Toyota Abandons Plans For All-Electric Vehicle Rollout

Soultest writes "Toyota has given up on plans to sell any significant number of all-electric vehicles. Citing 'many difficulties' with the project, the company says it will only sell about 100 of the battery-powered eQ cars it has been working on for several years. 'By dropping plans for a second electric vehicle in its line-up, Toyota cast more doubt on an alternative to the combustion engine that has been both lauded for its oil-saving potential and criticized for its heavy reliance on government subsidies in key markets like the United States. 'The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge,' said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota's development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.'"

Comments

electric ++

[Conficio]

I'd love to have a plug in electric, for the 85+% of short drives people make, +plus+ a trailer with a gas engine and a generator to power this car for longer distances. In my mind I would not even own this trailer, but rent it at a gas station. In addition that trailer could carry some additional luggage (and may be powered by its own motor).
In that case I'd not even care if this trailer generates electricity from gasoline, from waste cooking oil, liquified gas or hydrogen. All I'd care about is if it gives me sufficient juice to drive my size vehicle and what it's range (tank capacity) would be.
And with all electric we could have a drive by wire system that drives the trailer much more comfortable. I could even see steering in the trailer (which is easy if you have one electric motor per wheel, just run them at different speed) to eliminate the skills needed to back up with a trailer.

Re:electric ++

[vlm]

but rent it at a gas station

I would rather rent an old fashioned gasoline car at the gas station. Enterprise rentacar and the rest have this whole thing down to a science, where random hotel clerks rent cars. Adding the training for gas station clerks would not be a heroic additional achievement. Some tow truck operators already have "affiliate" programs with rental companies.

An ex coworker who rented a giant SUV for a cross country trip recently discovered another advantage of renting your cross country cruiser from a nationwide rental outfit.... you know what horrible things happens when you break down in the middle of nowhere 1000 miles from home? Nothing bad at all. In about an hour a dude shows up with a replacement vehicle and you continue your trip without a care in the world about the broken down car laying in the middle of nowhere. Renting... love it !

If my daily driver broke down 1000 miles from home and I knew I had to be home and driving it to work next monday, I'd be absolutely shitting bricks about how much I'm about to get screwed by the locals, like Deliverance but with cars and car mechanics, and how the vacation trip is now utterly ruined, but if you rent and have all the insurance options, a breakdown is just "eh, interesting story, whatever".

Re:Largely Demand Driven

[RogueyWon]

I think the actual issue is that we might be thinking about what infrastructure is needed for this in the wrong way.

I don't currently own a car (lucky enough to live in a London suburb with great public transport), but if I did, then an electric vehicle would make a lot of sense for what I'd use it for - short shopping trips and the like. However, the apartment complex I live in has no charging facilities in its car-park, so even though I own a parking space there (which currently sits empty), I'd have no way of charging one. Getting charging facilities installed would be seriously expensive.

I've often wondered if the conceptual model we use for electric cars isn't the wrong one. The current assumption is that when you buy an electric car, you also buy and own the battery, and you are responsible for keeping it charged.

Now - maybe there are umpteen good reasons why this couldn't work - but has anybody ever tried a different approach? I'm talking about a model where the cars have easily-swapped batteries, which the driver leases, rather than owning. So... you buy your car and you pay an upfront deposit for the lease of a battery. When your battery runs low, you go into a gas station (or in this case, gas/charging station), the battery gets removed and replaced by a fresh one from the station's "charging room".

You pay a fee to the station covering your share of its electricity costs for charging the battery plus whatever profit margin it requires (much like paying for your gas at the moment), and you drive off a few minutes after arriving. Meanwhile, "your" old battery is charged up at the station and swapped with another customer's empty battery once it's finished recharging. This eliminates a lot of the charge-time complaints associated with electric vehicles at the moment and also means that we don't need charging points in homes or at the roadside.

I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?

Re:Corporate Speak For

[bill_mcgonigle]

Toyota has been an innovator in how production operates, not in building game changing new vehicles.

This only makes sense in Oppositeland. Toyota has pioneered the hybrid-electric market, selling each one at a net loss.

Re:Darn dirty Humans

[rubycodez]

oil will never run dry, there are centuries of supply of fossil fuel and any hydrocarbon fuel chain can be changed to any other

No profits to be had (yet)

[sjbe]

We can't make it work with acceptable margins.

If a company cannot sell a product for a profit, there is no point in making the product. Current technology for electric vehicles has one huge showstopper bug in the recharge times. Until this problem is solved there is no mass market for all electric vehicles. There will be room for niche makers like Tesla (maybe) but nothing more. Plug-In-Hybrids are where there is a market and where the car makers can and should focus their efforts.

