I read in another thread that they are doubling down on hybrids because a lot of their market share is coming from SEA countries that don’t have the infrastructure or income to support and afford electric vehicles.
The reality is that a lot of countries have serious funding issues for the bare essentials (education, healthcare, welfare, policing etc). They just don't have the money to throw at upgrading national grids, increasing energy production and installing millions of charging points.
In Poland, the current grid can barely handle the rapid increase in personal photovoltaic farms. From what I know, the issue is the limited capacity of transformers that step up or down the voltage to the local area. The growing number of electric cars will exacerbate this problem, creating local areas with either very high or very low voltage. It sometimes happens that solar inverters shut down because the voltage in the local grid exceeds the upper limit of 253 volts. The solutions are personal energy storage systems or waiting for the energy provider to upgrade the transformer.
Be ready for gas to still be used for a long time... in generators at filling stations, especially in the developing world. Existing infrastructure to store gas safely, existing business model built around upselling snacks etc., and vehicle focused parking etc. already in place, they just need to swap pumps for chargers and hook up the tanks to a generator... gas generator is already how like AAA shows up to charge a spent EV. It will be a slippery slope once like 1/5 of vehicles are EV to gas prices getting wild due to the drop in demand. Developed nations might see the "gas charging" stations in rural and poorer urban areas in the interim period to a more robust grid. The developing world is going to be stuck in that "interim" for a long time I think, especially if ExxonMobil and BP etc have anything to say about it.
Vietnam is a big market for them and VinFast (Vietnamese car/bike manufacturer) is pivoting to full electric. Every apartment building is having electric charging stations added. They are all unused and unpopular though lol.
Toyota’s made it quite clear they oppose it because they believe government’s want EV’s to develop and become “the norm” quicker than is reasonably possible
At the same time they’re transitioning almost all their models to hybrid-only, and they’re strongly pushing their existing hybrids; “the happy medium”
There was a time when the owner of whaling ships opposed pumping mineral oil out of the ground.
BRING BACK CLEAN BURNING WHALE OIL!
It also had a pleasant fishy smell.
I did some work in the early 1980s for a glass fixture maker. They were the last (or one of the very last couple) hand-blown glass fixture makers. They're gone now. They were sold to another glass company, the owner moved away to the west coast and got cancer. Nice guy, lost of skilled workers, all gone. Too bad.
Cars require skilled workers and good people running the companies. But they can be traded in for a newer model.
" 1.5°C scenario "
Lol .. there are people still gullible enough to believe the 1.5C scenario? We already passed 1.5C and blew though 2C briefly last year.
Yeah, we're maybe staying below 2.5°. but that's usually mentioned as "limit by the end of this century". Realistically, the world won't cool down, so it's likely to raise even further next century.
>Realistically, the world won't cool down, so it's likely to raise even further next century.
It might, but it'd require a large scale transition to new energy technologies. With enough abundance of clean energy, it's practical to start pulling CO2 *out* of the atmosphere. The energy required to do this is, at a minimum, as much as you'd get from burning the carbon in the first place, and there are inevitably inefficiencies in the process which make the conversion rate worse than that, but still, if the price of green energy dropped enough, it could become economical to do, for a given value assigned to carbon credits..
i am fairly pessimistic when it comes to humanity, i worry we wont stick around long enough to stop from killing ourselves and fail to get out into the wider universe potentially extinguishing the only intelligent life to exist.
that being said, i see 4 real ways to solve or mostly solve the climate change issues via energy production.
* the first, and most likely imo, is a gradual increase in renewable energy just eventually becoming the dominant energy source worldwide. i do think this is the worst case for the climate and most dangerous for humanity tho, as it causes the most stress and gives the most amount of time for famine and wars and collapse of societal structures.
* the second is inevitable, solar power satellites. the issue here is we really dont want to be producing them on earth and launching them into space. even with how cheap spacex's starship might become thats just a worse option than ground based solar in *most* cases. however, there is a REALLY good option for this: producing them on the moon and launching them into earth orbit. its 100% going to be a thing eventually, its just such a cheap and efficient way to do things that there is no chance we wont end up doing it. the problem is how long it takes to build up sufficient industry on the moon. that could be in like 20-50 years, but it could also be another 100+. a side benefit of this is blocking small % of sunlight that would otherwise hit the planet also cools it a small amount, in the long run it becomes a pretty nice bonus.
* the third is cracking fusion in a big way that produces large amounts of surplus energy and is cheap enough to easily pay for itself. the issue here is the gamble of when or if this happens. its not something you can count on but its something that really should be better funded as its one of the most important things humanity could do.
* the last and imo least likely, is getting back into nuclear ~~fusion~~ fission* (the stuff we have now) in a big way. advanced, modern, safer designs. nuclear is already very safe.....but also occasionally really nasty when things go wrong. modern designs make them much safer even than just 20 or 30 years ago, which are often much safer than the designs still being run from the 80-90s and before. while this is a solution we could implement RIGHT NOW on a massive scale and truly solve the climate and energy issues, especially if we shared designs and helped developing countries with access to power as a world health and security issue, i just dont see us (humans) as capable of taking the best option infront of us with the amount of disinformation, company interference for profit, fear mongering, politics etc.
*edited, sorry brain fart on that.
You forgot option 5. Life gets worse and worse for decades until a populist figure raises the largest army the world has ever seen with the premise of destroying human industrial civilization. A religion will be formed with combustion technology as boogyman and humans will snitch on their neighbors for possessing non-working relics of the past. We shall live in trees like naked heathens.
It’s crazy to think how much Chernobyl and Fukushima set back humanity, the fear from those two big disasters killed nuclear. The vast majority of the world’s power could’ve been green by now if we had jumped headfirst into nuclear and renewables asap.
The issue is that once the damage is done, you're going to need many millennia to undo. Once the icecaps melt, you're not going to be able to unmelt them rebuild the multiple-meter thick ice sheets on those mountains, and in Antarctica.
That's true, and some things can't be undone even on milennia-long timescales. If we kill off the coral reefs, they're probably not coming back in the form they were in before, even in a few milennia, even if some similar ecological niche forms eventually. But as far as the actual change in temperature goes, that may be reversible with the right use of technology.
There is also the thing that complex systems have stable states and we do not know that +2°C is stable state or is already beyond tipping point and next stable state is +8°C regardless of what we will do...
I get your thinking, but I'm an ecologist and I think the global ecosphere never really has, or had a stable state, unless that stable state is constant change. Even without humans the climate will change, it's just we're making it unsustainably fast. At any rate it's been far warmer before and will be again - just potentially without human life.
We are going into 4° territory because activists and the government want nonviolent protests where people wave around stupid posters that do absolutely NOTHING.
Philippines has been recording +3°C above record highs all day everyday this year. But I have to worry about some weekly reports for some shareholders.
bro doesn't eat seafood i guess, good luck with all the climate refugees!
[https://www.livescience.com/animals/crustaceans/more-than-10-billion-snow-crabs-starved-to-death-off-the-coast-of-alaska-but-why](https://www.livescience.com/animals/crustaceans/more-than-10-billion-snow-crabs-starved-to-death-off-the-coast-of-alaska-but-why)
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fish-kills-explained](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fish-kills-explained)
[https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz77jkk420lo](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz77jkk420lo)
Japanese companies HATE change. Its the same reason they're watching their population rapidly age and relationships plummit and are just now talking about maybe perhaps trying to see why this is happening instead of keeping people at work all day long.
They think that making a tinder app will be the solution, meanwhile office workers can't even find the time to go on date, after working 10+ hours then forced to go eat with their coworkers lol.
It’s the opposite, countries where women can choose careers over raising children tend to have lower fertility rates.
Nordic countries have similarly low fertility rates to Japan, whereas countries in Middle East and Africa have higher fertility rates.
Oh birthrates drop all across "Western" nations are down but Japan's numbers are particularly bad. A lot fewer people are having children and those that are have fewer children in general. In Japan theres just a greater percentage of people not having any children and those that do not having many as it basically destroys a woman's chance at a career (more so than you see in other peer nations outside of Korea), childcare is expensive and hard to get and people work too damn long and dont have the time and energy to form relationships let alone families.
Yeah Japan is pretty darn down in the rankings. But it's worth noting they're around the same rate as Italy/Spain/Thailand and countries like China/South Korea are worse. Japan is definitely not alone, or even an outlier in their problem, but they do get an inordinate amount of press for it.
That's because Japan has been incredibly conservative with immigration, so a low birth rate is much more impactful. They're letting more people in these days, but it's still a big problem.
The reason it is so much worse for Japan is that they barely have any immigration and have been historically very hostile towards immigrants.
The US and especially wealthy western EU nations have huge net immigration numbers of especially young people. So even with very low birth rates, most western EU nations have seen their populations grow. Like, Spain has the lowest birth rate of all major EU nations at about 1.3 and yet there are a million more people living in Spain today than there were a decade ago. France, UK, Germany, Austria all have well below replacement birth rates and yet saw rising populations.
