Toyota To Spend $13.5 Billion To Develop EV Battery Tech and Supply By 2030 (reuters.com) 133
Toyota said on Tuesday it expects to spend more than $13.5 billion by 2030 to develop batteries and its battery supply system -- a bid to lead in the key automotive technology over the next decade. From a report: The world's largest automaker by volume, which pioneered hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles with the popular Prius, is now moving rapidly to deliver its first all-electric line-up next year. Considered a leader in developing batteries for electric vehicles, Toyota said it aims to slash the cost of its batteries by 30% or more by working on the materials used and the way the cells are structured. "Then, for the vehicle, we aim to improve power consumption, which is an indicator of the amount of electricity used per kilometer, by 30%, starting with the Toyota bZ4X," Chief Technology Officer Masahiko Maeda told a briefing, referring to an upcoming compact SUV model.
Far too late (Score:3, Insightful)
How many billions has Toyota sunk into foolcells? That is money down the drain IMHO.
There are dozens of companies out there with the technology to create all sorts of advanced batteries yet... Toyota wants to do it all themselves.
This won't end well...
Re:Far too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Toyota really wanted hydrogen to be the future because it had so much invested in hybrid technology and combustion engines. Not just Toyota, many of their suppliers too. In Japan car companies often have very close symbiotic relationships with firms that make parts of the drivetrain.
They really have left it rather late, as have many other Japanese manufacturers. A lot of the tech is patented by European and Chinese manufacturers already. At least Panasonic is doing well with battery production.
Re: Far too late (Score:2)
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Most of them are not really competing with Tesla.
For example, the Model 3 is efficient but the shape is compromised to achieve that. It's very low and people tend to prefer taller cars these days. Remember that even with their numbers most of the cars being sold are taller, often SUV style, non-electric ones.
Efficiency isn't such a big deal it turns out. Bjorn Nyland has done extensive testing but basically less efficient cars that can charge very fast (faster than Tesla) end up being about as "fast" for lo
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Weird, what's wrong with it? My mother has one of those and as far as I can tell there's nothing really wrong with it. It's gone more than a decade without any real trouble.
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Nah. I drove a Yaris subcompact for years, it was frankly a great car for the price. Absolutely no frills, but that also meant nothing ever went wrong with it. And IMO it handled great; super easy to drive downtown and park in the most inconvenient of spaces, yet still decent on the highway. And you can see in every direction! I wouldn't be surprised if my ex I gave it to still drives it 13 years later...
Sure, you'd have to drive it for a little while to get used to things like the short pedal travel, but e
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Here they start at around £20,000... A cheap car like a Hyundai i10 is about £13,000, or a Nissan Micra for about £14,000.
So yeah, not really cheap enough for someone looking for a cheap, small car.
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In this country we have full-sized pickups so we don't really have subcompacts, otherwise referred to in this market as "wheel chocks" or "speed bumps". We do have the Honda Fit, but that's not Honda's smallest car either.
(not speed humps here either, hump is kids' slang for fuck)
So a Yaris was indeed in the lowest-priced segment in this market. And frankly, if Toyota could make a shittier car, it would be flywheel-based and you'd pull the cord out to make it go.
Re: Far too late (Score:2)
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They killed Scion and moved the models they still wanted into their main brand [toyota.com].
Re: Far too late (Score:2)
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What's sad is that the original xB was boxier and had more personality but got just as much mileage. Also that they never made an AWD version. I would totally have driven an AWD 1st gen xB. The vehicle it was based on (bB) was offered with AWD in Japan...
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Interesting, we don't have Scion here.
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I like sitting more upright, and also being able to get in and out easier. That gets more important as you get older.
Re: Far too late (Score:2)
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Day late and a dollar short.
More like 10 years too late and they won't be able to catch up.
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This is a marketing conundrum more than it is a technological one. There is a tech adoption curve that starts with bleeding edge adopters who put up with all kinds of problems to have something nobody else has. That gradually shifts to early adopters who value novelty but demand something that actually works. Then you get to the bulk of the market, divided between pragmatists who follow the early adopters and conservatives who follow the pragmatists.