Toyota has been an innovator in how production operates, not in building game changing new vehicles.

I disagree. The Prius was a game changing vehicle. It is the first genuinely popular hybrid vehicle and it proved that there is a market for hybrid powertrains. While I will concede that Toyota's most important innovations have been in manufacturing processes, they have had some genuinely innovative products.

Re:Largely Demand Driven

[7-Vodka]

If you actually look at the data from the studies that companies have performed, there are virtually zero current owners of electric vehicles that use or even want to use charging stations outside of their homes.

Just about all of them to the last man and woman, prefer to charge at home. Ah but what about long trips? They just don't take them in EVs. They take another method of transportation, as they should.

Just take a look at every charging station that's ever been installed for public use, they are abandoned.

Sadly, it's not this mystical infrastructure that's holding EVs back. IMHO the first factor is that their range is incompatible with the owners who could charge them. Most people who can live with a sub 100 mile range, live in the city and don't have a garage to charge the cars. Most people who do have a garage live in the suburbs and need more range. The actual number of suitable households has got to be fairly small.

Then theres the fact that they are mostly priced probably at 2x where they should. Supply and demand are not enough, they need to meet at the same price to clear the market. I might want an EV and I'm willing-to-pay $15k. If you're selling for $40k, I'm not buying.

What's most amusing, is watching these gigantic corporations try to innovate and fail. They have tremendous resources, but they're not set up to innovate. They're set up to scale up things. When they try to innovate they fail miserably. So if they can't do it, who will?

Re:Largely Demand Driven

[postbigbang]

I don't think it's a scam at all. Germany pays plenty for fossil fuels, and even for electricity. It fuels the German economy. Pollution is hideous, and costs are high.

At some point, this has to change not only for Germany, but the rest of us, too. Bigger more efficient batteries? More efficient drive trains? Coils embedded in highways so you can charge while driving? Who knows. What's evident is that fossil fuels will continue cost the planet a lot in terms of global weather change, politics, and money.

People don't want to change. But they ultimately don't have a choice. I want an electric. That Toyota gave up deeply saddens me. Now the Nissan Leaf is all that's really left.

Self-driving cars will come before all-electric

[MasaMuneCyrus]

By the time an electric vehicle could charge so quickly as to be useful, we'll probably have self-driving cars. When self driving cars become a reality, we can throw the idea of car ownership out the window. As it stands, 99% of cars spend probably close to 99% of their time parked and unused. That is inefficient.

If self-driving cars become a thing, a company could purchase huge fleets of cars. Then, instead of letting your own car sit in the parking lot forever, you could just use an app on your smartphone to send a self-driving car in your direction. Or you could just schedule your car to arrive at your location at some specific time (for instance, schedule to be picked up before and after work at precisely 8:00am and 5:00pm). Who needs car ownership--with costs of insurance, maintenance, gas prices, etc--when you can call for a cheap robotic taxi wherever, whenever you want? Relatively few people, I'd wager. It could start with cities, but eventually there would be so many self-driving cars on the road that you could have a self-driving car pick you up to take you wherever you wanted within minutes. Want to go to a restaurant? Send a request for a robot car to pick you up. Fortunately, there's a car that just dropped somebody else off to go shopping a mile away.

Since these cars are self-driving, they could be electric and manage their power efficiently. If you call for a robotic taxi to take you to another state and it only has 50 miles left on its battery, the car could automatically schedule a car with a fresher battery for you to transfer to 50 miles down the road. The entire system would always make sure to minimize the number of transfers and recharge the cars whenever necessary.

With a system like this, even electric cars with 200 mile range would be reasonable. That is more than enough for 99% of one-way passenger commutes, and for those trips that are long, you just hop in a new car 200 miles down the road. Heck, with this kind of self-driving car system, the system could even have tour guides and whatever else programmed in. The more cars on the road, the better the service. The better the service, the better the adoption rate. The better the adoption rate, the more cars. The possibilities are endless.

Re:Self-driving cars will come before all-electric

[vlm]

You seem to be adding a frosting of additional technology you don't really need. Just expand the existing rental infrastructure by a factor of, say, 100, and modernize up to 2000 era standards.

All you need is, almost every parking lot, is now an "enterprise rent-a-car" lot, and streamline the rental process from 10 minutes down to perhaps 10 seconds for those pre-approved in a "club".

There used to be severe cultural issues with people filling their cars up with "8-tracks" then "cassette tapes" then "cds" but now you just bluetooth stream off the phone. Also some cultural issues with people packing their cars with, well, trash, just like some people do that with their houses. Hoarders. And some issues with kids car seats. But for most civilized people, swapping cars is not a big deal.