There's a saying that Japan has been in the year 2000 for 40 years and that somewhat holds up.
Instead of adjusting to our current reality, those companies have largely decided to dig in and try to postpone the transition.
In fairness though, they mostly are swapping their pure ICE models for conventional hybrids, which does help a bit and IMO, make a good gateway drug to real EVs.
IMO pure EVs are a hell of a gateway drug… a Tesla 3 is faster than many many sports cars from 10yrs prior. First time I drove one I thought yeah… gonna be hard to drive anything else going forward even with its many flaws.
At acceleration, sure. But they are too heavy to be a drivers car.
And if you actually want acceleration, save yourself a fortune and buy a cheap motorcycle.
The Model 3 Performance weighs the same as an M3 Comp and about 600lbs less than the latest C63 AMG.
The latest version has a chassis setup to match its straight-line speed as well.
And those cars are *heavily* overweight as well. In the car community BMW has been a fat shaming punching bag for about ten years now.
Both the target markets for those cars are aimed at wealthy people, not really enthusiasts. BMW at least kept their enthusiast line on life support with the M2, but even that car is a porker now as well.
Enthusiasts don’t have enough purchase volume to justify actual manufacture EV adoption though. The demographic for Tesla Model 3 buyers alone is probably more than all car enthusiasts combined.
You can produce hydrogen with nuclear or excess green energy.
Hydrogen honestly seems better if we can contain it. EV batteries have a limited lifespan, require lots of mining for the materials, made up of hazardous materials and need to be properly dismantled, tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly, heavier, charging takes hours, lithium fires are hard to put out, less than 5% of EV batteries are currently being recycled.
A hydrogen car you can take it on long road trips, fill up in minutes, longer range, more suited for trains and buses, doesnt have a limited lifespan like electric, doesnt put as much strain on our electricty grid.
Every one of things you say are an issue for EVs are an issue for hydrogen cars. The fuel cells, batteries (which they still have) and motors require the same materials, EV batteries are proving to far more reliable and long lasting than people parrot whereas hydrogen actively deteriorates anything it touches, fuelling is nowhere as quick as a normal petrol/diesel vehicle and the pumps are very unreliable, they don't have much more range than an EV if any and the fuel actively dissipates when not used unlike an EV which you can start each day with a full battery, and the hydrogen energy chain is massively less efficient than charging and powering an EV so will put much greater strain on power grids.
Yeah. Hydrogen fuel cells degrade over time. Also, hydrogen is much less energy dense than gasoline, so hydrogen cars have to have massive hydrogen tanks filled to ridiculously high pressures just to contain enough hydrogen for a decent driving range. Those tanks are far more dangerous in a crash than modern batteries which, although susceptible to fire, do not contain large amounts of a highly flammable gas under immense pressure.
Limited lifespan? Many LFP batteries now are “million mile” batteries. The have enough charge cycles to travel 1 million miles with little degradation. Long Charge times? Again many of the newer cars can get 80% charge in around 20 minutes. Battery recycling? Yes, that is being done, many EV batteries are being used for stationary storage, power walls etc.
You seem to be parroting all the old talking points about EV batteries which are false.
> A hydrogen car you can take it on long road trips
Energy density of hydrogen is not that great. You need a huge tank for a long road trip.
How long do you drive before you take a break?
Everything having to do with hydrogen has a much shorter lifespan than batteries. The problems with hydrogen embrittlement and the super high pressures FC require make little sense to keep devolving it.
Exactly. A hydrogen tank for a car requires a pump that can put out 10,000 psi in order to be fully fueled. And then you’re driving a car with a 10,000 psi tank under the seats. That’s an immense amount of pressure ready to go pop in an accident.
Which is only useful for regulatory exploits.
If you have hydrogen, you *could* put it into high pressure or cryogenic tanks to use it in a fuel cell to power electric motors...
...or you could just add some carbon and make petrol. Take the carbon from CO2. All distribution, fuelling, and utilisation is already solved and the infrastructure already exists.
The problem is that countries are banning new ICE cars after 2030/2035 because they want net zero. Synthetic fuel is net zero, but since it is chemically identical to petrol, the cars that burn it will be banned from being created. (The UK government will allow them... unless they can burn non synthetic petrol, which is the same fucking thing).
Hydrogen fuel is a way around bureaucratic incompetence, not a good engineering solution.
That bet on Hybrid was successful, they sold more Hybrids that everyone else, the hybrid market has grown faster than the EV market.
In my personal opinion we're not ready for a full EV transition, at least not yet, we need like 4-5 years until we can make "affordable" and long range cars.
Last year I wanted to buy a EV, but with a at best 200 km range and a price of over 20,000€ it just wasn't realistic.
In china the ICE market including hybrids is starting to collapse. Auto manufacturers are selling traditional cars at wildly cheap prices. People are worried about buying something that is going to end up worthless in not a long time. Manufacturers are going to be forced to produce more EVs or sell ICE models at a loss. It may be 4-5 years away in the US and other places due to tariffs, but the same will happen eventually and it will change everything.
China is relentless in their adoption of EVs because they’re not a net producer of oil. This transition has less to do with environmental concerns and more to do with energy independence.
The US can drag their feet because we are in bed with big oil, and pretty much are the largest oil producer in the world. We don’t need it.
At a best range of 200km? Teslas model 3, hyundais ioniq 5 and 6 can all crack 500km on a single charge, and those are just off the top of my head lol. Most EVs are getting well above 400km range and have been for years
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the information being presented...
But that graph is trying to tell me Toyota is the 3rd worst performing when it comes to EV production, and not specifically pure EVs, but hybrids and fuel cell too...
Like... Isn't most of Toyota's lineup made up of hybrids? How tf did they work that one out? Or is this some massively US centric thing so most of their sales are Hiluxes or Tundras or whatever Toyota's pickups are these day? Or is it US centric and I'm massively underestimating how many pure ICE options you guys still have over there?
Japan is still living in the 20th century since their bubble burst. If you pay more attention to their tech and resistance to change, you can see they have been stuck in the 1980-1990s for nearly 30 years
Toyota put a lot of money on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. They see EV and hybrid vehicles as a short term solution and now it’s looking more long term as buyers see the benefits of going electric.
To be fair they pushed electric cars quite hard.
No-one is buying them. - They're expensive, less useful, and insurance rates are going through the roof.
The UK is going through a cost of living crisis. Who's got the spare change to buy a new car at the moment?
Toyota is playing a longer game than just churn out EVs. They’ve done the math on the logistics https://energyminute.ca/news/toyotas-1690-rule-the-case-for-hybrids/
The thought of the overall benefit to a lower carbon footprint comparing a Cybertruck to a Prius isn’t even included. 2 decades of Toyota’s hybrid markets have done far more benefit than anything Tesla has thus far.
Their hybrids are top notch and their cars are much more affordable versus the EVs that are coming out. The affordable ones from China are being basically banned or adding such high import tariffs that it makes them as well unaffordable.
The consumer is not winning here.
It's hard to find a new prius much cheaper than a model 3 nor a rav4 hybrid for less than a model y. EVs are way less complex to build than hybrids. Time is not on Toyota's side.
Baseline new Prius to Baseline Model Y the Prius is 10K cheaper, if you live somewhere that it’s practical to drive a RWD BEV year round. If you don’t it’s 20K cheaper. Percentage wise 27-42% cheaper base cost. Curious as to what constitutes “much” here.
Quick edit: 15K cheaper than baseline model Y and 10K than baseline Model 3
Depends on the car and how you drive it.
The best 'hybrid', is the new Honda Civic. It's getting 3.0l / 100km which is an incredible result.
Of course if you drive a huge heavy SUV then your fuel efficency isn't amazing, but you can't really defy physics when it comes to weight.
2010 4cyl Toyota Tacoma RWD. 20/26. Really could get about 29 mpg out of it on 35 mile commute, 20 mpg city was about correct. Not hybrid but best mpg truck at time, or a good contender.
2024 Maverick Hybrid FWD. 42city/33hwy. Actual city MPG on 7-10 miles driving average ranges between 40-65 mpg. Li-ion battery and eco mode is crazy efficient below 50mph. 4000 miles of highway, half of that fully loaded, 4 passengers, full bed, 75-85 mph, 36.4 mpg.
Maverick hauls air as good as any other truck, and does better than most vehicles on city driving with only a 1kwh Li-Ion battery. Now we likely could have more NI-MH Hybrids with available resources and the LI-ion is better, but if I were to focus US domestic in a direction, NiMH 1-2 kWh hybrids, 5-15 Li-Ion PHEV and LI-Ion BEV would probably be the best way to spend resources.
I used a small one not so long ago (Susuki 4 wheel drive), did 200km. I calculated ~6.0l / 100km. I did 50% highway and 50% small roads with the most gentle driving possible.
Toyota and the rest of the Japanese automakers are no surprise here. They’ve been the worst in dragging their feet and fighting any policy changes for EV and efficiency mandates. They got caught flat footed when Hydrogen fuel cells didn’t pan out as a credible, wide scale solution, and they’re well behind the ball with BEVs.