Hybrid technology *should* be well into the pragmatist
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People don't buy Hybrids because they cost more, full stop.
They don't care any more whether a car is a hybrid or not, they just buy as much car as they can afford, and they ether can't afford a hybrid or can afford a much nicer non-hybrid.
Non-plug-in full hybrids are fucking stupid, though. They make literally no sense. You get 80% of the benefit with a mild hybrid that costs much less to design and build because physically it is just an accessory change (drop starter and generator, use starter-generator, m
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That's just another way of saying the same thing: spending that kind of money is an emotional decision. Emotion drives people to spend a lot *more* money on vehicles a lot *less* practical than a hybrid. If you're making a purely pragmatic decision, you'll buy a lightly used car. There's simply no rational way to justify putting tens of thousands of dollars on a car whose value will effectively halve the instant you drive it off the lot.
I don't see any TCO advantages to a mild hybrid, otherwise we'd see m
Mild hybrids and plug in hybrids (Re:Far too late) (Score:2)
I don't see any TCO advantages to a mild hybrid, otherwise we'd see mild hybrids topping the list of cheapest 5 year cost to own hybrid.
Hybrids are still quite new technology and it's going to take time to work out all the details. Even with the internal combustion engine, a technology that is over 100 years old, we are still seeing people try new things. These new technologies will find their way into mass produced commuter cars and light trucks to get better fuel economy and lower maintenance costs.
The problem with a plug-in hybrid is that the traction battery has to be quite large and heavy.
With a BEV the battery must be even larger and heavier, so what is your point?
There is a difference in energy density between hydrocarbon fu
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The point is that a BEV doesn't have to lug around an ICE engine and gas tank. That's part of the reason why you get "hand of God" acceleration in a BEV but not a plug-in; when you have *two separate systems* each capable of reasonably propelling the car that takes mass, and it's noticeable. A Prius Prime weighs 600 pounds more than a regular Prius.
To make a PHEV fun to drive, you have to make mass-saving compromises; for example Audi's A3 etrons only have 20 miles of electric range and 30% lower MPGe on
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To make a PHEV fun to drive, you have to make mass-saving compromises
Around here most people drive large pickups or SUVs. I'm not thinking fun to drive is top of their list, nor are mass saving compromises.
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The point is that a BEV doesn't have to lug around an ICE engine and gas tank.
Yes, I got your point but it appears you missed mine.
My point is, again, that hybrids are still new and so it will take time to work out the details to get the most out of them. A BEV doesn't have to "lug around" an ICE and gas tank but a hybrid, be that a mild hybrid or a "full hybrid" (or whatever they are called) or whatever falls in the middle, will not have nearly the mass in batteries of a BEV to "lug around". Much of the point of a hybrid is to avoid the mass and expense of the large battery in a B
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What I don't get is why you think a mild hybrid has a TCO advantage over full hybrid. Mild is a great way for a manufacturer to do a quick and dirty improvement on a existing ICE car, but in the long run as you introduce new models or refresh old ones it's not that expensive to go full hybrid. The Corolla LE hybrid only costs 3000 dollars more than the ICE version, and over five years is one of the cheapest cars on the market to own and operate.
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What I don't get is why you think a mild hybrid has a TCO advantage over full hybrid.
I don't believe I made such a claim. I will say that the TCO benefits of the variations on the hybrid will vary on usage. I see the TCO and initial purchase cost of the ICEV eventually losing out to the hybrid to the point that pure ICEVs will become rarities, reserved for the lowest and highest ends of the market where initial purchase cost means everything or nothing.
Mild is a great way for a manufacturer to do a quick and dirty improvement on a existing ICE car, but in the long run as you introduce new models or refresh old ones it's not that expensive to go full hybrid.
I'm not even sure what you mean by "full hybrid". I see the "mild hybrid" which has a very small battery and cannot plug in to charge. N
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I see the "mild hybrid" which has a very small battery and cannot plug in to charge.
That's why we're talking past each other. You're using your own personal definition of mild hybrid.
