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Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020
autofan1 writes "Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and that by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it 'expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars.' Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for '100 percent' of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."
Somehow, I'd hoped that 13 years from now we'd be all electric, or otherwise not tied permanently to OPEC's apron strings. Hybrids are a nice improvement, but they're not exactly flying cars or solar power.
I suppose in Car Industry terms, 13 years isn't all that far off. I suspect that a car model is perhaps 5 to 7 years in the making, or longer for a really radical redesign.
But to think that I'll be turning 50 and cars will still be burning plain old gasoline, with only a moderate improvement in performance over right now... that makes me depressed.
"What the Japanese don't understand" is a hilarios way to start any sentence about automobiles. There are things that Japan has been getting right for over 20 years that GM still hasn't learned.
So Toyota will sell no all-electric or other "zero emissions" cars in 2020? No H2 or fuelcell vehicles? Hybrids are better than simple internal combustion engines, but not good enough. Has Toyota and the car industry just figured out that they can avoid the really big change away from gasoline just by getting us all to go "ooh, hybrids - that's good"?
--
make install -not war
The real win of hybrids isn't the drivetrain, it's rengenerative braking. Storing kinetic energy rather than dissipating it as heat is an obvious efficiency win, since you're presumably going to stop moving at some point.
Really, the other efficiencies of hybrids are side effects of regenerative braking - once you've got an infrastructure in the car to store kinetic energy and subsequently deliver it to the wheels, you might as well use that infrastructure to improve the running efficiency as much as possible.
Now, it's possible that for current hybrids, the overhead incurred by including that infrastructure outweighs the gains of regenerative braking for some driving profiles, but there's no reason to think that will always be the case, since that's an engineering problem, not a physics one.
Other things equal, vehicles with regenerative braking will always be more fuel-efficient than vehicles without. The challenge is to make other things equal.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
that works for me, when I need to drive from point a to point b I don't want my car to factor in the equation: I don't think about my fridge day after day, polishing it, cleaning the freezer section, lubing the door handles, having to take it in for service multiple times a year because its compressor has yet again broken down. Yeah, it can freeze my leftovers to -120C in 20 seconds, but when am I ever going to be able to use all that cooling power given that most things I eat can do just fine at -10/-15C?
My fridge serves my needs, keeping my food fresh, just like my car serves my needs, going from point a to point b as safely and as worry-free as possible, hence why I drive a toyota: because outside of taking it in for maintenance every 5,000 miles it's just like another appliance, reliable, efficient, and that does what I need with a minimum of fuss.
-- the cake is a lie
Why would someone design a car simply for that trip?
I'm not looking for a car DESIGNED for that particular 250 mile each-way trip. I'm looking for a car CAPABLE of that particular trip.
However, like the EPA emissions test cycles, this is a real usage pattern, with a mix of types of travel that puts a load on power train and charge control performance that must be met to have a practical vehicle.
It's also likely to be a common cycle: While my particular trip is Silicon Valley to Antelope Valley, its characteristics are virtually identical to trips from Silicon Valley to:
- Reno via Donner Pass,
- Carson City via Carson Pass and Echo Summit, or
- Minden/Gardnerville via Carson Pass, Echo Summit, and the Geiger Grade.
Trips from Silicon Valley to the skiing areas around South Lake Tahoe and Stateline are a nearly complete subset of the Carson City / Minden / Gardnverville trips (cutting off only a few miles of downslope at the end.) Similarly with Reno vs. the (north) Lake Tahoe and Incline Village areas.
There are a LOT of people who make these trips quite regularly, with a load of recreation gear (or gambling money B-) ). (Try it during the winter skiing season, summer camping season, or any three-day holiday and count the cars.) Ordinary gasoline vehicles - SUVs, town cars, compacts, and pickup trucks - can all make them just fine, even in bad weather, on less than a tank of gas each way (and with a safety margin for traffic jams, chain-up lines, and getting stuck in snowstorms on a summit overnight). A plug-in hybrid should be able to do the same, with no penalties on performance, safety, travel time, comfort, or extra fuel stops. (And it should be able to do so with the sort of fuel efficiency improvements that hybrids are noted for, thanks to regeneration on the long downslopes.) If it can't manage this it isn't a viable replacement car for, not just one of the largest urban markets, but the one with the highest concentration of politically-correct tree-hugging early-adopters with massive disposable incomes.
If it CAN hack it, at a reasonable price, it can handle the driving cycles thoughout virtually all of the US. It should sell like hotcakes in the SF Bay Area, paying off the development costs quickly, then go on to take the rest of the country by storm.
So IMHO this trip would be an excellent target for automotive engineers to shoot for in their plug-in hybrid designs.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Parent post is not flamebait; it is an accurate description of the road behavior of many, many bicyclists. I don't know how many times I've passed a bicyclist on the street, carefully taking all the precautions I would take when passing any slow-moving vehicle (slowing down, moving as far as possible to the left, only settling back into my lane when I'm sure I've passed completely, etc.) and then stopped at a red light a block or two down ... only to have the bicyclist come zooming past me, right through the red light, and have to repeat the whole process a little way past the light. And this can go on for light after light, seriously slowing down traffic and greatly increasing the chances of an accident somewhere along the line. Mention this to most bicyclists, though, and get ready for an earful of self-righteous rage.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Actually, as a cyclist, I couldn't agree more. It's those exact, dick moves that get cyclists into accidents. Fact is, if you're on the road, you follow the same rules a car does. That means stopping at red lights, not passing on the shoulder, etc. Unfortunately, you're also right, in that most cyclists have no fucking clue what it means to be polite and respectful of their fellow commuters.