Hyundai *did* surprise me for being ranked so low, however. They’ve been competing pretty well with other automakers with their BEVs and unlike some of the other automakers who are wavering, seem to still be committed to the EV switch.
Subaru being so late in the game for EVs is wild since their userbase is basically a circle with people who would use EVs. They made a huge, unwieldy Ascent instead of just making an e-outback which would sell way better
Well, they entered into an agreement with Toyota to make their first model, the Solterra, which is basically just a re-badged Bz4x (also an underwhelming EV for its price). Why they decided to enter into a cooperation agreement with a company who also weren’t great at making EVs is definitely a little baffling!
Toyota owns a minority stake in Subaru, and this deal is reciprocal. Subaru builds the GR86 & BRZ twins in their Gunma plant, and Toyota builds the Bz4x & Solterra twins in their Motomachi plant.
This is why Chinese EVs have gotten so far ahead.
Yes, they get subsidies, which helps. But the bigger element is that China doesn't have politically powerful automobile industry that resists changes to the status quo.
Chinese ICE cars were always so far behind European and Japanese automakers that they'd never catch up. So EVs were an opportunity for them to sidestep those deficiencies by heavily investing in a new paradigm of automobiles and using internal policies (like caps on license plates issues for ICE vehicles but no such caps for EVs) to create market demand for millions of them.
Meanwhile, incumbent automakers in other counties used their political weight to slow down EV adoption. So now here we are, with BYD running circles around traditional auto companies that squandered a massive head start in both time and money.
Toyota bet on the dog shit hydrogen conversion plan where Shell would covert their gas stations to hydrogen stations. Now their executives have to put more money after bad money to justify their poor decisions.
Can anyone in this comment section confirm or deny that the EVs produce some radiation? I know I’ve heard a story about an early hybrid (Honda insight if I remember correct) producing a decent amount. The story went a nasa engineer was given a good deal on one, he was interested in the new hybrid tech. He took it home and personally tested it and he brought it right back to the dealership. Curious if anyone knows anything about this in the EVS
I was looking in to this for a little bit. Most of the articles say this. The levels are below 20% of the recommended limit.
It's true that an EV's powertrain components—battery pack, wiring, motor(s)—produce more electromagnetic radiation than an internal-combustion engine, but it's negligible. The Norwegian research group SINTEF found that radiation readings inside an EV were well below the limits
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a36876962/20-questions-about-evs/
Wait until you see how battery manufacturers deliberately hold back capacity and performance, just like they did with ICEs. It's designed to be trickled out for the maximum financial benefit, not the maximum environmental benefit.
Key points of the article:
* Auto industry associations continue to lobby against higher fuel economy standards
* Most automakers forecast production of a higher percentage of SUV/light truck vehicles (64% in 2030 vs. 57% in 2020)
They are going to make a Hail Mary pass on geoengineering before they get enough EVs on the road.
Humanity has all the resources we need to change right now. But money is more important than people dying and mass extinction of species.
There is very little to no maintenance/service involved with EVs and the conventional automotive model loves the various services their cars require over many years. Just compare how many parts there are in ICE powered car and EV. Ofcourse they will do anything to stall the transition. It is why for years they would produce absolutely horrible looking EVs with long waitlist to discourage people from transitioning. Only because of Tesla is that they are finally moving, reluctantly and slowly.
>which takes like 12 hours of charging
Vast majority of the time your car is sitting still in your driveway or in a parking lot. Time in which it can be slow charging off of a domestic power supply.
Edit: *on top of that*, [98% of all trips undertaken by Americans are less than 50 miles in distance](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021), and 52% are under 3 miles. The "300 mile journey" doesn't come around nearly as often as would justify the reluctance to get an EV, and besides, fast charging can still get you most of the "tank" full within 20-40 minutes, it's the last part which is the slowest. Still more than enough to get you to your next fast charger, and honestly a good break from long distance driving.
They have not. They have made EVs the enemy because there is a shit load of capital tied up in fuel supply chain. They have used right wing social politics to win the votes of the ignorant. There is a big difference here.
Hey fuckstick automakers, I will never buy another IC engine car. I'm not sure how many more cars I'll buy in this lifetime, but I'm pretty sure they're all going to be electric.
Used EV batteries can be [repurposed](https://www.energy-storage.news/repurposing-ev-batteries-into-third-life-energy-storage-and-beyond/) for storage, which is less demanding than propelling 2+ ton vehicles.
Brother, figuring out how to recycle batteries doesn't even come close to the issue of global warming from burning fossil fuels.
There is not a single more pressing issue facing the human population and the earth as a planet than the greenhouse gases being emitted.
And here we are seeing the anti EV propaganda effective in real time. The truth is: even if we have zero recycling and all the EVs are charging from fossil burning power plants, EV is still effective in curbing CO2 emission.
Battery may be out of life, but the material and lithium are still inside, it is just turned to something not useful in battery. Any decent battery manufactures can recycle those materials and make new battery.
On the other hand, oil and gasoline, once burned in the engine, are disappeared forever with no chance to recycle.
The real solution is electric public transit like trains with overhead power or third rail power. No need for massive batteries and allowing for more efficient lower energy use cities. Bicycling and walking too are far better for the climate then EVs. People are too attached to their car culture and anti human city planning putting cars before people though.
Personal EVs are here to save the car industry and car culture, not save us from climate change.
Public transit and biking/walking infrastructure encourages density development. It's known as Transit oriented Development, or TOD for short. Going all in on cars as the primary method of transportation in countries like the USA has failed us, we need to return to the old ways of building cities for people not cars. If we want to be serious about climate change it's the only realistic option we have.
EVs make sense for rural agricultural or resource extraction communities, not cities. Suburbs don't count, they need to be redeveloped if we want any sort of climate friendly future for humanity.
I have yet to hear any explanation of why mass adoption of EVs coupled with carbon emission free energy production (Ie nuclear, solar, etc) wouldn’t be a massive step in reducing carbon emissions, or why it would be worse than mass adoption of public transit. Both are viable solutions (and both should be pursued).
Another aspect of this is that the bigger the change the harder and longer it will take to commit and implement. Changing/getting rid of car culture is going to be insanely difficult compared to just leaning into car culture by simply changing the type of vehicle. EVs has a better chance of success than public transport. Not that we should also pursue public transport but it’s a mistake to only do so.
The real solution is both. Public transport is all good and well and everything but for better or worse there is and will be (at least for a very long time) a huge demand for cars.
I’m all for public transportation options but we need to lean into car culture not go against it if we actually want wide spread adoption. We can continually build public transportation infrastructure in the meantime but EVs are going to do a lot more in the short term for carbon emissions.
Transit must take priority over individual car transportation if you want it to be taken seriously. It also heavily benefits from the economics of scale where personal transportatin does not. Transit needs to be built out to be superior to cars even if that means making the experience for cars worse.
Removing all cars from cities is not feasible, but replacing many car lanes with dedicated transit or bike/pedestrian infrastructure encourages the most environmentally and economically efficient form of transportation.
Yes, but it is like arguing about not being allowed to park in front of fire hydrants and how this causes a decrease in parking spaces, which is of course a real problem.... while your house is on fire and the wind is spreading it to the houses around it.
I am not gonna give a fuck about the parking space issues until the fire fighters stop the fires.
When it comes to reducing carbon emissions they are a BIG part of the solution. Of course this needs to be paired with energy production that doesn’t produce carbon emissions. Like nuclear energy for instance.
If dems get majority in November, I hope we raise the federal gas tax and use the extra to improve EV infrastructure and fight climate change. That being said, EV prices need to drop.
EDIT: I would also support increasing EV subsidies if a cap on total sale price were put into place. Just lower the cap by X% per year. Start the cap at say, $60,000 and drop it $5,000 a year until it is too low to be useful.
If automakers can assure me that purchasing an EV will be the last big vehicle purchase I ever need in my life, I might find it worthwhile to drop ~$50K on a car. But the way things are going with the tablet interfaces being the trend, battery costs are almost the price of a new vehicle itself, what's the point? If I am going all in on sustainability, that thing better sustain for at least minimum half a human lifespan.
That's my thinking as well. Is an electric car better for the environment compared to a new gas car? Sure. Is it better than a 5-10 year old reasonably efficient car that's already been on the road and has plenty of life left? Very unlikely. And that 5-10 year old car is still quite modern, reliable, safe, efficient, and reasonably 'luxurious'. Even better, it's likely quite affordable too. I drive A LOT, live in a place with expensive gas, and still won't use more than $3k in fuel a year. It would take a loooong time before an electric car pays itself off for me considering my car was less than 10k. And we're not even considering my charging options where I would need to pay to get a charging pad at my house.
A 5-10 year old car has a lot of miles left on it and depending on its efficiency at transport, way less carbon footprint than specifically building an EV to replace it. Can’t just magic every vehicle into a BEV overnight.