The industry definition of a "mild hybrid" is an ICE vehicle that has electric assist. In a mild hybrid the ICE must be running whenever power is required at the wheels, but the electric motor and battery allow for a limited amount of the lost energy to be captured by regenerative braking. You can make an ICEV into a mild hybrid as simply as connecting the electric motor to the ICE drive shaft with a belt and
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Once a company has hybrid transmission technology of its own, mild designs become less attractive.
The mild hybrid is attractive in a world where battery supplies are limited, and they are not free. If car companies want to suddenly reduce their MPG targets, they can go mild hybrid across their entire line at a very small price penalty. (If it were expensive, Dodge wouldn't be doing it...) I do wish they would pay up for the full 48V electrical system though, and eliminate the lead acid battery. It's not useful as a backup for the 48V system, and therefore it's wasteful to have it there. One or more buck
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That's why we're talking past each other. You're using your own personal definition of mild hybrid.
No, I am not using my own definition. As an example I saw the new Ford F-150 PowerBoost described both as a "mild hybrid" and "full hybrid". A "mild hybrid" because it can only crawl at 20 MPH or so under only electric power. The argument for it being a "full hybrid" is it can move at all under electric power. Calling the F-150 PowerBoost a full hybrid is setting the bar pretty low. It's also quite a stretch to me to put the F-150 PowerBoost and Toyota Prius in the same category.
Anything that can be ca
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People don't buy Hybrids because they cost more, full stop.
Hybrid sales have grown faster than electric-vehicle sales for two years, according to data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Far too late (Score:5, Interesting)
How many billions has Toyota sunk into foolcells? That is money down the drain IMHO.
Unlikely. Hydrogen fuelcells will absolutely be part of our future world. Not in passenger cars, but development of a sub technology can lead to lucrative payback elsewhere as a technology supplier for other industries.
It's good to see Toyota abandon their fools errand of trying to push this for passenger cars, but this is far from money down the drain.
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Re: Far too late (Score:3)
Hydrogen economy (Re:Far too late) (Score:3)
Where hydrogen will show up is in synthesized hydrocarbon fuels.
I'll see the same arguments against hydrogen as a fuel over and over again. They claim to make the point that hydrogen as a fuel is not viable but do so by kneecapping the technology with their assumptions. One assumption is that because a large source of hydrogen today is from natural gas that it's no better for the environment than current fossil fuels. Another assumption on the source of hydrogen is that with electrolysis of water being s
Re: Far too late (Score:2)
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For fuel cells to take off, all we need is a better way to generate hydrogen
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>> This won't end well...
Oh, it will end well.
But for us, not for Toyota
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"Toyota wants to do it all themselves."
Did the article say they were starting from scratch and not building on existing tech?
And, how do we get better batteries without R&D?
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Well it is often difficult to know what would be a good idea and what would be a fad, until after some time, where one side will be rewarded for being forward thinking, while the other would be criticized for putting so much investment is such a failed idea.
Fuel-cells early on seem like the better solution, compared to battery electric. Faster Charging Time, longer range, high failing batteries as well the progression of battery technology from the late 1990's and early 2000's was a rather slow increase.
By
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https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0... [nytimes.com]
https://ww [internationaltrucks.com]
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It's playing catch up (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hybrids are electric + ICE. Toyota is a leader in those. Pretending that Toyota doesn't have significant expertise in manufacturing electric vehicles requires ignoring reality.
And when it comes to reducing prices of batteries, we're going to have to figure out something that isn't NMC based lithium ion. That one is going to shoot up in price if we actually start cleaning out our caps on elements critical to manufacturing parts of lithium ion batteries like cobalt. We're already getting to 8:1:1 NMC just to
Re: It's playing catch up (Score:2)
Re: It's playing catch up (Score:4, Interesting)
Your own link debunks your claim in its totality. All it states is that Tesla is trying to go back to LFPs as an alternative to moving to NMC 8:1:1 from NMC 6:1:1 and hoping that when they do that, they won't inherit all the problems of LFPs that were the reason pretty much everyone today uses NMC 6:1:1 and moving go 8:1:1.