I think a clearing corporation who force all the rental operators interchange fluidly would be a pretty interesting business model. Much as any bank can cash any old fashioned paper check from any other bank, eventually, anyway, any rental lot operator needs to be able to rent any rental operator's car in a fluid, (mostly) cheap, transparent manner.. With remote control of the car and a cell phone, you don't really need clerks at every parking lot anyway, this also makes all rental operations 24x7 which is really convenient. Dumbphone means talk to a call center in India, smartphone means use an app, if you must use apps...

Batteries getting low and you're in too much of a hurry to charge, or going on a long road trip? Simply pick up a new car while on the road... your old car's GPS gives you directions to your new car.

Pay, lets say, fifty cents per mile and a buck per hour to rent any car. My employer's parking lot is now a rental lot, as is the strip mall two blocks from my house. They'd make maybe $500/month off me, which really isn't too bad compared to my existing insurance, maintenance, registration, taxes, and car payment. That would work very well for me. I'd save money with this scheme, but I'd be willing to lose a little money if it meant I didn't have the headaches of owning a car. I would imagine there's always going to be old timers who demand the old ways (Amish (literally) or whatever) and the system can accommodate them.

If you demand smartphone apps, write one where taxi drivers bid on your offer to be driven from wherever you are to the closest (now reserved) rent a car. The rentacar pays the taxi driver directly, you tip in cash a buck or two. I suppose human valet parking deals can be arranged too, for a modest fee and probably the usual cash tip.

I could also see an incentive system developing maybe in a dreaded smartphone app... the AI knows the baseball stadium will have high rental demand at the end of the game... how about a $5 credit if you drop off a car at the stadium parking lot and take the bus to work? Or if you promise to return this car to a residential lot before 6am rush hour we'll give you $1 off your next rental... Even really crazy stuff like guarantee the price will never be more than a buck per hour or a buck per mile but it could be as low as free if there's immense demand due to vacation traffic or whatever.. place a bid on a car, see if you win...

Re:It's a practicality issue

[DCFusor]

Volt has 8 year warranty on the battery. It takes just as long to put gas into it as any other car, no - less time, the tank is smaller. Mine gets 180 mpg daily, but when I go on long trips, it gets about 40 mpg on gas-only. Your arguments are specious. I can and have put two full size bicycles into the back without having to cram or bend anything. I sold all my other cars except for the truck I use to move firewood and horse crap. I haven't needed the truck for anything else, and the problem has become running it enough to keep *its* battery charged and the tires not flat-spotted.

I am NOT tied to a utility, I've been off grid since '79 and my PV system charges the car. What's not to like? Built in America by Americans, fuelled off the sun (panels largely made by BP solar(!) - and a little bit of gasoline. I may own this car for much more than a year before I can change the oil at this rate - it's not broken in yet.

Did I mention fun to drive?

Yeah, fossil fuels are great till they get scarce and you have to kill (and be killed) people to keep them flowing, like now - and subsidize the companies more than the car companies on top of that. You don't have to carry the oxidizer is the reason.

Buy American, the job you save might be your own. My car is American, as are the solar panels that charge it (yes, it takes lots but then you get no power bill either - for anything else). Quit paying rent to the man, own your own infrastructure. It makes you rich in more than one way. Freedom, dude.

Trailer-generators

[Firethorn]

I've actually done some work on this, and still think it's an interesting option.

On the upsides:
1. Higher efficiency for the most common use(tooling around town) - without the gasoline motor, you enjoy higher efficiencies, plus you either get a smaller vehicle or more trunk space.
2. For a long highway trip, it's only logical to make the trailer a touch larger than it has to be for the engine/generator - bam, instant additional storage space for your luggage. I don't know about you, but I haul more for long trips, and if you're hauling kids... I should note that I'm picturing a still relatively small two wheel trailer.
3. Don't buy; rent. If you only need it twice a year, rent it! If you need it more often than twice, at some point you're probably better off just buying a hybrid in the first place.
4. Efficiency loss shouldn't be much - you only need the thing to be big enough to make up 'most' of the energy cost of going down the highway.
Downsides:
1. Cost - said trailer will likely run $8k or so
2. Training - driving training in the USA sucks as is; most don't know how to haul a trailer(though this one would be simple).
3. Cars might need to be reinforced a bit - many light cars today, even EVs, can only haul 800 pounds of trailer once you put the hitch on. This isn't much, especially if you figure on putting some cargo in the trailer as well. Plus you'll need to put a charge point in a spot suited for the trailer, and program the car to account for incoming power while moving. 'Shouldn't' be hard, but still a fringe case.