Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
Such is the cost of progress. Considering how much of an established supply chain ICE cars have, it’s amazing that a zero CO2 output EV has higher efficiency, and reliability. Think about it: after more than 120 years of optimization, 40% thermal efficiency is the best we’ve got. Considering how energy dense gasoline is, that’s a crazy waste, global warming concerns aside.
The weakest point in the whole strategy is the battery pack, which it’s likely we’ll soon discover some alternative to with this much market pressure and scientific interest being focused on it.
For the record: you can ship of Theseus anything. But do people? Not unless it’s a critical problem, so you have a degraded vehicle with higher emissions than designed for at the factory. Secondly, who wants to invest that much downtime over and over? I don’t mean to sound rude, but that whole first part is an admission of Stockholm syndrome 😋
The point still stands - unless EVs become cheap enough for the average buyer, they will be a nearly useless novelty item for the wealthy. And they will never be enough of them to solve any issue with emissions you don’t like.
And that “better” and “cheaper” battery is still most likely decades away - despite all the pop media articles talking about all those incredible laboratory “breakthroughs” that are supposedly ready to be unleashed. The gulf between the lab and the production line is very large.
And you are correct that few people are willing to keep repairing anything forever unless forced to. And that is precisely why an inexpensive entry level EV is so important. And those high end cars far less so…