Including Tesla.
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Just because you gave up on science when you failed gaokao and shamed your parents greatly, doesn't mean that everyone is on your level.
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Toyota fucked up big time and missed the electric vehicle wave. Rather than invest they've spent the last 5 years engaged in a campaign of bullshit.
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Mercedes engines in their small cars are low power. Mercedes fucked up big time and there's no way it'll ever be powering Formula 1.
In real world on the other hand...
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Most of Toyota's hybrids are ICE + electric, i.e. the internal combustion engine is the predominant form of propulsion that with regen charges a small battery that might let you go travel a couple of miles at slow speed on battery. So if you drive around town a lot it might help vehicle efficiency. If you're up and down the motorway it won't.
They've gotten a little better than that. Apparently, the Prius Prime can go at highway speeds on battery. But AFAIK, they don't support DC fast charging and their max regenerative braking power is a fraction of what Tesla does, so their pack architecture doesn't have to be designed with nearly the level of thermal management that a true EV would require.
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The Prius Prime has significantly better performance, especially going on the highway, when it is using electric only. When it switches to ICE is reverts to a pretty crappy car. I know as we own one.
PS: For us it gets about 26 miles on a full charge. We have discovered that if there is a really bad stop/start traffic it goes a lot further, as much as 40, kind of the opposite of gas engines (though I suspect the modern ones that switch off at stops may have some of this as well).
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Um, ever hear of a Prius? I would wager there are more Prius's on the road than all other electrics combined. removing the engine and making cheaper batteries will put Toyota at the forefront of electric car manufacturing.
This news is a wake up call to the rest of the auto industry.
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It's naive to believe that expertise making Priuses is meaningful when it comes to making full EVs at scale. There's a bunch of new learning curves to go up, and Toyota is all on its lonesome with this, late and grudging.
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What is naive is to not think Toyota was smart and let the standards shake out while they led the market with their hybrid.
I don't think it takes a lot of engineering to drop the engine and add more batteries.
A 30% drop in cost for said batteries will make Toyota a powerful force in the EV market.
Re: It's playing catch up (Score:3)
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Perhaps you want to read up how a hybrid car works ...
Just a hint.
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Perhaps you want to read up how a Prius works ...
Just a hint. 'Cause it's not a Volt.
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Why would I?
Obviously it is not a Volt.
Nevertheless the Prius has:
a) no differential
b) no transmission
Wow, that was easy.
Re: It's playing catch up (Score:2)
https://parts.toyota.com/p/Toy... [slashdot.org] >Differential
https://nadascientific.com/def... [slashdot.org]>Transmission
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The transmission needs to go away. So does the differentials.
Most electric vehicles will still have a differential. I suppose it is possible to have an electric motor on each wheel. You could monitor the power / velocity of each motor to generate an optimal system. But from what I understand, wheels in most electric vehicles still receive power via a differential.
Tesla has done away with a transmission but other still have them. They are typically much simpler - for example the electric Porsche has a two speed transmission. Future large trucks and SUVs will a
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"I don't think it takes a lot of engineering to drop the engine and add more batteries."
I refer you to my previous post about being naive.
Re: It's playing catch up (Score:2)
Exiciting for like, 5 years ago (Score:4, Funny)
A "leader"??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cough splutter. Considered a leader by whom???
But wait... (Score:3)
Re:But wait... (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't, they bet on Hydrogen and lost. But hybrids are HARDER than EVs. If they can make a hybrid, they can CERTAINLY make an EV. EVs are ridiculously simple compared to hybrids. All the people claiming that they're got a huge hill to climb are... I dunno, just wishing ill on them? But it's nonsense.
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God knows where they were going with hydrogen powered cars but nobody thought it was viable.
Probably thought they were going to develop powertrains for military use [gmdefensellc.com] like GM is doing. Only there's not much market for that frankly, except what's fulfilled by GM. The only place they really make sense is in the desert, where the additional PITA factor is partially cancelled out by their ability to produce drinking water.