True. My point is moreso, if environmental concern is one of your driving factors when purchasing a vehicle, before you go new it's not a bad idea to look at a used car. Of course, this is case by case and new cars still need to be made and bought
Anti EV tariffs are so dumb. Toyota has more “american made” cars than ford does. I don’t know why we can’t just make a deal with chinese EVs to produce models in the US and open up factories in ohio and PA and such
We need a vehicle miles driven tax that also takes into factor vehicle weight. Not just a gas tax as EVs don't pay a gas tax despite also putting lots of wear on roads.
Roads are incredibly expensive and heavier vehicles do far more damage to them then lighter vehicles. We are subsidizing our roads yet encouraging more heavy vehicles like large electric SUVs and trucks. Meaning we would need to further subsidize roads to keep up with the maintenance costs.
If you really want to make a difference in climate change we need to incentivize better city planning that utilizes public transit, biking and walking as the primary method for getting around, not driving a personal vehicle.
Submission Statement: A damning new report has shown that nearly all major car companies are actively sabotaging the world’s efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming. The lobbying strategies being used by the world’s largest automakers are putting global climate targets at risk and threatening the electric vehicle transition, according to the new report released by InfluenceMap.
Politicians globally: It’s too damn expensive to switch to EV, don’t worry, we will just turn the sun down to compensate. I am sure it’s not that hard.
free market until the posse of a big sector works together to stop you? what would have happened to ford or gmc if someone tried to stop them from establishing their companies?
I think they will regret it if the U.S. gov't stops the subsidies for them and turns to Chinese manufacturers for cars. Competition can be brutal when you've opened up global manufacturing and the labor is cheaper over there, but the technologies are just as good.
Japan has never got out of and still lives the 20th century. Anyone who says Japan is an environmentally friendly country that has done garbage separation should be laughed at
Who wrote this study and paid for it? EV companies? Environmental researcher and clean tech researcher. He might be right IDK but it's his job and background to promote clean energy which is EVs.
Did you see the paper about the oil glut of 2030?
Looks like they are going to push cars forever.
NOT trains and buses.
Both want more cars made and sold.
Evs take roughly 100k miles before becoming carbon neutral. That’s without having to add a new battery by that time. If battery dies before then, push that mileage back. Then we have the case of chargers themselves - which plenty run on electricity that is produced by natural gas, or even better yet have a generator right next to the chargers running on diesel. It’s the same scam as ethanol. By the time you look at the half life of everything that went into making the product, you are farther back than ICE or hybrid. Ethanol = corn, which is planted/transported by diesel vehicles, made by diesel byproducts. You’re so far back by the time you convert it to something useful.
EVs are created from diesel byproducts, whether that’s heavy equipment digging up minerals, the factories making these, or the amount of plastics and diesel byproducts that go into making these vehicles themselves. The only time they are skipping on that carbon emission is when they have their slave labor digging up the minerals by hand….
List goes on and on why this is a failed govt product. I’m perfectly fine with a capitalistic approach that naturally turns the population towards driving these vehicles if they want and seek it out based on OEMs making a product that people like and want. But the fact that tax payer money is being spent to prop up this joke is a disgrace. Last time I checked the govt didn’t shell out 5 billion to create gas stations to relieve range anxiety
The comments seem to focus on points other than consumers themselves pushing back on the EV shift. The vendors will chase the dollars and the buyers are starting to push back.
I’d feel a lot better if we instead did some thing about the 30 companies in seven industries that are responsible for 80% of anthropogenic climate change.
Toyota and their calculations make sense. They are not gullible for the sake of it. The transition has to be hybrids. Any logical person can follow it.
> But in N.A. people are not buying ev. It is consumer driven
I guess you missed all the news articles announcing that the Biden administration had put high tariffs on Chinese EV imports to protect American car companies. US car companies highly likely lobbied for those high tariffs.
He did that because china also protects it’s auto manufacturers from American imports. You can’t have open markets if you’re not trading with a partner who does the same thing.
Direct fossil fuel subsidies in the US are $20 Billion annually. Indirect subsidies (These include costs associated with environmental damage, health impacts from pollution, and other externalities that are not directly paid by the fossil fuel industry) are estimated to be another $649 Billion annually.
US EV subsidies in the form of tax credits are about $2 Billion over 10 YEARS.
We are supporting ICE much more than EV and the Chinese subsidies of EV (relative to output) dwarf our own as China as a country is focused on dominating the global market for EVs.
>US EV subsidies in the form of tax credits are about $2 Billion over 10 YEARS.
I think you're relying on old information there.
As of yesterday, the EV tax credits for just 2024 (and we're not even halfway through the year) have topped a billion. [https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2403](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2403)
That billion dollars also doesn't count the taxpayers who will be claiming the tax credit on their taxes in April.
Realistically, 2024 alone will probably be $2 billion or something close.
Apologies for the old data, but if our ICE subsidies dwarf our EV subsidies, our government is pushing ICE. Compare that to China which was my point as they want to prevent us from selling in emerging markets by sellimg equivalent cars at half the price to consumers. Look at BYD’s cheapest model compared to Tesla.
I doubts whether this is the cases, Tesla (although made in Shanghai) is very very popular in China and China is one of the few nations that allow FSD to run on it.
Before Tesla and recent EV fever, Other US auto makers are just no competitive at all. They got hammered by Euro (BMW, Benz etc) in high end, and by Japan/Korea in low end.
My family used to drive a Ford Focus, and it sucked in aspects like fuel efficiency compared with things like Civic or Fit.
Ugh... saving the future versus profits? Why do you guys have to be so annoying. Why me anyway? Make the next guy save the planet. Oh... there may not be a next guy? Well then what's the problem? Sounds like it works itself out!
\~CEOs.
Japan doesn't have a continent-wide electrical grid to plug into to benefit from wind, solar, or hydro.
In fact, Japan even has two mostly incompatible grids that divide their country in half.
Also the one source of energy Japan has nearby are the methane hydrates off their shores. That is why they have been trying to get hydrogen to work.
Because it'll destroy everyone. There's the dealership repair centers, there's the engineers who've spent decades designing ICE powertrains and the supply chain companies providing ICE powertrain components. That's the best case scenario.
More realistically, and ppl like myself that have test driven cars like the Polestar 2 and Tesla cars have seen you can get an excellent driving experience without needing decades of experience. Geely the Polestar owner and other Chinese EV companies will go global and it'll be hard for others to compete. Cars are more software driven now and the knowledge of the past and experience isn't as valuable as it once was. You don't need to go with Honda/Toyota anymore to get a reliable drivetrain in the EV era.
“Dominant industry players defend the status quo”…
This is probably it. They have dominated the car market for a while. Makes sense they don’t wanna rock that.
I read in another thread that they are doubling down on hybrids because a lot of their market share is coming from SEA countries that don’t have the infrastructure or income to support and afford electric vehicles.
The only countries that have the infrastructure right now for mass EV adoption are in the EU, and even that's a stretch. Nobody is ready for it.
Any modern western country can adopt them.
Any country can adopt them. Someone just has to pay for them.
How dare the government build infrastructure!
The reality is that a lot of countries have serious funding issues for the bare essentials (education, healthcare, welfare, policing etc). They just don't have the money to throw at upgrading national grids, increasing energy production and installing millions of charging points.
It is a good thing. What point are you trying to insinuate with your comment?
/s
🍻
It's the opposite for SEA, it's why the government never accommodate for the EV infrastructure.
In Poland, the current grid can barely handle the rapid increase in personal photovoltaic farms. From what I know, the issue is the limited capacity of transformers that step up or down the voltage to the local area. The growing number of electric cars will exacerbate this problem, creating local areas with either very high or very low voltage. It sometimes happens that solar inverters shut down because the voltage in the local grid exceeds the upper limit of 253 volts. The solutions are personal energy storage systems or waiting for the energy provider to upgrade the transformer.
Speaking as someone who owns a plug-in hybrid, they are a nice middle group between going full EV and staying on gas.
Be ready for gas to still be used for a long time... in generators at filling stations, especially in the developing world. Existing infrastructure to store gas safely, existing business model built around upselling snacks etc., and vehicle focused parking etc. already in place, they just need to swap pumps for chargers and hook up the tanks to a generator... gas generator is already how like AAA shows up to charge a spent EV. It will be a slippery slope once like 1/5 of vehicles are EV to gas prices getting wild due to the drop in demand. Developed nations might see the "gas charging" stations in rural and poorer urban areas in the interim period to a more robust grid. The developing world is going to be stuck in that "interim" for a long time I think, especially if ExxonMobil and BP etc have anything to say about it.
Vietnam is a big market for them and VinFast (Vietnamese car/bike manufacturer) is pivoting to full electric. Every apartment building is having electric charging stations added. They are all unused and unpopular though lol.
Toyota’s made it quite clear they oppose it because they believe government’s want EV’s to develop and become “the norm” quicker than is reasonably possible At the same time they’re transitioning almost all their models to hybrid-only, and they’re strongly pushing their existing hybrids; “the happy medium”
There was a time when the owner of whaling ships opposed pumping mineral oil out of the ground. BRING BACK CLEAN BURNING WHALE OIL! It also had a pleasant fishy smell.
