Toyota takes baby steps to plug-in car
Questions about expense, reliability and profitability are good reasons for Toyota to take its time on a plug-in electric hybrid, a company executive said Monday.
Yoshitaka Asakura, project general manager in Toyota's hybrid vehicle system-engineering division, said Monday in an article in The Wall Street Journal that Toyota is taking into account that not all consumers, despite vocal environmentalist groups, may be interested in a car that has to be re-charged daily.
Toyota executives spoke at several break-out sessions on emissions reduction, battery technology and design strategy on Monday at the 2007 Tokyo International Automotive Conference, of which Toyota and The Wall Street Journal are sponsors.
Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota's president, is scheduled to give a speech at the conference Tuesday to outline his company's goals.
The company's attitude toward plug-in electric hybrids is noticeably more conservative than the one that rival General Motors has put forth.
GM has promised that its Chevy Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid car that will run on lithium-ion batteries, will be tested in spring 2008 and available for purchase in 2010. The company has been touring the concept Chevy Volt car around the U.S. to promote its future sale.
Toyota has not given a timetable for when its plug-in electric car will be available to consumers, though it has been working on pilot projects with household plug-in cars in Japan.
The company has also said in the past that current battery technology may be too expensive at this point to make a plug-in electric commercially viable. Some have estimated that it costs about .
In answer to critics' questions of battery expense, GM has said a new business model of leasing a car's battery may be introduced to release its car at an affordable price.
All the rhetoric comes amid an ongoing battle of some automakers against new Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that would require them to raise the average mpg per product line from the current 25 mpg to 35 mpg by 2020. The bill requires automakers to either improve the mileage of trucks and sport utility vehicles and/or introduce more efficient cars in their lineup to bring down their overall fleet average.
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
In the case of the Volt, you could probably assume several hundred thousand miles before the batteries may need to be replaced. And even then the car will still work, but its electric-only range may just be reduced. By the time that day arrives, the cost of lithium battery packs should be much lower than today.
They are right about one thing nobody is interested in a car you "HAVE TO" recharge everyday. They want a car that "CAN BE" recharged everyday. Nobody wants a purely electric vehicle they want a plug-in hybrid. Which means if your battery starts to get low your combustion engine kicks in. If you keep your batteries charged you use little to no gas.
Plausible?
What happens to the electric grid? Do elec producers even have that much juice available to sell?
I think these decisions have to be thought through very carefully and things have to evolve in careful deliberate ways.
third generation lithium ion technology that GM and others are devloping, or, far more likely, is refucing to admit the obvius : Toyota doesn't HAVE any third generation li ion batteries and are stuck with their first and second generation
technology. He can't be so dumb as to not be aware of the spec of the upcoming Chevy VOLT and Opel Flextreme , both highly publicized and discussed serial plug-ins. We even know the capacities of the battery pack, its weight, its lifespan , the car's electric mileage, etc. This Toyota exec wants us to believe that they can't
type in www.gm-volt.com and find all that info (and more)? I wasn't born yesterday, Toyota, and the fact that Chinese automaker BYD is building an 08 plug-in for $19,000 with a 60 miles range while Toyota claims it's impossible for them to build one with a 20 mile range without addding $10,000 to the cost of a Prius hybrid, leads me to the inescapable conclusion that Toyota is now officially a dysfunctional organaization. They can't possibly be this stupid. He claims plug-ins won't be popular (because, he says, his wife wouldn't plug in her car) when surveys have shown that half the buying public are aware of plug-ins and half are interested in buying one. Apparently, Toyota execs make decisions about U.S. public demand by asking their wives (!!!!!!)
That's typical of Detroit manufactures.
I think you mean bring "up" the average mpg.
Its not really a battery though, it is a nanotech
based Ultra-capacitor.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/page1/?a=f
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZENN
Neither GM nor Toyota has any interest in EEStor
- Li-Ion vs. Nanotech Ultra-capacitor
- by Ex-MislTech October 22, 2007 11:13 AM PDT
- Lithium Ion have a short lifespan, and their
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- One tiny problem...Eestor is all hype
- by sanenazok October 22, 2007 11:36 AM PDT
- Don't spread this garbage.
- Like this
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(15 Comments)performance drops as time adds up.
GM is betting on these guys being done in time,
and if it happens it could really help them
out of the bad spot they are in.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/page1/?a=f
Even C|Net ran a story on EEStor hype. Before you spread this imaginary crap check out:
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13512_1-9771053-23.html?tag=bl
If the math doesn't make sense, the product doesn't work. No real company like GM believes EEStor and their imaginary products.