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."

Comments

That's a scary thought

[jfengel]

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.

Re:What the Japanese don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

0% Zero Emissions

[Doc Ruby]

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"?

Re:What a dreadful idea

[Control Group]

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.

Re:All Cars or Trucks Too?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.