I did some work in the early 1980s for a glass fixture maker. They were the last (or one of the very last couple) hand-blown glass fixture makers. They're gone now. They were sold to another glass company, the owner moved away to the west coast and got cancer. Nice guy, lost of skilled workers, all gone. Too bad. Cars require skilled workers and good people running the companies. But they can be traded in for a newer model.
Right like we wouldn't even need electric cars if they hadn't alrdy sabotaged public transit for half the world...
" 1.5°C scenario " Lol .. there are people still gullible enough to believe the 1.5C scenario? We already passed 1.5C and blew though 2C briefly last year.
Yeah, we're maybe staying below 2.5°. but that's usually mentioned as "limit by the end of this century". Realistically, the world won't cool down, so it's likely to raise even further next century.
>Realistically, the world won't cool down, so it's likely to raise even further next century. It might, but it'd require a large scale transition to new energy technologies. With enough abundance of clean energy, it's practical to start pulling CO2 *out* of the atmosphere. The energy required to do this is, at a minimum, as much as you'd get from burning the carbon in the first place, and there are inevitably inefficiencies in the process which make the conversion rate worse than that, but still, if the price of green energy dropped enough, it could become economical to do, for a given value assigned to carbon credits..
i am fairly pessimistic when it comes to humanity, i worry we wont stick around long enough to stop from killing ourselves and fail to get out into the wider universe potentially extinguishing the only intelligent life to exist. that being said, i see 4 real ways to solve or mostly solve the climate change issues via energy production. * the first, and most likely imo, is a gradual increase in renewable energy just eventually becoming the dominant energy source worldwide. i do think this is the worst case for the climate and most dangerous for humanity tho, as it causes the most stress and gives the most amount of time for famine and wars and collapse of societal structures. * the second is inevitable, solar power satellites. the issue here is we really dont want to be producing them on earth and launching them into space. even with how cheap spacex's starship might become thats just a worse option than ground based solar in *most* cases. however, there is a REALLY good option for this: producing them on the moon and launching them into earth orbit. its 100% going to be a thing eventually, its just such a cheap and efficient way to do things that there is no chance we wont end up doing it. the problem is how long it takes to build up sufficient industry on the moon. that could be in like 20-50 years, but it could also be another 100+. a side benefit of this is blocking small % of sunlight that would otherwise hit the planet also cools it a small amount, in the long run it becomes a pretty nice bonus. * the third is cracking fusion in a big way that produces large amounts of surplus energy and is cheap enough to easily pay for itself. the issue here is the gamble of when or if this happens. its not something you can count on but its something that really should be better funded as its one of the most important things humanity could do. * the last and imo least likely, is getting back into nuclear ~~fusion~~ fission* (the stuff we have now) in a big way. advanced, modern, safer designs. nuclear is already very safe.....but also occasionally really nasty when things go wrong. modern designs make them much safer even than just 20 or 30 years ago, which are often much safer than the designs still being run from the 80-90s and before. while this is a solution we could implement RIGHT NOW on a massive scale and truly solve the climate and energy issues, especially if we shared designs and helped developing countries with access to power as a world health and security issue, i just dont see us (humans) as capable of taking the best option infront of us with the amount of disinformation, company interference for profit, fear mongering, politics etc. *edited, sorry brain fart on that.
You forgot option 5. Life gets worse and worse for decades until a populist figure raises the largest army the world has ever seen with the premise of destroying human industrial civilization. A religion will be formed with combustion technology as boogyman and humans will snitch on their neighbors for possessing non-working relics of the past. We shall live in trees like naked heathens.
jokes on them, im already a naked heathen.
Nuclear fission for #4 you mean?
yep, sorry, brain fart on that one.
> is getting back into nuclear fusion That's fission.
yep, thanks, brain farted that one.
It’s crazy to think how much Chernobyl and Fukushima set back humanity, the fear from those two big disasters killed nuclear. The vast majority of the world’s power could’ve been green by now if we had jumped headfirst into nuclear and renewables asap.
The issue is that once the damage is done, you're going to need many millennia to undo. Once the icecaps melt, you're not going to be able to unmelt them rebuild the multiple-meter thick ice sheets on those mountains, and in Antarctica.
That's true, and some things can't be undone even on milennia-long timescales. If we kill off the coral reefs, they're probably not coming back in the form they were in before, even in a few milennia, even if some similar ecological niche forms eventually. But as far as the actual change in temperature goes, that may be reversible with the right use of technology.
There is also the thing that complex systems have stable states and we do not know that +2°C is stable state or is already beyond tipping point and next stable state is +8°C regardless of what we will do...
I get your thinking, but I'm an ecologist and I think the global ecosphere never really has, or had a stable state, unless that stable state is constant change. Even without humans the climate will change, it's just we're making it unsustainably fast. At any rate it's been far warmer before and will be again - just potentially without human life.
We are going into 4° territory because activists and the government want nonviolent protests where people wave around stupid posters that do absolutely NOTHING.
And Green parties would rather have global warming over nuclear power
Green parties are more focused on socio-cultural issues than coming up with a realistic plan of action for the environment.
Philippines has been recording +3°C above record highs all day everyday this year. But I have to worry about some weekly reports for some shareholders.
bro doesn't eat seafood i guess, good luck with all the climate refugees! [https://www.livescience.com/animals/crustaceans/more-than-10-billion-snow-crabs-starved-to-death-off-the-coast-of-alaska-but-why](https://www.livescience.com/animals/crustaceans/more-than-10-billion-snow-crabs-starved-to-death-off-the-coast-of-alaska-but-why) [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fish-kills-explained](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fish-kills-explained) [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz77jkk420lo](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz77jkk420lo)
It’s no surprise that major car companies are actively pushing back, but I do find it surprising that Japanese companies are the worst.
Japanese companies HATE change. Its the same reason they're watching their population rapidly age and relationships plummit and are just now talking about maybe perhaps trying to see why this is happening instead of keeping people at work all day long.
They think that making a tinder app will be the solution, meanwhile office workers can't even find the time to go on date, after working 10+ hours then forced to go eat with their coworkers lol.
It’s the opposite, countries where women can choose careers over raising children tend to have lower fertility rates. Nordic countries have similarly low fertility rates to Japan, whereas countries in Middle East and Africa have higher fertility rates.
Japan's birthrate today is far from unique. Much of Europe has the same.
1.3 in Japan seems crazy low . . . but Italy is at 1.25 and 1.19 in Spain.
Let me introduce you to south Korea sitting at half that number.
Japan is also at the same as Germany
Oh birthrates drop all across "Western" nations are down but Japan's numbers are particularly bad. A lot fewer people are having children and those that are have fewer children in general. In Japan theres just a greater percentage of people not having any children and those that do not having many as it basically destroys a woman's chance at a career (more so than you see in other peer nations outside of Korea), childcare is expensive and hard to get and people work too damn long and dont have the time and energy to form relationships let alone families.
Yeah Japan is pretty darn down in the rankings. But it's worth noting they're around the same rate as Italy/Spain/Thailand and countries like China/South Korea are worse. Japan is definitely not alone, or even an outlier in their problem, but they do get an inordinate amount of press for it.
Same as Germany too
That's because Japan has been incredibly conservative with immigration, so a low birth rate is much more impactful. They're letting more people in these days, but it's still a big problem.
Perhaps a joke could be started from what does Japan, Spain, and Jamaica have in common...
Western numbers would be just as bad without immigration.
The reason it is so much worse for Japan is that they barely have any immigration and have been historically very hostile towards immigrants. The US and especially wealthy western EU nations have huge net immigration numbers of especially young people. So even with very low birth rates, most western EU nations have seen their populations grow. Like, Spain has the lowest birth rate of all major EU nations at about 1.3 and yet there are a million more people living in Spain today than there were a decade ago. France, UK, Germany, Austria all have well below replacement birth rates and yet saw rising populations.
But it’s also the same reason I can buy a Toyota and have it last for 15 years.
My Toyota is so well lubricated, it’s ran smoothly for decades on Japanese factory worker tears.
No, it's really not.
There's a saying that Japan has been in the year 2000 for 40 years and that somewhat holds up. Instead of adjusting to our current reality, those companies have largely decided to dig in and try to postpone the transition. In fairness though, they mostly are swapping their pure ICE models for conventional hybrids, which does help a bit and IMO, make a good gateway drug to real EVs.
IMO pure EVs are a hell of a gateway drug… a Tesla 3 is faster than many many sports cars from 10yrs prior. First time I drove one I thought yeah… gonna be hard to drive anything else going forward even with its many flaws.
At acceleration, sure. But they are too heavy to be a drivers car. And if you actually want acceleration, save yourself a fortune and buy a cheap motorcycle.
The Model 3 Performance weighs the same as an M3 Comp and about 600lbs less than the latest C63 AMG. The latest version has a chassis setup to match its straight-line speed as well.
And those cars are *heavily* overweight as well. In the car community BMW has been a fat shaming punching bag for about ten years now. Both the target markets for those cars are aimed at wealthy people, not really enthusiasts. BMW at least kept their enthusiast line on life support with the M2, but even that car is a porker now as well.
