Toyota and Tesla May Work Together Again 51
cartechboy writes: Tesla and Toyota have already worked together a few times. The factory in which Tesla builds the electric Model S? It bought that from Toyota. The Toyota RAV4 EV? The battery and software tuning was done by Tesla. Now it sounds like Tesla and Toyota might have another significant project in the pipeline in the next two or three years. Tesla CEO Musk said such a project could be "on a much higher volume level" than the firm's last project with Toyota, the RAV4 EV. Toyota currently has a 2.4 percent stake in Tesla Motors and has sold 2,130 RAV4 EVs through August. For its part, Toyota has no comment regarding Musk's statements about the future project. Given Toyota's stance on electric cars, Musk's comment is a bit confusing. So what exactly will this joint project be?
Tesla stories on Slashdot (Score:1)
Re:Tesla stories on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Because pure electric cars are new technology that are cool and interesting to read about. Because, for the moment, it still reads like an underdog story(not that I actually buy into that being true). Because are we really that interested in what, say, Microsoft is up to now?
Re:Tesla stories on Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is a bit like going "why talk about computers like they're new" in the 50s, because the babbage introduced the difference engine in 1822.
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Pure electric cars are old technology. ... and later.
The first cars all where electric around 1870
Re:Tesla stories on Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Even though this is really a non-story, it's still much more interesting than Bitcoin.
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One every 8.5 days, actually (Score:1)
There aren't "stories every day" about Tesla, but every time there's a Tesla story, there is someone bitching and moaning about "all" the Tesla stories.
There have been 30 stories since January 1st - that equals about one story every 8.5 days.
You can count yourself, if you like. They do get clustered a bit, probably because when one piece of Tesla news hits, everyone starts paying more attention to Tesla related topics.
http://slashdot.org/tag/tesla [slashdot.org]
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I hope Toyota doesn't write the software (Score:2)
Re:I hope Toyota doesn't write the software (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, sometimes you just want to make a crash a little more literal.
Or a race condition.
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Pretty sure those runaways were caused by morons who put their floormats over the accelerator, not software.
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Pretty sure those runaways were caused by morons who put their floormats over the accelerator, not software.
Pretty sure they weren't [eetimes.com] (at least, not all of them).
Having spent more than 18 months going in and out of the secure room to study Toyota's code, Michael Barr, CTO of the Barr Group, put together an 800-page report analyzing the 2005 Camry L4's software. On the witness stand, he walked a jury step by step through what the experts discovered in their source-code review.
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Barr testified that the source-code review indicated "both that task could die by the memory corruption, and that also that one of side effects of that would be that this -- for example, that task died, that many of fail safes would be disabled." But is it possible to prove that the experts' discoveries in that cloak-and-dagger source-code room would manifest themselves in a moving vehicle? How do we know how a car might react to malfunctions or an outright failure in Task X?
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However, we have confirmed in other vehicle testing that I'll talk about later, that if the incident begins with the peddle, [sic] brake peddle [sic] pressed at all, even lightly then the unintended acceleration will continue, potentially, forever unless the driver tries the risky thing of letting go of the brake while the car is driving away with him.
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Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] notes that a 2011 report found the problems were all mechanical, not electrical. Barr's report seems to be a lot of "what if"s like a cosmic ray causing a bit flip.
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The EE Times article is from 2013. Barr analyzed the source code and found numerous problems:
Having spent more than 18 months going in and out of the secure room to study Toyota's code, Michael Barr, CTO of the Barr Group, put together an 800-page report analyzing the 2005 Camry L4's software. On the witness stand, he walked a jury step by step through what the experts discovered in their source-code review. According to Barr's testimony, that review revealed:
Software bugs that
My guess:Series Hybrid + recharge tech licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
In a series hybrid, each wheel has it's own motor, and the ICE engine runs at a steady speed that is very efficient to generate electricity that is then used to recharge the batteries that are fed to the electric motors.
A second part of my guess is that Toyota is licensing the recharging technology from Tesla, so that they can use the supercharger network as well. This way they can have a vehicle that can run 100% off of electricity only, but have a ICE engine that is available at any time to back that up (faster refueling, can go anywhere there is a gas station, etc.)
Spelling nazi strikes again. (Score:2)
No??
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Series = only the electric motor is connected to the drive train.
Prius is a "power split" or a "series parallel" hybrid, which is a bullshit term that means "we are special and not just a parallel hybrid"
In the modern colloquial terminology, slang usage seems to to be
"Series" = "range extended electric vehicle" or "generater in the trunk"
"Parallel" = "doesn't work without gasoline"
In general, people don't care HOW a seri
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In a series hybrid, each wheel has it's own motor,
Not necessarily. One might reasonably include a differential fore and aft and use just a pair of motors. The problem with having one motor per wheel is that you can never transfer more than 1/4 of the power to any given wheel. With a system with two motors and two differentials you still eliminate transmission loss, while the diff (coupled with ABS) provides the opportunity to transfer up to 1/2 of the power to one wheel. That makes for less need for torque reduction during acceleration when wheel slip is d
I know! (Score:2)
So what exactly will this joint project be?