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"They're making hybrids because they haven't got the battery production capacity to do anything else."
This is false. They don't have production capacity because they have not needed it, they make hybrids because not long ago BEV was universally considered too small a market without long distance charging infrastructure.
"God knows where they were going with hydrogen powered cars but nobody thought it was viable."
For your definition of "nobody". It seems clear that the entire Japanese auto industry disagreed
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And the "Japanese auto industry" was Toyota with some token support from Honda. They backed the wrong horse which was obvious to anyone paying any attention. They knew this as much as anybody so there is no explanation other than it was a deliberate attempt to stall for time.
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So you're saying they had production capacity to build cars with 10x the battery size but didn't? Do you realise that doesn't make a lick of sense?
It makes sense if they're making money. Corporations are generally created for that purpose, not for making the world a better place.
And the "Japanese auto industry" was Toyota with some token support from Honda.
Uh, Mitsubishi? Nissan? Subaru? Which you almost could lump together as if it were one brand in the past what with all the parts sharing, I'm not sure if that trend has continued but Nissans and Subarus used to have a bunch of Mitsu hard parts, and all three used Hitachi ECUs.
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Where they lack experience is large battery management. The Prius has a 0.75kHw lithium-ion cell, where as the original Leaf had 24kWh and most cars these days are packing 50+.
The Prius also only has slow AC charging, and the battery has a low charge/discharge rate so heat isn't much of an issue. The batteries have no active thermal management.
To make decent cars they will need a new platform too, which takes account of the battery pack weight being under the floor and spread differently. Cars that are just
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Where they lack experience is large battery management.
No big deal, they can just copy everyone else at this point.
The Prius also only has slow AC charging, and the battery has a low charge/discharge rate so heat isn't much of an issue. The batteries have no active thermal management.
It's not like Toyota is new to cooling systems, though. They will do fine.
To make decent cars they will need a new platform too, which takes account of the battery pack weight being under the floor and spread differently.
Toyota is competent at coming up with new platforms, so that's not a big challenge for them either, especially given how easy it is to fit batteries into the CUV form factor that now dominates car sales.
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"It's not like Toyota is new to cooling systems, though. They will do fine."
Right, and claiming they are behind ignores that BEV-only manufacturers are substantially changing how they do this for future models.
It should be noted that while certain people like to proclaim how far Tesla is ahead in battery technology, their most notable recent developments are all focused on overcoming the deficiencies of small cylindrical cells, a problem most of the rest of the industry doesn't have because they feel small
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"Cars that are just an ICE with the drivetrain swapped out tend not to be very good, although there are exceptions."
I believe this to be false. "Good' in this context is arbitrary and is generally measured by a pro-Tesla view of what makes a good car. BEVs developed on ICE platforms tend to be heavier than necessary and do not take advantage of all the packaging benefits that dedicated platforms have. That's all that can be said for sure. Converted platforms tend to be 1st generation BEVs, to the extent
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EVs are ridiculously simple compared to ICE, much less compared to hybrid.
It's not just Toyota that's being dismissed, it is literally every conventional car maker. Making a good BEV is not difficult, which makes you wonder why Tesla can't do it.
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They pushed hybrids, that still have super efficient ICE, optimized for speeds above 9 mph and the electric motor will replacing the first gear. This will allow them to continue to have their protective moat from competi
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At worst Toyota is "reduced" to buying batteries from someone else, like they have in the past for their EVs. But maybe they take a more commodity approach and get their batteries from a slightly broader base of sources, and lift all of them at once. Or maybe they just spend some of their fifty-odd billion dollars (I like USD rates for comparisons thanks) on battery production.
There's no particular reason they couldn't just gang batteries together either, the connection complexity exists somewhere regardles
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Your basically at the point that the whole company strategy and build process is now - outdated and not suited for EV. Hard to throw away that much hard work for many. Ultra easy for a new company.