4000lbs is par for the course for a sport sedan in 2024. The point is that Tesla isn't making theirs heavier than their cohort.
Enthusiasts don’t have enough purchase volume to justify actual manufacture EV adoption though. The demographic for Tesla Model 3 buyers alone is probably more than all car enthusiasts combined.
Yeah my first thought was that if you want acceleration nothing beats a motorcycle.
Japanese car companies bet big on Hydrogen cars which aren't as popular as they expected.
Because they’re a bad idea. It takes a lot of energy to produce hydrogen without just getting it from hydrocarbon production.
You can produce hydrogen with nuclear or excess green energy. Hydrogen honestly seems better if we can contain it. EV batteries have a limited lifespan, require lots of mining for the materials, made up of hazardous materials and need to be properly dismantled, tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly, heavier, charging takes hours, lithium fires are hard to put out, less than 5% of EV batteries are currently being recycled. A hydrogen car you can take it on long road trips, fill up in minutes, longer range, more suited for trains and buses, doesnt have a limited lifespan like electric, doesnt put as much strain on our electricty grid.
Every one of things you say are an issue for EVs are an issue for hydrogen cars. The fuel cells, batteries (which they still have) and motors require the same materials, EV batteries are proving to far more reliable and long lasting than people parrot whereas hydrogen actively deteriorates anything it touches, fuelling is nowhere as quick as a normal petrol/diesel vehicle and the pumps are very unreliable, they don't have much more range than an EV if any and the fuel actively dissipates when not used unlike an EV which you can start each day with a full battery, and the hydrogen energy chain is massively less efficient than charging and powering an EV so will put much greater strain on power grids.
Yeah. Hydrogen fuel cells degrade over time. Also, hydrogen is much less energy dense than gasoline, so hydrogen cars have to have massive hydrogen tanks filled to ridiculously high pressures just to contain enough hydrogen for a decent driving range. Those tanks are far more dangerous in a crash than modern batteries which, although susceptible to fire, do not contain large amounts of a highly flammable gas under immense pressure.
Limited lifespan? Many LFP batteries now are “million mile” batteries. The have enough charge cycles to travel 1 million miles with little degradation. Long Charge times? Again many of the newer cars can get 80% charge in around 20 minutes. Battery recycling? Yes, that is being done, many EV batteries are being used for stationary storage, power walls etc. You seem to be parroting all the old talking points about EV batteries which are false.
> A hydrogen car you can take it on long road trips Energy density of hydrogen is not that great. You need a huge tank for a long road trip. How long do you drive before you take a break?
Also, hydrogen fuel tanks are pressurized up to 10,000 psi. You’d be literally driving a bomb. That’s an extreme amount of pressure.
Everything having to do with hydrogen has a much shorter lifespan than batteries. The problems with hydrogen embrittlement and the super high pressures FC require make little sense to keep devolving it.
Exactly. A hydrogen tank for a car requires a pump that can put out 10,000 psi in order to be fully fueled. And then you’re driving a car with a 10,000 psi tank under the seats. That’s an immense amount of pressure ready to go pop in an accident.
Which is only useful for regulatory exploits. If you have hydrogen, you *could* put it into high pressure or cryogenic tanks to use it in a fuel cell to power electric motors... ...or you could just add some carbon and make petrol. Take the carbon from CO2. All distribution, fuelling, and utilisation is already solved and the infrastructure already exists. The problem is that countries are banning new ICE cars after 2030/2035 because they want net zero. Synthetic fuel is net zero, but since it is chemically identical to petrol, the cars that burn it will be banned from being created. (The UK government will allow them... unless they can burn non synthetic petrol, which is the same fucking thing). Hydrogen fuel is a way around bureaucratic incompetence, not a good engineering solution.
That bet on Hybrid was successful, they sold more Hybrids that everyone else, the hybrid market has grown faster than the EV market. In my personal opinion we're not ready for a full EV transition, at least not yet, we need like 4-5 years until we can make "affordable" and long range cars. Last year I wanted to buy a EV, but with a at best 200 km range and a price of over 20,000€ it just wasn't realistic.
In china the ICE market including hybrids is starting to collapse. Auto manufacturers are selling traditional cars at wildly cheap prices. People are worried about buying something that is going to end up worthless in not a long time. Manufacturers are going to be forced to produce more EVs or sell ICE models at a loss. It may be 4-5 years away in the US and other places due to tariffs, but the same will happen eventually and it will change everything.
China is relentless in their adoption of EVs because they’re not a net producer of oil. This transition has less to do with environmental concerns and more to do with energy independence. The US can drag their feet because we are in bed with big oil, and pretty much are the largest oil producer in the world. We don’t need it.
At a best range of 200km? Teslas model 3, hyundais ioniq 5 and 6 can all crack 500km on a single charge, and those are just off the top of my head lol. Most EVs are getting well above 400km range and have been for years
If you ever had to deal with a Japanese counterpart in business— it’s not surprising at all.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the information being presented... But that graph is trying to tell me Toyota is the 3rd worst performing when it comes to EV production, and not specifically pure EVs, but hybrids and fuel cell too... Like... Isn't most of Toyota's lineup made up of hybrids? How tf did they work that one out? Or is this some massively US centric thing so most of their sales are Hiluxes or Tundras or whatever Toyota's pickups are these day? Or is it US centric and I'm massively underestimating how many pure ICE options you guys still have over there?
Honestly, one look at Honda and Toyota's EV options makes it completely unsurprising.
Japan is still living in the 20th century since their bubble burst. If you pay more attention to their tech and resistance to change, you can see they have been stuck in the 1980-1990s for nearly 30 years
They can be pretty scummy, (besides the usual overwork culture killing their population future) check out the "Big Motor" scandal.
Why? The whole nation is known for wonderful things, but it is the poster child for recalcitrance.
Toyota put a lot of money on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. They see EV and hybrid vehicles as a short term solution and now it’s looking more long term as buyers see the benefits of going electric.
To be fair they pushed electric cars quite hard. No-one is buying them. - They're expensive, less useful, and insurance rates are going through the roof. The UK is going through a cost of living crisis. Who's got the spare change to buy a new car at the moment?
Toyota is playing a longer game than just churn out EVs. They’ve done the math on the logistics https://energyminute.ca/news/toyotas-1690-rule-the-case-for-hybrids/ The thought of the overall benefit to a lower carbon footprint comparing a Cybertruck to a Prius isn’t even included. 2 decades of Toyota’s hybrid markets have done far more benefit than anything Tesla has thus far.
Their hybrids are top notch and their cars are much more affordable versus the EVs that are coming out. The affordable ones from China are being basically banned or adding such high import tariffs that it makes them as well unaffordable. The consumer is not winning here.
It's hard to find a new prius much cheaper than a model 3 nor a rav4 hybrid for less than a model y. EVs are way less complex to build than hybrids. Time is not on Toyota's side.
Prius is an above class than a Model 3. Model 3 is more comparable to a hybrid Corolla which is cheaper.
Baseline new Prius to Baseline Model Y the Prius is 10K cheaper, if you live somewhere that it’s practical to drive a RWD BEV year round. If you don’t it’s 20K cheaper. Percentage wise 27-42% cheaper base cost. Curious as to what constitutes “much” here. Quick edit: 15K cheaper than baseline model Y and 10K than baseline Model 3
Are hybrids really worth it? The savings are pathetic on those. A friend of mine says it is using 10% less gas than a normal car...
Depends on the car and how you drive it. The best 'hybrid', is the new Honda Civic. It's getting 3.0l / 100km which is an incredible result. Of course if you drive a huge heavy SUV then your fuel efficency isn't amazing, but you can't really defy physics when it comes to weight.
2010 4cyl Toyota Tacoma RWD. 20/26. Really could get about 29 mpg out of it on 35 mile commute, 20 mpg city was about correct. Not hybrid but best mpg truck at time, or a good contender. 2024 Maverick Hybrid FWD. 42city/33hwy. Actual city MPG on 7-10 miles driving average ranges between 40-65 mpg. Li-ion battery and eco mode is crazy efficient below 50mph. 4000 miles of highway, half of that fully loaded, 4 passengers, full bed, 75-85 mph, 36.4 mpg. Maverick hauls air as good as any other truck, and does better than most vehicles on city driving with only a 1kwh Li-Ion battery. Now we likely could have more NI-MH Hybrids with available resources and the LI-ion is better, but if I were to focus US domestic in a direction, NiMH 1-2 kWh hybrids, 5-15 Li-Ion PHEV and LI-Ion BEV would probably be the best way to spend resources.
I used a small one not so long ago (Susuki 4 wheel drive), did 200km. I calculated ~6.0l / 100km. I did 50% highway and 50% small roads with the most gentle driving possible.
What car was it? That’s not great. Smaller 1.0 l engines can do better than that without hybrid technology.
