I hope Toyota wins this. They have sound manufacturing principles and have demonstrated them for decades and caused radical shifts in the way cars are made across the world — including in the US and in Europe. Much of what Western carmakers learned from them is articulated in the exceptional book "The Machine That Changed the World" — which Musk has almost certainly read, despite being written in 1990 (there are clear sections that seem to incredibly presciently predict Tesla's strategy — exceptional entertainment value in the car, self-driving capabilities, and electric engines).
Toyota employs far more people, produces cars that are incredibly low-key yet functional, and is backed by robust teams that work incredibly well together, as opposed to Tesla, which is generally functioning okay, but operates largely at the whims of Musk, much as Ford did back in the day. Which works for a while, but is not a sustainable mode for innovation. Apple is a semi-notable exception to this rule, of course, so we'll see what happens. But again, rooting for Toyota.
I still think there’s space for both companies but I hope EVs win. ICE car manufacturers have coasted for decades on blissful ignorance of externalities and 2020 just saw the world on fire across the globe.
Coincidence? No, I don’t think so. People know our fossil fuel obsession has cost us dearly.
Plus EVs have much better maintenance profiles other than just saving money in gas.
I don't get the obsession with how EVs will change the world. Cars represent a fairly small percentage of our energy usage, and EVs take significantly more energy to manufacture. Do you also have electrically-powered domestic heating and hot water? It's the same argument.
EVs could help because they give each home a huge battery. Ability to store energy on a large scale could be the answer to making solar and wind viable as primary energy sources.
Many homes use gas-powered heating and hot water because it used to be cheaper. It's inefficient for power plants to burn gas, turn it into electricity + waste heat vs. homes just turning the gas directly into heat. That likely won't be the case for long since renewable electricity sources should drive down the cost of electricity.
It's a nice, techie-sounding idea, but there isn't enough lithium in the world to make that many batteries. It also has the downside that most people with cars expect to use them daily, and not find they have been depleted while in use as grid storage. There is also the related issue of excessive charge cycle wear on those batteries.
The energy harvested from a wind turbine (or solar panel) is quite small compared to the energy required to make that generator, when compared to the equivalent figures for a fossil fuel plant. I just don't buy the idea that renewables are cheaper sources - just looking at the energy returned on energy invested, power produced will be more expensive. That's ok, because us humans should learn how to use drastically less energy in our daily lives, but it doesn't help to pretend that it will make energy cheaper.
Not sure where you are getting your figures but this does not seem to match reality.
USGS predicts we have 13.5 million tons of lithium reserves which would support production of 100 million EVs per year for over 17 years. And that's just on the earth. Asteroid mining, recycling, or alternate battery tech could easily extend that timeline. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...
Also take a look at recent solar costs vs. fossil fuels. They've already crossed with fossil fuels at 5-17 cents and solar at 3-6 cents per kwh. We should of course not waste energy, but requiring humanity to use less energy is not the answer, it's never happened in human history and we do not need it to happen.
The article you linked also doesn't do your point any favours - some quotes:
>"Can lithium batteries scale up? According to this quick and purely speculative math, the short answer is, with current reserves, not just no, but hell no."
>"Even this little sketch of the issue highlights the obvious conclusion: we need to do our best to get away from single passenger cars -- even EVs -- and rely more on smart city design, walking, biking, carpooling, trains, shuttles, etc."
As for the relative prices of electricity sources - I'll just say it again, the energy returned on energy invested for renewable sources mean that an all-renewable grid would have a higher cost per unit of electricity. The only reason it's cheap now is because most of the manufacturing is done by countries that are happy to burn oil, coal, and whatever else they can find, to do so.
I guess only time will tell. I believe battery improvements will now only accelerate given the amount of research in that area.
Even if lithium doesn't scale, we will find alternatives for electrical energy storage and will become increasingly efficient at renewable manufacturing.
ICE is horrible pollution because (1) it burns fuel happens in people's faces instead of in remote industrial areas, and (2) it's not efficient to burn fuel in tiny little mini-generator in every car.
As a bonus, (3) the fuel largely comes from failing nation-states, which is geopolitically dangerous.
I'm glad you can see that one of the major benefits of EVs is you export the horrible pollution and mess of manufacturing and disposing to "remote industrial areas", in this case, mostly China / Asia.
The US is a net oil exporter. Also, take a look at where cobalt and other necessary rare earths come from.
An EV takes significantly more energy to manufacture than an ICE car. Including this energy cost, over its lifetime, the efficiency gains are marginal.
Back before the Model 3 was announced, I was hoping that Tesla and Toyota would form a partnership to build and service a mass-market EV. From a purely business point of view, I think this would have been a huge win for both companies.
Despite the success of the Prius, Toyota made a decision to focus exclusively on fuel cell technology and wasted ten precious years. After Toyota lost that bet, Tesla's superior EV technology could have helped Toyota catch up with the competition. Tesla had no experience with the formidable supply chain and production issues involved in building high-quality cars on a large scale. This is one of Toyota's great strengths.
Unfortunately, there seemed to be bad blood between Toyota and Tesla management. I suspect this may have prevented consideration of such a partnership.
There was a Toyota and Tesla partnership in 2010, producing a small number of RAV4 EVs, combining Tesla's battery pack and electric drivetain with Toyota's chassis.
I haven't found many details outside of wikipedia, not sure the nature of the partnership. If it was about Toyota getting tax credits, Tesla testing an EV drivetrain without having to engineer an entire vehicle platform, or something else.
Tesla's business is not just selling cars; it's their mission to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy". That is why they're successful. That's why they invest in R&D for battery tech, solar panels, software. It's all about the mission, in the end.
Tesla made the electric car desirable to the masses. That is no small feat. Toyota could have done it years or even decades ago, but they didn't. Other traditional car makers could have done it, but chose not to.
