I will put it another way for you. Do you know that ship with a methanol power plant? If we replaced that with batteries the ship couldn't even make a pacific ocean sprint and would have zero cargo space beyond carrying its own batteries. THAT is the problem with EV. EV is the futurama water wheel robot. Always panicking the moment you walk away from the grid for 10 seconds.
My entire point was that work vehicles(and transit vehicles) and remote areas cannot exist with full EV because of the combination of fixed ranges and the inability to rapidly refuel without infrastructure. In Egypt, a place oddly enough I've had to go work frequently, they aren't remotely ready for EV for 99.9% of the country. Egypt isn't a "shithole" and has plenty of infrastructures and plenty of money. Outside of the cities though.. different world. The world is not American or Chinese cities. A city can convert to EV when they upgrade their grid enough to do so. That costs about the same as the belt and road initiative and has the odd side effect of not really making money in the long term. So it again is a fantasy. No one's going to fund the grid upgrades and even if they did that's decades of construction(and hilariously a shitton of GHG emissions to support said construction). The realities are to just convert American CITIES to full EV would take longer than you will probably be alive just in construction alone.
So yeah you are stuck with liquid fuels for a long time yet. Nothing you believe is going to change physics without a novel silver bullet invention. Batteries suck. The grid cant expand to 5x its current capacity without decades of construction. Even if the previous two points weren't true EVs will never physically be capable of operating away from infrastructure as easily as liquid fuel methods.
Also, the grandkids thing was about self-driving cars working on snow. Aint happening in the next 30 years.
Hashiriya415
Limp Gawd
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I wanna see a fuel cell laptop one day. A small fuel cell the size of average gaming laptop battery which powers it for a week or month.
The Chevy Volt, a compact car, has a 55 KW generator, powered by an 84 HP (63KW) gas engine. So I am not seeing this enormous challenge of putting a 60KW generator into a car.
Again what does Tesla have to do with it? This is about a Car like the Volt either with Series-Parallel drive-train it currently has or your argued Serial only drive-train that suffers energy conversion losses, exactly as in the Nutzo post that you quoted, and maybe misunderstood his point?
https://hardforum.com/threads/toyot...elling-any-evs.1979070/page-3#post-1044129020
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Nafensoriel
Limp Gawd
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How much room is in that sucker? Ever drive a volt? Those 60k kWh numbers weren't pulled from my ass. Technically most gasoline cars are around 73k kWh equivalent.
A direct serial with no intermittence in operation doesn't give any advantages of having an electric drive train over common ICE/hybrid pairings. Honda wasn't talking out of their ass either. Liquid fuels density and the scalability of electric motors is what makes larger applications more efficient.
You gain efficiency by treating your recharging system as a "take along grid" for an EV which requires space(and weight). If you want more direct comparisons as to how this works even for ICE look at a compact car(3200lbs) vs an f150(6500lbs) Twice the weight translates into well over twice the hauling capacity, carrying capacity, and torque. Electric motors skew this even harder as you don't really need to upgrade motors for a "truck" since they are already ridiculously powerful at 60k kWh in the lower bands used for things like towing.
In short. For a car, EV isn't terrible(well it is but it's functional). You still have the issue with range and grid dependance but since most people live in cities this isn't a major concern. For everything else, a form of hybrid will eventually take the crown once regulation against gasoline starts to impact the industry in a meaningful way.
What does this have to do with Toyota? They doubled down on hybrids rather than jump the shark of media-driven demand. I'm a fan of free markets so neither situation bothers me. I just frankly dislike the assumption that EVs are "just around the corner for everyone in every situation!". EV have physical limits that society isn't going to fix soon and hybrids don't.
EV's have limitations for the niche cases, but they are going to eat up the mainstream.
Lets be real about Toyota's motivations, it is all about their massive (and losing) bet on Hydrogen.
Mainstream passenger cars are going to go EV, not hydrogen.
Nafensoriel
Limp Gawd
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There we agree completely. Hydrogen was a laughable avenue to travel down. Unless you've got pocket mister fusion of course(even then no it's terrible. Hydrogen is almost as bad as batteries for weight efficiency once bottled)
Don't discount that niche market though. People automatically like to assume I'm a "climate denier conservative dumbass" the moment they hear me challenge EVs or bring up transit shipping. The reality is I and my colleagues target CO2 far more efficiently in transit than you might expect.
Those freighters? Cargo shippers individually produce more garbage emissions than most midsized towns. Transit trucks on the highways are again more pollutant than cars. Even a work truck for a welder is a hot spot due to how often a work truck is driven.
The issue is the amount of time they actually work. Your commuter car turns on twice a day for 1-2hrs of operation per day. Going EV actually doesn't help that much. For a work truck, you are operating the vehicle 4-16 hours a day. Individually those trucks do far more and their operators' needs are considerably different than a commuter.
So either by intent or incompetence, Toyota's choice to stay hybrid actually puts them in a better place to enter and dominate the work vehicle market. If you've ever seen one of the old prototype A-Bats or even driven one of Fords PHEV F150s you could see the utility first hand.
The downside is cost though. ICE is cheap. Burning inefficiently is cheap. Doing anything well requires talent and engineering which... well ain't cheap
.So either by intent or incompetence, Toyota's choice to stay hybrid actually puts them in a better place to enter and dominate the work vehicle market. If you've ever seen one of the old prototype A-Bats or even driven one of Fords PHEV F150s you could see the utility first hand.
The downside is cost though. ICE is cheap. Burning inefficiently is cheap. Doing anything well requires talent and engineering which... well ain't cheap
Except Toyota really hasn't done anything like a work truck, and their light duty hybrid stuff is mainly just putting in more efficient, but lower torque Atkinson cycle engines, and weak electric motor, to overcome the weak torque and provide low speed operation with the gas engine off. It doesn't seem like that tech really translates well to work vehicles.
Its due to cash for clunkers back about 10 years ago and rising new car pricing. Cash for Clunkers killed any excess inventory in the used market and newer used cars had to be traded in at higher levels to help off set rising pricing in new cars/suv/trucks.
I remember back about 27 years ago you could get a decent used car for about $1500 bucks that was 4-5 years old. Now a used Jetta (as an example) that is less then 5 years old goes for over $7K.
Another example is my 2006 Mustang GT I had. Going further back I had a 1998 Mustang GT-I think I was lucky to get $3-4K for it in 2002 (Paid about $20K for the car). I had my 2006 Mustang GT for 11 years and sold in 2017(It was a 3rd car at that point) and I got $6500 for a car with over 100K miles on it!