Toyota to spend 1.5T yen on EV battery development

They don't have what they would need in the battery dept - and the battery is the most important part of an EV. The Prius has a NiMH battery, which has lower energy density than Li-ion and other newer chemistries.

The (non-plugin) Prius can get by with the NiMH battery because the battery is only used for regen braking energy capture and acceleration at low speeds, not for high amounts of energy storage or power output. For those it uses gasoline and the ICE engine.

The hydrogen distraction is baffling.

(Of course, governments the world over leapt at hydrogen and clung on for dear life because it was the only renewable vehicle tech that preserved the current fuel distribution model and so allowed them to keep supporting road infrastructure with fuel taxes. They saw the legislative advantage, physical efficiency was nothing to do with it.)

Toyota had something special back in the 80s and early 90s and it seems like they lost it. Was there some key innovator high up in the company who retired some time around then?

So imagine if instead of concurrently trying to make hydrogen happen while their side-gig of hybrids managed to completely corner the market, they went all in on electric. It would be a very different car market.

They aren’t as behind as you’d think given that a hybrid still makes more sense than an ev to a lot of people. A reliable hybrid that just works is what people need. More so with their adaptive cruise control.

Could they have done better? Sure. It’s hard to say different given their size and culture.

Also, GM had the EV1 years before …

i think there is a speadsheet somewhere inside Toyota where your "nightmarish" - because it cannibalizes significant share of the current revenue from hybrids - scenario is precisely described. The fear of cannibalization of current cash cow (and related internal uphill battle with the top management milking the cow) is frequently the reason behind seemingly obvious blunders by BigCo-s.

The ideal model, if I had some power/leadership 10 years ago with some foresight would have been:

- add a plug to the Prius for all-electric mode, get the technology to as many carmakers as possible with whatever negotiated means possible.

- push them to increase the all-electric mode to 50 miles

- once tech was doable, impose incentives/requirements/taxation that required all new cars be PHEV. Especially for trucks/SUVs.

- incentivize home charging and start incentivizing gas stations to have plugs as well as a requirement to staying in business

Given the current supply of cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc, the most effective way to electrify consumer transportation is the 50 mile PHEV. It would have electrified 95% of daily trips for those vehicles, and eliminates range anxiety for the longer trips until the infrastructure is done.

With that and Toyota's lead, the plug in hybrid would have provided practical market "EV" leadership probably through 2030. It is mystifying to me why they dragged their feet to add a simple plug to the system. A massive management failure that ceded not only pseudo-EV leadership, but leadership in the hybrid market.

Toyota may be able to coattail the nascent OEM market for EV components and leverage their status as current #1 to keep afloat, but so many companies are far ahead in the vertical integration for the EV. An OEM component EV will be inferior to vertically integrated manufacturers (Tesla currently, VW and probably GM soon).

I'd guess that the OEM model of ICE drivetrains is basically an extreme optimization of a long-running design. Early ICE companies were probably vertically integrated intheir parts/components manufacturing until specific market competition for components between dedicated OEM manufacturers could eventually beat the in-house teams.

But EVs are a MASSIVE revolution in terms of the core components, and designs are innovating/evolving so rapidly that you can't tie yourself to components. Look at Tesla, they are building their own motors, batteries/chemistries, and even minerals extraction pipelines per battery investor day.

OEM ecosystems only exist once a sufficient number of cars are using a component. So an automotive OEM EV motor won't be competitive with Tesla until several generations of EVs go through the market, and a generation for a car is at least 5 years traditionally?

Almost all the car companies annoucing EV programs/funding aside from VW and maybe GM are just doing the OEM model: we'll get some OEM motors and OEM batteries, slap them onto a traditional OEM ICE platform. And boom, the CEO gets to tell major activist shareholders that he isn't being left behind: please don't fire me like you canned the BMW CEO.

Toyota is likely still stuck in OEM mode. They can't maintain leadership with that mentality, the vertical integration model will win for the next two decades at least, even if solid state closes some of the tech gap with Tesla for the main auto people (which is what they are basically all gambling on)

I always loved hydrogen, especially if someone comes up with a better way to generate it. The refueling issue and the chemical disaster with batteries would be solved.

https://electrek.co/2021/03/17/toyota-lobbies-us-government-...

Seems like they're late to the party & know it.

I'm afraid they're going to use their brand power and customer loyalty to drag everyone else down.

I don't think it is a fair comparison. How many of those batteries made it into their vehicles vs their other products?

Tesla batteries are made out of individual cells - pretty much ripe for the Reuse in the 3R process.

Of course the main way to improve batteries at this point is to make them cheaper, which comes directly from production scale (look at what happened with solar panels). And even if that wasn't the case, while we wait for improved tech before we scale up battery production, we're continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels.

This reminds me of some of the propaganda spread by fossil fuel companies decades ago. They position themselves as being on the side of environment, and yet the conclusion is always to delay, do more research, and continue with the status quo.

Throwing out the gasoline motor in a full redesign will be great to see (ev mode almost feels sporty already), but in the meantime I’m enjoying my 550mi range on a 10 gallon tank + never using gas on days I don’t leave town.

Teslas can be only repaired in a professional shop, whereas Toyotas can be fixed by a moderately skilled individual in a private garage. You can order all the parts for Toyota online and do everything from engine rebuild to any kind of maintenance.

Not a Toyota.

Patent lifespan is 14-20 years, depending on the type of patent, and which country issued it (there are probably outliers that have longer/shorter time-spans, though most countries now are unified). The question is there anything useful in patents that are expire, but if so there is copying about it.

Most car companies have weird cross licensing agreements (weird in part because there are anti-monopoly laws in place to work around) so to some extent they can.

Not only this, but company B is buying fresh new machines that manufacturers have been competing to optimize for at least one tech-generation. They can build new factories optimized for 10x volume, which took the market years to reach and would have been insane ten years earlier.

They can skip compromises in products that were necessary due to immature tech.

Earlier-mover gave tesla brand recognition, but no other lock-in.

Literally everybody does that.