Now they're all on a race to compete against Tesla.
But ultimately, the goal shouldn't be to have everybody drive an electric car instead of an ICE car. It should be about having less cars on the road, period. It should be about consuming less resources, wasting less resources, period.
I deeply agree with your last paragraph, but the first one is quite naive. It is simply their PR “mission”, their only real mission is the good ol’ dollar, nothing more.
I think his words are being mischaracterized here a bit, he admitted they are having success, but is simply taking issue with their absurd valuation relative to their actual success.
That being said, given Toyota's tendency to shy away from innovation lately I can see why he's getting flak. He should be, and not just because of Tesla.
I'm a diehard Toyota fanboy, because I believe in things being built to last. It's good for the environment, and good for consumers. Nothing frustrates me more cars designed to last only as long as the warranty or lease term.
I had a BMW 3 series that I loved driving which broke down far more than a non-performance variant had any right to, so the Lexus equivalent I bought afterwards was a welcome change that I've loved driving ever since.
But Toyota has hidden behind their "reliability" moniker for so long, their offerings aren't really competitive in any segments anymore.
For pickup trucks, both the Tundra and Tacoma have weak inefficient engines, with the Tacoma having a dog of a transmission. For luxury sedans, Lexus has no performance variants anymore, and their mid-performance variants have fallen woefully behind the competition (the 2021 IS350 has gained 5hp since it's debut in 2006).
My wife wants an EV so her next car is looking to be a BMW i3 (despite how much I swore I'd never buy another), and I want a reliable performance car so it seems like my next car will be a used Porsche (with maybe a mid-step at an IS-F, a car Lexus hasn't produced since 2014).
They haven't just missed the boat on EVs, their ICEs are falling terribly behind as well, what are they doing over there? Reliability doesn't matter if you're not producing anything people want.
I’ve been driving Toyota cars exclusively over the past 30 years. I’ve been driving a Prius for the last 18.
I had really hoped that Toyota would come up with an electric only vehicle, but they’ve rolled out their hybrid drive train across their entire fleet now.
They have a fuel cell vehicle which runs on hydrogen only, but there’s a small handful of stations in the UK which means it’s pointless.
I now have an electric car in order which isn’t a Toyota and I don’t think I’m going back.
Out of interest, what electric car have you ordered? A VW ID3 or something?
I was wondering about the ID3 because the batteries are built into the floor and seem to only have a 100k miles lifetime, which is nothing for a VW and will destroy the secondhand market in the name of "progress" and saving the environment (but with non recyclable battery tech to do so).
I want a small, economic, non-flashy electric car for daily commuting. I don’t need the self driving feature or any other bells and whistles. Tesla doesn’t exactly fit that bill.
I’ll look into these. I live in the US suburbs on a bit of a budget, and there’s a sweet spot for pricing that IMO hasn’t quite happened yet with most EV. I think the number for me is $25k for a new base model with average range. I hope my next car will be an EV, but we’ll see.
With tax subsidies, many models are in that range now.
if you don't have the income or the desire to take advantage of the tax subsidies yourself, you can still get them through very generous leasing programs that most manufacturers are offering for electric vehicles.
Japanese mega-corporations are notoriously conservative/slow to react.
While they'll survive at a minimum due to JDM dominance, and it may be plausible to ignore Tesla due to low volume numbers, GM and Volkswagen are credibly sized companies with substantial lead times over Toyota.
They've already blown their solid-state prediction for the Tokyo Olympics, Hydrogen is (at minimum) ten years from any significant consumer usage, and no EV vehicles of any technical significance aside from slapdash compliance vehicles.
500,000 vehicles from Tesla versus 7.5 million for Toyota projected for this financial year.
Anyone reading this should understand what is happening.
One disruptive company is growing in leaps and bounds (50% up Y/Y Q/Q for Tesla) using intrinsically cheaper and better technology, and taking a much wider view of the market by including power generation supply and storage.
The other switched to hybrid powered vehicles fast but stopped there, and thereupon lost value. Toyota sold 10 million cars in CY2019 and forecasts a COVID affected 7.5m for the year ended March 21. Sadly they don't even make electric utes (light trucks) for use in underground mines, let alone EVs for taxis and so on.
Toyota actually has plans to compete with Tesla. They announced that last year. They already have working prototype car with solid state battery which they had planned to debut at the now postponed Tokyo Olympics. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a27887943/toyota-ev-rollou...
Toyota has some PHEV models but they stopped selling some models like RAV4 EV (in Japan) due to battery shortage. BEV uses dozens of times battery than PHEV. So currently for Toyota, selling some amount of PHEV/HEV is practical than selling a little EV on limited battery supply situation.
Next problem: Why Toyota won't build Li-On terafactory? Possibly they bet solid state battery.
Quarterly profitability isn't important if your company overall hasn't become profitable yet. If you got $100B in investment and profit $1B every quarter, that's not great.
Disclaimer: don't know actual numbers for Tesla and not in a position to look them up right this second.
Third party analysis/teardown of Tesla cars has predicted solid margins for 5+ years now, and there are still a decade of significant year-on-year improvements coming in the pipeline.
If Tesla achieves the promise of battery investor day (which really is the average year-on-year double-digit cost improvement in batteries that has been going on in the industry), and does the same with its unibody molding and other components in a vertically integrated market, Tesla will do really well.
Toyota employs far more people, produces cars that are incredibly low-key yet functional, and is backed by robust teams that work incredibly well together, as opposed to Tesla, which is generally functioning okay, but operates largely at the whims of Musk, much as Ford did back in the day. Which works for a while, but is not a sustainable mode for innovation. Apple is a semi-notable exception to this rule, of course, so we'll see what happens. But again, rooting for Toyota.