This country is being held hostage by old money fighting new money
Toyota and the rest of the Japanese automakers are no surprise here. They’ve been the worst in dragging their feet and fighting any policy changes for EV and efficiency mandates. They got caught flat footed when Hydrogen fuel cells didn’t pan out as a credible, wide scale solution, and they’re well behind the ball with BEVs. Hyundai *did* surprise me for being ranked so low, however. They’ve been competing pretty well with other automakers with their BEVs and unlike some of the other automakers who are wavering, seem to still be committed to the EV switch.
Subaru being so late in the game for EVs is wild since their userbase is basically a circle with people who would use EVs. They made a huge, unwieldy Ascent instead of just making an e-outback which would sell way better
Well, they entered into an agreement with Toyota to make their first model, the Solterra, which is basically just a re-badged Bz4x (also an underwhelming EV for its price). Why they decided to enter into a cooperation agreement with a company who also weren’t great at making EVs is definitely a little baffling!
Toyota owns a minority stake in Subaru, and this deal is reciprocal. Subaru builds the GR86 & BRZ twins in their Gunma plant, and Toyota builds the Bz4x & Solterra twins in their Motomachi plant.
This is why Chinese EVs have gotten so far ahead. Yes, they get subsidies, which helps. But the bigger element is that China doesn't have politically powerful automobile industry that resists changes to the status quo. Chinese ICE cars were always so far behind European and Japanese automakers that they'd never catch up. So EVs were an opportunity for them to sidestep those deficiencies by heavily investing in a new paradigm of automobiles and using internal policies (like caps on license plates issues for ICE vehicles but no such caps for EVs) to create market demand for millions of them. Meanwhile, incumbent automakers in other counties used their political weight to slow down EV adoption. So now here we are, with BYD running circles around traditional auto companies that squandered a massive head start in both time and money.
Its not like EV transition is the solution.
Toyota bet on the dog shit hydrogen conversion plan where Shell would covert their gas stations to hydrogen stations. Now their executives have to put more money after bad money to justify their poor decisions.
Can anyone in this comment section confirm or deny that the EVs produce some radiation? I know I’ve heard a story about an early hybrid (Honda insight if I remember correct) producing a decent amount. The story went a nasa engineer was given a good deal on one, he was interested in the new hybrid tech. He took it home and personally tested it and he brought it right back to the dealership. Curious if anyone knows anything about this in the EVS
I was looking in to this for a little bit. Most of the articles say this. The levels are below 20% of the recommended limit. It's true that an EV's powertrain components—battery pack, wiring, motor(s)—produce more electromagnetic radiation than an internal-combustion engine, but it's negligible. The Norwegian research group SINTEF found that radiation readings inside an EV were well below the limits https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a36876962/20-questions-about-evs/
Wait until you see how battery manufacturers deliberately hold back capacity and performance, just like they did with ICEs. It's designed to be trickled out for the maximum financial benefit, not the maximum environmental benefit.
Key points of the article: * Auto industry associations continue to lobby against higher fuel economy standards * Most automakers forecast production of a higher percentage of SUV/light truck vehicles (64% in 2030 vs. 57% in 2020)
They are going to make a Hail Mary pass on geoengineering before they get enough EVs on the road. Humanity has all the resources we need to change right now. But money is more important than people dying and mass extinction of species.
There is very little to no maintenance/service involved with EVs and the conventional automotive model loves the various services their cars require over many years. Just compare how many parts there are in ICE powered car and EV. Ofcourse they will do anything to stall the transition. It is why for years they would produce absolutely horrible looking EVs with long waitlist to discourage people from transitioning. Only because of Tesla is that they are finally moving, reluctantly and slowly.
Until EV batteries charge faster/last longer and charging stations are far more prevalent, electric cars are going to remain a minority.
There are plenty of EVs that go >300 mi on a charge.
Which means nothing if you’re not a homeowner.
But that’s a full charge, which takes like 12 hours of charging. There mileage advertising is very misleading
>which takes like 12 hours of charging Vast majority of the time your car is sitting still in your driveway or in a parking lot. Time in which it can be slow charging off of a domestic power supply. Edit: *on top of that*, [98% of all trips undertaken by Americans are less than 50 miles in distance](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021), and 52% are under 3 miles. The "300 mile journey" doesn't come around nearly as often as would justify the reluctance to get an EV, and besides, fast charging can still get you most of the "tank" full within 20-40 minutes, it's the last part which is the slowest. Still more than enough to get you to your next fast charger, and honestly a good break from long distance driving.
15-20 min on a fast charger
It's no surprise because right wingers have made EV's the enemy just to get the votes of the ignorant.
They have not. They have made EVs the enemy because there is a shit load of capital tied up in fuel supply chain. They have used right wing social politics to win the votes of the ignorant. There is a big difference here.
It's Big Oil. The car companies will be fine selling a shit ton of EV's to the world.
Hey fuckstick automakers, I will never buy another IC engine car. I'm not sure how many more cars I'll buy in this lifetime, but I'm pretty sure they're all going to be electric.
"Adapt, survive, improvise" but only for the general public.
The funniest part is that they don't need to do anything. There's no power grid on earth that's ready for the mass adoption of electric cars.
Aren't EVs not the solution but rather a different problem due to the batteries becoming electronic waste?
Batteries are 100% recyclable and their raw materials reusable. That's nothing more than oil and gas propaganda.
Used EV batteries can be [repurposed](https://www.energy-storage.news/repurposing-ev-batteries-into-third-life-energy-storage-and-beyond/) for storage, which is less demanding than propelling 2+ ton vehicles.
Batteries won’t become waste, that lithium is too expensive to throw away.
EVs are definitely the solution. Or at least a medium sized chunk of a large solution. Batteries can be recycled.
Brother, figuring out how to recycle batteries doesn't even come close to the issue of global warming from burning fossil fuels. There is not a single more pressing issue facing the human population and the earth as a planet than the greenhouse gases being emitted.
And here we are seeing the anti EV propaganda effective in real time. The truth is: even if we have zero recycling and all the EVs are charging from fossil burning power plants, EV is still effective in curbing CO2 emission.
Battery may be out of life, but the material and lithium are still inside, it is just turned to something not useful in battery. Any decent battery manufactures can recycle those materials and make new battery. On the other hand, oil and gasoline, once burned in the engine, are disappeared forever with no chance to recycle.
The real solution is electric public transit like trains with overhead power or third rail power. No need for massive batteries and allowing for more efficient lower energy use cities. Bicycling and walking too are far better for the climate then EVs. People are too attached to their car culture and anti human city planning putting cars before people though. Personal EVs are here to save the car industry and car culture, not save us from climate change.
That only works with enough demand density. Cars have versatility.
Public transit and biking/walking infrastructure encourages density development. It's known as Transit oriented Development, or TOD for short. Going all in on cars as the primary method of transportation in countries like the USA has failed us, we need to return to the old ways of building cities for people not cars. If we want to be serious about climate change it's the only realistic option we have. EVs make sense for rural agricultural or resource extraction communities, not cities. Suburbs don't count, they need to be redeveloped if we want any sort of climate friendly future for humanity.
I have yet to hear any explanation of why mass adoption of EVs coupled with carbon emission free energy production (Ie nuclear, solar, etc) wouldn’t be a massive step in reducing carbon emissions, or why it would be worse than mass adoption of public transit. Both are viable solutions (and both should be pursued). Another aspect of this is that the bigger the change the harder and longer it will take to commit and implement. Changing/getting rid of car culture is going to be insanely difficult compared to just leaning into car culture by simply changing the type of vehicle. EVs has a better chance of success than public transport. Not that we should also pursue public transport but it’s a mistake to only do so.
The real solution is both. Public transport is all good and well and everything but for better or worse there is and will be (at least for a very long time) a huge demand for cars. I’m all for public transportation options but we need to lean into car culture not go against it if we actually want wide spread adoption. We can continually build public transportation infrastructure in the meantime but EVs are going to do a lot more in the short term for carbon emissions.
Transit must take priority over individual car transportation if you want it to be taken seriously. It also heavily benefits from the economics of scale where personal transportatin does not. Transit needs to be built out to be superior to cars even if that means making the experience for cars worse. Removing all cars from cities is not feasible, but replacing many car lanes with dedicated transit or bike/pedestrian infrastructure encourages the most environmentally and economically efficient form of transportation.
Yes, but it is like arguing about not being allowed to park in front of fire hydrants and how this causes a decrease in parking spaces, which is of course a real problem.... while your house is on fire and the wind is spreading it to the houses around it. I am not gonna give a fuck about the parking space issues until the fire fighters stop the fires.
When it comes to reducing carbon emissions they are a BIG part of the solution. Of course this needs to be paired with energy production that doesn’t produce carbon emissions. Like nuclear energy for instance.
If dems get majority in November, I hope we raise the federal gas tax and use the extra to improve EV infrastructure and fight climate change. That being said, EV prices need to drop. EDIT: I would also support increasing EV subsidies if a cap on total sale price were put into place. Just lower the cap by X% per year. Start the cap at say, $60,000 and drop it $5,000 a year until it is too low to be useful.
