Report: Toyota to mass-produce plug-ins in 2012
Toyota Motor plans to start mass-producing plug-in hybrid cars in 2012, according a report.
The Japanese business newspaper Nikkei said on Saturday that the first year's production is expected to be about 20,000 to 30,000 cars.
(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)
Toyota earlier last year said that it plans to start testing 500 plug-in hybrid Priuses in 2010 for fleet owners.
Current Priuses use nickel metal hydride batteries, but for its plug-in vehicles Toyota plans to use lithium ion batteries developed and made through a joint venture with Panasonic.
The plug-in hybrid cars from Toyota will be able to go between 12 and 18 miles on a battery charge alone, according to the paper, which Reuters cited.
There will be a wave of plug-in electric sedans coming to market over the next two years. In addition to a plug-in Prius, Toyota is making an all-electric city car called the FT-EV, which is expected in 2012.
The highly anticipated 2011 Chevy Volt is scheduled to go into production in late 2010. Unlike a traditional hybrid, the Volt will run entirely off its batteries and use the internal combustion engine to charge the battery for rides longer than 40 miles.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
I'll want something beefier in about 10 years, but for now I can use one of my existing gasoline powered cars for longer hauls.
Yes, such a transition is possible but it will be hard, costly, and time consuming. For now all electric vehicles (like the Tesla, for example) will remain prohibitively expensive. Unless and until a major breakthrough in electricity storage or generation occurs shortly the nirvana of electric cars is a ways off yet in my opinion.
I am still wondering how long it will take for an electric car to compete in Nascar races!! Or will they disallow them? Or have separate races for them?
The obvious reason is that we have tens of thousands of gas stations and an infrastructure to support gasoline, and it's highly compact and quickly "rechargeable". And, of course, all-electric vehicles have too short of a range to actually count on. Things happen, plans change, detours occur, and you don't want a car that simply cannot do what you need it to do when you need it to do it.
The less obvious reason is: how many of us can actually plug a car in at home? We live in a condo, and there's no place to plug in. Same for apartment dwellers, of course. Same for many townhouse owners who do not have a garage and do not park their car directly in front of their house. And the idea of being able to plug our car in at a gas-station-like charge-station and recharge it in a few minutes is a pipe dream. So many of us are simply locked out of the plugin market for quite some time.
But this is beside the point, and the point is hybrids promote the continuation of car culture, and our reliance on the car transportation paradigm...in the U.S. at least. Wouldn't it be better to pour our efforts into changing the country's transportation infrastructure to something more energy efficient and sustainable? Light rail, train transport, water transport used to have a HUGE place in the U.S. transportation portfolio before oil & automobile companies made car transport so cheap and easy to obtain.
Well now that the world's oil supply is about half gone, and ever more expensive to extract, everyone wants to "go electric". That would have been a good idea 30 years ago, when oil was still plentiful and cafe standards were still aggressive, but that ship has sailed. Millions of Americans have already started to realize that walking, biking, or using public transportation is preferable to skyrocketing gas prices and plug-ins that cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy. Will plug-ins be massed produced? Yes. Will there be a market for them in the short-term? Sure. Will they keep car culture from going away? Probably not.
Toyota's 18 mile electric range would be pathetic compared to what will be out there at that time, unless Toyota will make options for longer mileage using larger battery packs along with the increased prices for comparison with others. Toyota has never been an active proponent of Lithium Ion batteries and have been dragging their feet about its adoption but instead advocating NiMH. Now, when they have decided to go with Li-Ion, it is very late in the game. They have just started their test fleets when other companies are almost done with retooling. They lost three years in this game.
Yes we need to worry about supplying power with the influx of these plug-ins, be it hybrid or pure BEV's. And the best solution is obvious, but still in its perpetually high priced as well. In order to minimize their impact, incentives for solar along with the purchase of plug-in EV's should be encouraged. Solar PV and EV's are a perfect match without straining much of our grid. A 4 kW peak capacity solar panel at an average 5.6 sunshine hours should give you more than 100 mile range each day on your EV that uses 200 WH per mile. If your commuting roundtrip is just 40 miles per work day, you would have power to spare for others who are not fortunate enough to install solar PV.
So when you buy plug-ins in the very near future, you might as well install solar PV whenever you can. Buy US manufactured EV and US manufactured solar PV, and you will be helping the US economy at the same time.
Great solution! (BG)
Thanks,
Dan
If I were to install the solar PV myself, I've been quoted with about $3K-$3.5K/kW peak capacity before rebates, which is economically viable for our electric rates ( retail $ value of electricity produced from these panels will be greater than or equal to the principal and finance charges on after-rebate price). However, your quote is very attractive, it is $4,500/kW installed before rebates. I haven't found such a rate yet and am glad you mentioned this. The usual quotes that I can get are typically in the $6K-$10K/kW peak capacity which is actually proportional to the degree of the overhead and marketing expenses of the company.
If we have solar PV and plug-in EV, we are not simply exchanging the oil companies with your energy utility company. And do we know for sure that the majority owners of our for-profit electric utility companies are not the same set of people that are running the show on oil? The current for-profit electric utility companies would love the coming of the plug-in EV's, expect the prices of electricity to increase. But if we have solar PV installed, rated for our household and travel needs, we would be almost independent of our energy needs, not simply exchanging one form of energy manipulator with another.
The electricity is then converted into chemical energy in the battery and then into mechanical energy.
Have heard that the energy required to get the mechanical energy via electricity is more than from petrol . Probably more pollution from the coal than from petrol as well.
I wonder what the life expectancy is of the rather expensive battery is.It could end up an expensive route to take.
Why should we limit ourselves with electricity from coals only? At today's production cost of sub $1/watt of solar PV, the solar arrays would be a lot cheaper to build than nuclear fusion power plants for the same power without cost overruns and about 5 times quicker too. Those of Stirling energy systems are operational as each module is setup, unlike coal plants and nuclear plants which needed many years of completion before you can see power generation.
There are even cheaper technologies that can provide baseload power supply using molten salt technology that would allow a solar power plant to sustain power generation at 24x7.
Electricity would be a win-win for these new generation of cars. We can continue to develop cheaper and cleaner technologies of generating electricity without burning coal or petrol or building more nuclear power plants that have no viable solution for nuclear waste disposal.
- by fredtheviking July 7, 2009 9:43 AM PDT
- Perhaps Toyata is becoming complacent and isn't willing make a big bet on Plug-ins. But if I can get a Plug-in that goes 12 miles on electric for $25,000. Has over overall fuel economy improvement and feature improvements. I would say this is pretty good. I think Toyota will do well with the Plug-in. Consider the completion will have plug-ins first but it will be more expensive to get one.
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- by willdryden July 7, 2009 9:55 PM PDT
- The real problem is that Toyota is still not convinced that lithium batteries can deliver the reliability that Toyota purchasers expect. They can not use NiMH batteries in plug-in vehicles as Chevron controls the patents.
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