Right, Toyota's biggest problem isn't technical difficulty, it's inertia. Making the decision and then supporting it is harder than actually doing the deed because of the weight of bureaucracy. Toyota has a history of successfully shifting the way they do business, though; they invented JIT inventory as we know it, then they reinvented it when it was found that it had flaws. Most everyone else is still stuck on JIT inventory 1.0 while Toyota is on 2.0, which is why the chip shortages hit them so much later
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It is interesting that so much is invested in Toyota criticism wrt BEV when all the Japanese manufacturers are in the same boat. There must be a reason for that, and it is incredibly foolish for anyone to think that the Japanese are going to bow out of the marketplace because they are late to the BEV party. It is all complete nonsense. The Japanese are masters of production, quality and refinement, they will catch up and compete like they have for decades.
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Except that the new company doesn't know how to make a good car and spends its efforts porting games and refining fart apps.
Within 5 years every car company will have BEV models and only a fool will think that Tesla can compete. Tesla has yet to learn how to make a car, it is stuck in a 70's muscle car mentality and believes more in controlling narrative than improving the quality of its products.
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Anyway, even if you are right, 247th time is the charm, and it is really true and Tesla dies hopelessly outclassed by competition, I don't care. It would not be the first company to squander away stupendous first mover advantage.
The winner will not be ICE. The winner will be some BEV. Either a legacy that managed a good transition or a new upstart.
But there is enough evidence that Tesla is doing the right thing
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It's easier for a new company to decide to do that, it's easier for Toyota to actually do it if they decide to. Tesla has proven that making quality vehicles is not easy. There will be plenty of ICEVs and even hybrids in the future for Toyota to build while they get their minds around the idea of building mostly EVs, and then ICEV production will peter out, limited to special purpose and limited use vehicles. But that's going to take quite some time, even if all these markets that have so far pledged to sto
Re: But wait... (Score:2)
Too little (Score:2, Insightful)
But better late than never, so they say, so here's hoping Toyota will get its act together. The company has been held back by Big Oil's attempt to keep monetizing their fossil fuel business by "greenwashing" and turning it into hydrogen, for which Toyota made the fuel-cell driven cars.
Toyota was conned into believing it could gain the upper hand over BEV manufacturers by going it alone with hydrogen fuel-ce
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Toyota was conned into believing it could gain the upper hand over BEV manufacturers by going it alone with hydrogen fuel-cell driven cars.
Alone except for GM [cnbc.com] and Honda, you mean? Or did you just mean not partnering with someone else doing fuel cells, like GM and Honda did?
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I'm convinced that within a decade BEV's will be (much) cheaper to produce than ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles as they're mechanically MUCH simpler (it's basically a battery with an electric motor and four wheels). Current ICE's are very complex yet very reliable and afford
BEV costs (Re:Too little) (Score:3)
I'm convinced that within a decade BEV's will be (much) cheaper to produce than ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles as they're mechanically MUCH simpler (it's basically a battery with an electric motor and four wheels).
I'm not convinced. The engines in an ICEV are made from very common and low cost materials like steel, aluminum, and magnesium. Batteries use many different materials, which must be arranged quite precisely chemically and physically to work. We will not likely ever see a shortage of iron but problems sourcing any one of the many different materials will drive up battery costs. Also at a time when people are wanting these same materials for portable electronic devices, wind power, solar power, and batter
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"Indeed, but the complexities of batteries over ICEs will not go away with a century of refinements."
Complexities of batteries over ICEs is all in your head. This doesn't exist.
"There's plenty of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and so on to go around but producing them and turning them into products will always take more effort."
More effort than what? And how does that matter when that is merely one aspect of a very complicated issue? Refining petroleum and delivering fuel to ICE vehicles "will always take more
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I'm convinced that within a decade BEV's will be (much) cheaper to produce than ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles as they're mechanically MUCH simpler (it's basically a battery with an electric motor and four wheels).
I'm not convinced. The engines in an ICEV are made from very common and low cost materials like steel, aluminum, and magnesium. Batteries use many different materials, which must be arranged quite precisely chemically and physically to work.