Refitting the Model S with an Atkinson cycle [wikipedia.org] engine so that its range doesn't suck...
I kid, I kid! :p
2015 Pluggable Prius - Only 11 miles on EV Mode (Score:2)
www.toyota.com/prius-plug-in/
Maybe Tesla can help them to bump that number up by a factor of 10 - otherwise, it almost a joke.
(I drive a 2005 Prius and my wife drives a LEAF)
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Agreed.
And the Plug-in-Prius can't even drive 100% electric at freeway speeds.
The "plug-in" part really is a joke on the Prius. It's definitely not worth the extra $5k over the regular Prius.
FYI, I drive a Leaf and my husband drives a Prius.
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So, you're Kevoco's wife?
Re:2015 Pluggable Prius - Only 11 miles on EV Mode (Score:4, Interesting)
I frequently drive a plug-in Prius at 65mph in pure EV mode. It's really no big deal (unless you're one of those people who insist on stopping at the top of the on-ramp, so you have to stand on the accelerator to get up to speed.) I can hit 70 or more on a downhill with a tailwind :) .
Unless 90% of your driving is under ten miles round trip, and you don't like to rent cars in order to drive more than the 80 mile range you'd get from a 2014 Leaf, in which case the PiP pays for itself.
The Leaf is a great car if you get the 6.6 KWH on-board charger and a level 2 EVSE ($600 minimum). If you have only the level 1 EVSE and the lame charger, you're talking about a vehicle that literally spends far more of its time on the charger than on the road. Not worth the price for most people.
But in any case you can't just buy a car without analyzing your needs - not even a gas car. It's even more important when you buy an EV or plug-in. You have to know what you'll be doing with it, and how long you plan to keep driving it. They aren't for everyone yet, although Tesla is working on changing that.
My spouse drives a Leaf and gets three days driving from one charge; I drive the plug-in Prius and charge every day - sometimes two or three times a day. In firewood cutting season I spend more money on gas for my chain saws than I do for my car.
One thing that does totally suck about both cars is the lack of a spare tire. This offends me so much I am trying to figure out how to mount spares on the rear bumpers! The regular Prius has a spare.
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Didn't they have a plug-in kit for the original Prius that would let you do more than 11 miles on a charge? ISTR it voided one's warranty, but by now there must be original prii without warrantii.
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Perhaps that's what the spec sheet says, but my car will hit 65 in pure EV on any given day (did it twice yesterday) and it will go higher in hot weather (as long as I'm going downhill).
I always figured the hot weather factor was because at high speed it wants to spin the gas engine with all valves open, and it needs to be properly hot to do that.
But hey, maybe I got one with improper control calibration - all I can tell you is what I'm seeing empirically!
Tesla/Toyota (Score:2)
What stance? (Score:3)
Given Toyota's stance on electric cars, Musk's comment is a bit confusing.
So I followed the relevant link in TFS and the only substance there is the following: Toyota's Global R&D Chief Mitsuhisa Kato [...] said: "The cruising distance is so short for [electric cars], and the charging time is so long ... At the current level of technology, somebody needs to invent a Nobel Prize-winning type battery." Somebody needs to for what? Certainly not for Toyota to sell an EV, because they've done that already. But I'm not really clear on what Toyota's stance on EVs is, except that the battery technology is not where they'd like to see it. That's everyone's stance on EVs.
Here's my prediction: Either Tesla is going to provide the powertrain for another Toyota EV, possibly a RAV4, or Toyota is going to provide the car (perhaps sans plastics and fenders) for Tesla's upcoming cheaper car. I'd like to see such a car made of Aluminum, but Tesla has hinted that the next car or two won't be made of so much of it, and Toyota is generally allergic to it for all but top-end models.
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IIRC Toyota's stance is that batteries are never going to get good enough to be the main energy storage in a (premium) car and that all-electric cars will run on hydrogen fuel cells.
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IIRC Toyota's stance is that batteries are never going to get good enough to be the main energy storage in a (premium) car
Well, Tesla has conclusively proven them wrong, at least for a portion of the market which includes the RAV4 EV. And if they get to move the goalposts to premium car, that leaves them with the option of making another RAV4 EV, for example.
My money is on an electric Camry (Score:2)
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Yeah, because Toyota never built a Lexus
By sales volume Lexus cars are contenders for the least interesting on the road. The ES and RX are the top selling lines by a long shot and neither have more personality than a box of generic wheaties.
They also never built the LFA
The LFA might as well not exist, it is not only extraordinarily low in volume to the point where >>99% of the world's population will never see one in person, but it also shares no parts with any other car made by Toyota. It is an exercise in what they can do
Supplying batteries for the 70mpg Fit Hybrid? (Score:2)
Seeing as Honda just scrapped their Fit EV and the Insight, and the popularity of the Fit Hybrid in Japan, they might be scaling up to release a Hybrid Fit in the US. Things would fly off the shelves.