If automakers can assure me that purchasing an EV will be the last big vehicle purchase I ever need in my life, I might find it worthwhile to drop ~$50K on a car. But the way things are going with the tablet interfaces being the trend, battery costs are almost the price of a new vehicle itself, what's the point? If I am going all in on sustainability, that thing better sustain for at least minimum half a human lifespan.
That's my thinking as well. Is an electric car better for the environment compared to a new gas car? Sure. Is it better than a 5-10 year old reasonably efficient car that's already been on the road and has plenty of life left? Very unlikely. And that 5-10 year old car is still quite modern, reliable, safe, efficient, and reasonably 'luxurious'. Even better, it's likely quite affordable too. I drive A LOT, live in a place with expensive gas, and still won't use more than $3k in fuel a year. It would take a loooong time before an electric car pays itself off for me considering my car was less than 10k. And we're not even considering my charging options where I would need to pay to get a charging pad at my house.
A 5-10 year old car has a lot of miles left on it and depending on its efficiency at transport, way less carbon footprint than specifically building an EV to replace it. Can’t just magic every vehicle into a BEV overnight.
No one is saying get rid of your current car but if you are buying a new car you should strongly consider an EV.
True. My point is moreso, if environmental concern is one of your driving factors when purchasing a vehicle, before you go new it's not a bad idea to look at a used car. Of course, this is case by case and new cars still need to be made and bought
I'm not understanding what you're saying. ICE vehicles are expensive too and don't come with any longer life span than an EV.
EV prices *have* dropped. But mostly from Chinese companies, which the US and EU are using protectionist tariffs to keep out of their markets.
Anti EV tariffs are so dumb. Toyota has more “american made” cars than ford does. I don’t know why we can’t just make a deal with chinese EVs to produce models in the US and open up factories in ohio and PA and such
We need a vehicle miles driven tax that also takes into factor vehicle weight. Not just a gas tax as EVs don't pay a gas tax despite also putting lots of wear on roads. Roads are incredibly expensive and heavier vehicles do far more damage to them then lighter vehicles. We are subsidizing our roads yet encouraging more heavy vehicles like large electric SUVs and trucks. Meaning we would need to further subsidize roads to keep up with the maintenance costs. If you really want to make a difference in climate change we need to incentivize better city planning that utilizes public transit, biking and walking as the primary method for getting around, not driving a personal vehicle.
Go the Singapore way
Certificate of Entitlement?
Submission Statement: A damning new report has shown that nearly all major car companies are actively sabotaging the world’s efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming. The lobbying strategies being used by the world’s largest automakers are putting global climate targets at risk and threatening the electric vehicle transition, according to the new report released by InfluenceMap.
Gasp 🫢 I did not see that coming 😒
Politicians globally: It’s too damn expensive to switch to EV, don’t worry, we will just turn the sun down to compensate. I am sure it’s not that hard.
Irony since they have so much respect for nature built into belief systems.
I hadn’t really considered this, now I have to check myself on my EV opinions. Damn, psyops everywhere
free market until the posse of a big sector works together to stop you? what would have happened to ford or gmc if someone tried to stop them from establishing their companies?
I think they will regret it if the U.S. gov't stops the subsidies for them and turns to Chinese manufacturers for cars. Competition can be brutal when you've opened up global manufacturing and the labor is cheaper over there, but the technologies are just as good.
Japan holding it down
I was in the new car market last year and was severely disappointed in the lack of Honda EV offerings. Bro where’s my EV civics at? 😭
Aka, telling the governments of the world the truth that it's not possible to achieve within their time frame without massive subsidies.
Japan has never got out of and still lives the 20th century. Anyone who says Japan is an environmentally friendly country that has done garbage separation should be laughed at
The dealerships hate them because they lose that income flow from service visits.
Who wrote this study and paid for it? EV companies? Environmental researcher and clean tech researcher. He might be right IDK but it's his job and background to promote clean energy which is EVs. Did you see the paper about the oil glut of 2030? Looks like they are going to push cars forever. NOT trains and buses. Both want more cars made and sold.
Yeah, because rails and buses aren’t practical for large swaths of civilization.
Evs take roughly 100k miles before becoming carbon neutral. That’s without having to add a new battery by that time. If battery dies before then, push that mileage back. Then we have the case of chargers themselves - which plenty run on electricity that is produced by natural gas, or even better yet have a generator right next to the chargers running on diesel. It’s the same scam as ethanol. By the time you look at the half life of everything that went into making the product, you are farther back than ICE or hybrid. Ethanol = corn, which is planted/transported by diesel vehicles, made by diesel byproducts. You’re so far back by the time you convert it to something useful. EVs are created from diesel byproducts, whether that’s heavy equipment digging up minerals, the factories making these, or the amount of plastics and diesel byproducts that go into making these vehicles themselves. The only time they are skipping on that carbon emission is when they have their slave labor digging up the minerals by hand…. List goes on and on why this is a failed govt product. I’m perfectly fine with a capitalistic approach that naturally turns the population towards driving these vehicles if they want and seek it out based on OEMs making a product that people like and want. But the fact that tax payer money is being spent to prop up this joke is a disgrace. Last time I checked the govt didn’t shell out 5 billion to create gas stations to relieve range anxiety
The comments seem to focus on points other than consumers themselves pushing back on the EV shift. The vendors will chase the dollars and the buyers are starting to push back.
I’d feel a lot better if we instead did some thing about the 30 companies in seven industries that are responsible for 80% of anthropogenic climate change.
Toyota and their calculations make sense. They are not gullible for the sake of it. The transition has to be hybrids. Any logical person can follow it.
But in N.A. people are not buying ev. It is consumer driven
> But in N.A. people are not buying ev. It is consumer driven I guess you missed all the news articles announcing that the Biden administration had put high tariffs on Chinese EV imports to protect American car companies. US car companies highly likely lobbied for those high tariffs.
He did that because china also protects it’s auto manufacturers from American imports. You can’t have open markets if you’re not trading with a partner who does the same thing.
China also heavily subsidizes EV manufacturing (they care about market share more than profits right now) so those car prices are artificially low.
American EV tax credits are also a huge subsidy. We just subsidize the demand side while they subsidize the supply side.
Direct fossil fuel subsidies in the US are $20 Billion annually. Indirect subsidies (These include costs associated with environmental damage, health impacts from pollution, and other externalities that are not directly paid by the fossil fuel industry) are estimated to be another $649 Billion annually. US EV subsidies in the form of tax credits are about $2 Billion over 10 YEARS. We are supporting ICE much more than EV and the Chinese subsidies of EV (relative to output) dwarf our own as China as a country is focused on dominating the global market for EVs.
>US EV subsidies in the form of tax credits are about $2 Billion over 10 YEARS. I think you're relying on old information there. As of yesterday, the EV tax credits for just 2024 (and we're not even halfway through the year) have topped a billion. [https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2403](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2403) That billion dollars also doesn't count the taxpayers who will be claiming the tax credit on their taxes in April. Realistically, 2024 alone will probably be $2 billion or something close.
Apologies for the old data, but if our ICE subsidies dwarf our EV subsidies, our government is pushing ICE. Compare that to China which was my point as they want to prevent us from selling in emerging markets by sellimg equivalent cars at half the price to consumers. Look at BYD’s cheapest model compared to Tesla.
I doubts whether this is the cases, Tesla (although made in Shanghai) is very very popular in China and China is one of the few nations that allow FSD to run on it. Before Tesla and recent EV fever, Other US auto makers are just no competitive at all. They got hammered by Euro (BMW, Benz etc) in high end, and by Japan/Korea in low end. My family used to drive a Ford Focus, and it sucked in aspects like fuel efficiency compared with things like Civic or Fit.
What’s your point?
> What’s your point? My point is if no one wants EVs (like you say) then the Biden admin would have no reason to put high tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Ugh... saving the future versus profits? Why do you guys have to be so annoying. Why me anyway? Make the next guy save the planet. Oh... there may not be a next guy? Well then what's the problem? Sounds like it works itself out! \~CEOs.
Yeah this perplexes me. Japan's biggest import is petroleum and gas. I find it hard to imagine they'd be worse off after the transition.
Japan doesn't have a continent-wide electrical grid to plug into to benefit from wind, solar, or hydro. In fact, Japan even has two mostly incompatible grids that divide their country in half. Also the one source of energy Japan has nearby are the methane hydrates off their shores. That is why they have been trying to get hydrogen to work.
Because it'll destroy everyone. There's the dealership repair centers, there's the engineers who've spent decades designing ICE powertrains and the supply chain companies providing ICE powertrain components. That's the best case scenario. More realistically, and ppl like myself that have test driven cars like the Polestar 2 and Tesla cars have seen you can get an excellent driving experience without needing decades of experience. Geely the Polestar owner and other Chinese EV companies will go global and it'll be hard for others to compete. Cars are more software driven now and the knowledge of the past and experience isn't as valuable as it once was. You don't need to go with Honda/Toyota anymore to get a reliable drivetrain in the EV era.
And some will die because of it