And yet, once you correctly design a battery, you mass-manufacture that one part, and it "just works". Most of the complexity is in the design phase. The pack assembly consists of spot welding hundreds of identical parts into a subpack, and then connecting several identical subpacks together. Contrast that with the ~2,000 parts in a typical ICE engine that are almost all different, and all have to be manufactured individually to tight tolerances and then assembled. The manufacturing complexity is way hi
Material costs (Re:BEV costs (Re:Too little)) (Score:2)
There are costs in the materials. Costs related to the effort and energy to get those materials. Then there are costs in turning this raw material into a working product, which is also related to the labor and energy required.
The iron, aluminum, and manganese used to make ICEs are very low cost materials, and quite easily recycled. Batteries use more expensive materials, and are not so easily recycled. I don't care if the design and mechanics are simpler because it is easy to show that the floor on the
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There are costs in the materials. Costs related to the effort and energy to get those materials. Then there are costs in turning this raw material into a working product, which is also related to the labor and energy required.
The iron, aluminum, and manganese used to make ICEs are very low cost materials, and quite easily recycled. Batteries use more expensive materials, and are not so easily recycled.
Actually, recycling EV batteries is relatively straightforward. It just isn't worth doing because the raw materials are too cheap and the total number of EV batteries waiting to be recycled isn't large enough to be worth building the plants yet. When there are enough batteries sitting around waiting to be recycled, you'll see more progress in that area.
I don't care if the design and mechanics are simpler because it is easy to show that the floor on the cost of a car will be in the materials it is made out of, and the materials needed to make a BEV are far more costly than that for an ICEV.
That's a floor, but it's not a realistic one. The cost of assembly can never be zero, nor anywhere close, realistically:
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I noticed you are comparing real world ICEV costs to speculations on BEV costs, and also assuming ICEV costs will not change. Speculation on future BEV labor costs will come with speculation on BEVs becoming lower in cost to make than ICEVs but the assumption that ICEVs will not also see some improvement is something I see as a problem.
A growing industry in battery recycling is a safe assumption, but this leading to lower material costs is not a safe bet.
I expect the hybrid vehicle to develop to the point
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I noticed you are comparing real world ICEV costs to speculations on BEV costs, and also assuming ICEV costs will not change.
There's a reason for that. ICE vehicles are already manufactured in large volume. The ICE car industry has been around for 135 years. Any economies of scale from ramping up production have already happened. Any that haven't happened probably won't.
A growing industry in battery recycling is a safe assumption, but this leading to lower material costs is not a safe bet.
Those numbers above were based on reducing labor costs, not material costs. Again, unlike the ICE industry, mostly involving companies that have been around since before my parents were born, building products in huge production runs, the EV industry is nasce
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There are huge economies of scale to be gained from ramping production up.
And none of them will solve the material cost issues.
Battery costs are coming down very, very quickly.
And the floor on that will be the cost of materials, and the costs of lithium, cobalt, or whatever will always be higher than iron, aluminum, and manganese.
We are going in circles here. Whatever you see as a means to lower the sticker price or TCO of the BEV will drive demand until this higher demand drives the price back up. To get BEVs to replace the ICEV andor hybrids would require some very unlikely, perhaps impossible, market forces.
There really aren't any huge wins left in the ICE car space.
The ICE doesn't
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Most EV packs aren't based on little bitty cells, they have nice big ones that are easy to handle. Instead of hundreds of cells there are only dozens.
GM gave toyota leadership by killing their EV (Score:2)
Toyota's 'leadership' in hybrid technology was a gift from GM when GM killed their EV. This is discussed in Who Killed the Electric Car [wikipedia.org].
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The EV-1 was primitive AF in terms of a finished automotive industry project. The RAV4 EV was a much more serious effort. Interestingly, GM made a much more serious effort to destroy the EV-1 than Toyota did with the RAV4 EV, far more examples of the latter of which have survived.
Of course, Toyota didn't make the battery for that vehicle, either, but they surely carved a few open when they destroyed them, so that they could evaluate the condition of the packs. In the process they will have learned anything
So they got their heads out of you-know-where? (Score:2)
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Highly amusing to the ignorant, perhaps.