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Toyota and Tesla May Work Together Again
cartechboy writes: Tesla and Toyota have already worked together a few times. The factory in which Tesla builds the electric Model S? It bought that from Toyota. The Toyota RAV4 EV? The battery and software tuning was done by Tesla. Now it sounds like Tesla and Toyota might have another significant project in the pipeline in the next two or three years. Tesla CEO Musk said such a project could be "on a much higher volume level" than the firm's last project with Toyota, the RAV4 EV. Toyota currently has a 2.4 percent stake in Tesla Motors and has sold 2,130 RAV4 EVs through August. For its part, Toyota has no comment regarding Musk's statements about the future project. Given Toyota's stance on electric cars, Musk's comment is a bit confusing. So what exactly will this joint project be?
How come there are Tesla stories nearly every day on Slashdot?
After reading about the terrible software that came out of Toyota, which caused those fatal random unstoppable accelerations, I really hope Tesla will be writing the ECU software.
The current Priuses and other Toyota offerings are parallel hybrids. That is, they have transmissions that directly drive the wheels using the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine).
In a series hybrid, each wheel has it's own motor, and the ICE engine runs at a steady speed that is very efficient to generate electricity that is then used to recharge the batteries that are fed to the electric motors.
A second part of my guess is that Toyota is licensing the recharging technology from Tesla, so that they can use the supercharger network as well. This way they can have a vehicle that can run 100% off of electricity only, but have a ICE engine that is available at any time to back that up (faster refueling, can go anywhere there is a gas station, etc.)
So what exactly will this joint project be?
Refitting the Model S with an Atkinson cycle engine so that its range doesn't suck...
I kid, I kid! :p
www.toyota.com/prius-plug-in/
Maybe Tesla can help them to bump that number up by a factor of 10 - otherwise, it almost a joke.
(I drive a 2005 Prius and my wife drives a LEAF)
my inner 7-year-old wants this Transformer.
Or is it more akin to "Slashdot MAY hire real editors"?
Fucking pathetic hypothetical click-bait headlines.
Slashdot has jumped the shark, and the shark turned around, ate it, digested it, and shit it back out. As Beta.
Given Toyota's stance on electric cars, Musk's comment is a bit confusing.
So I followed the relevant link in TFS and the only substance there is the following: Toyota's Global R&D Chief Mitsuhisa Kato [...] said: "The cruising distance is so short for [electric cars], and the charging time is so long ... At the current level of technology, somebody needs to invent a Nobel Prize-winning type battery." Somebody needs to for what? Certainly not for Toyota to sell an EV, because they've done that already. But I'm not really clear on what Toyota's stance on EVs is, except that the battery technology is not where they'd like to see it. That's everyone's stance on EVs.
Here's my prediction: Either Tesla is going to provide the powertrain for another Toyota EV, possibly a RAV4, or Toyota is going to provide the car (perhaps sans plastics and fenders) for Tesla's upcoming cheaper car. I'd like to see such a car made of Aluminum, but Tesla has hinted that the next car or two won't be made of so much of it, and Toyota is generally allergic to it for all but top-end models.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There aren't "stories every day" about Tesla, but every time there's a Tesla story, there is someone bitching and moaning about "all" the Tesla stories.
There have been 30 stories since January 1st - that equals about one story every 8.5 days.
You can count yourself, if you like. They do get clustered a bit, probably because when one piece of Tesla news hits, everyone starts paying more attention to Tesla related topics.
http://slashdot.org/tag/tesla
Please help metamoderate.
The Leader is good,
the Leader is great,
we surrender our will as of this date!
Ya'll gonna feel stoooopid you didn't sign on earlier when he buys out the Raelians.
No??
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Watch for Toyota's next halo electric supercar, the FT-1 (Supra replacement) to be powered by Tesla.
Would be an electric car that has a tendency to suddenly accelerate and spontaneously combust. If only Ford was involved in the consortium, then it will also explode upon any rear impact.
Those terms became obsolete as soon as the Toyota Prius was built. Neither the Toyota hybrid system nor any other currently shipping hybrid from a major auto company fits in either category.
You see, before the Insight & Prius, people only built two kinds of hybrids.
When the gas engine and electric motor were connected in series, they both ran all the time. You could not just spin the crankshaft without spinning the rotor, and vice versa, because the shafts were coupled together in series.
When the gas engine and electric motor were connected in parallel, you could run either one alone, but you couldn't add their power together - the max HP and torque were determined by the strongest of the two, because Toyota hadn't invented their clever planetary gear transmission yet.
Modern hybrids use both systems at will. For example the Toyotas will spin their gas engines at high speed with all the valves wide open and no gas to the injectors under some circumstances, which is a series hybrid trick. But it can also add the torque of the electric motor to that of the gas engine if you slam the accelerator to the floor from a dead stop, and that's a parallel hybrid trick.
The terms you used are obsolete. Modern hybrids are both, or neither.
Hey, it's time to get serious about this singularity thing if we're going to do it at all
Parallel = electric motor and gas motor are both connected to the drive train.
Series = only the electric motor is connected to the drive train.
Prius is a "power split" or a "series parallel" hybrid, which is a bullshit term that means "we are special and not just a parallel hybrid"
In the modern colloquial terminology, slang usage seems to to be
"Series" = "range extended electric vehicle" or "generater in the trunk"
"Parallel" = "doesn't work without gasoline"
In general, people don't care HOW a series/parallel/power split/monkeyass hybrid works... they just care about the "doesn't work without gasoline" part, which is the tough pill to swallow with modern "totally not parallel" hybrids.
In a series hybrid, each wheel has it's own motor,
Not necessarily. One might reasonably include a differential fore and aft and use just a pair of motors. The problem with having one motor per wheel is that you can never transfer more than 1/4 of the power to any given wheel. With a system with two motors and two differentials you still eliminate transmission loss, while the diff (coupled with ABS) provides the opportunity to transfer up to 1/2 of the power to one wheel. That makes for less need for torque reduction during acceleration when wheel slip is detected. Instead, the power is transferred to the wheel with traction. The end result may well be the ability to use less total motor capacity. Open diffs are cheap and EVs are already heavy, plus this reduces system complexity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tesla likes to go for flashy and exciting vehicles. Toyota likes to build boring economy cars for the masses. I bet Toyota is eying the gigafactory as a source for batteries for a new all-electric Camry (or similarly bland family sedan). They should be able to use scale to bring down the cost of an all-electric Camry, the question then will be if sucking all the fun out of it will make a notable difference in battery life or not.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seeing as Honda just scrapped their Fit EV and the Insight, and the popularity of the Fit Hybrid in Japan, they might be scaling up to release a Hybrid Fit in the US. Things would fly off the shelves.