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Toyota Goes After Electrics
by Andrew McCaskey
You can tell that Toyota is an engineering company. They are asking some serious questions – from the perspective of the world-wide leader in volume production and life cycle support of modern electric vehicles.
Most of their concerns related not to hybrid gas-electric models, but to the more exciting “plug-in Electric Vehicles” that run from the battery fulltime. The only function of the internal combusion engine is to keep the battery charged. Real issues relate to battery life and performance. Not on the ideal coastal California Freeways, but more to the point performance on the highways of the Northern half of the country where minus ten degree days are not all that uncommon. And, in a full electric that all has to come out of the hide, not available as a lucky by -product in the form of waste heat.
The real crux of the argument, though is the race between politics and technology and the inertia of the installed base. If we think that the transition from analog TV to digital TV is a problem, given fifteen years of talking, delay, administrative rulings and finally the technology layer – it is going to be nothing compared with a transition (forced or voluntary) to some sort of electrical based transportation system. As the Toyota study pointed out since we use about half of our imported oil for cars and trucks even replacement of one third of the roughly 75 million vehicles in the US – which might take fifteen years to occur – would cut the oil imports by approximately one sixth.
It is not that the emperor has no clothes – it is sort of like the hospital gown that is ill fitting and more than a little drafty. It will serve the purpose, but it sure won’t give you the confidence that you need. The technology will get there but the politics will get there sooner.
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