Recently I read an article on Yahoo! Finance which talks about why Toyota is slow moving in developing EV and bring it to the market. Here are some highlights of the article:
“Why is Toyota waiting on electric cars?” asked Tadashi Tateuchi, a former race car designer turned electric-car evangelist.
Electric technology could help determine winners and losers in the auto industry of the future, but Toyota has been highly skeptical of electrical vehicles.
“The time is not here,” Masatami Takimoto, Toyota’s executive vice president, said during a factory tour this year.
Electric cars “face many challenges,” he said, adding that “to commercialize pure E.V.’s, we need a battery that far exceeds the current technology.”
If Toyota is right, its competitors will have spent billions on a technology that will be slow to take off.
Moreover, he said, battery production technology is no more complicated than that of semiconductors, which are already mass produced.
“Toyota could launch an electric car tomorrow if it wanted to,” Mr. Tateuchi, the former race car engineer, said. Regretting his gas-guzzling creations, he founded the Japan E.V. Club 15 years ago to urge automakers to produce zero-emission cars.
“Toyota tells people the age of electric cars is not yet here,” he said. “That’s not true.”
Some experts predict that the auto market will soon be divided among competing technologies. “Small electric cars will be used for short distances within cities, with hydrogen cells powering big buses,” the Development Bank of Japan forecast in 2008.
Others say that once automakers commit to mass production and drive costs down, electric cars could dominate the market. That could require Toyota to speed up its electric car plans, they say.
“You don’t see many competing technologies survive in a key market for very long,” said Mr. Shimizu, the Keio University professor.
And more often than not in the history of innovation, a change in the dominant technology means a change in the market leader.
“Electric cars are a disruptive technology, and Toyota knows that,” Mr. Shimizu said. “I wouldn’t say Toyota is killing the electric vehicle. Perhaps Toyota is scared.”
First of all I would like to remind professor Hiroshi Shimizu that no, battery is NOT like semiconductors because battery actually has to store energy, release energy, restore energy and repeat that process hundreds of thousand times if not more. Also, the kind of battery we are talking about here is a bit different than the batteries that he was used to so simply saying that the battery technology is sufficient enough for EV is not a responsible statement. So I would like to suggest that professor Shimizu should probably stay at what he does best and leave the technical aspects to the professionals.
Second, those who think Toyota is “scared” by EV are totally out of their minds. They need to understand that mechanically an EV is more simple than the regular ICE vehicles and as long as there is a break through in the battery technology any current 1st tier car manufactures can make EVs without any difficulties. Also, those who think EV’s time is here is also crazy, look at that Mini E POS that BMW brought us… It costs $50,000, has a range of 100 miles and needs AT LEAST 3 to 4 hours to charge. Yeah sure it’s a great city commuter but based on those numbers how can one say that the EV is ready for the general population?
I predict the EV wouldn’t be mainstream for at least another decade. What’s going to happen is that the hybrid will continue to get better and better mileage as the battery technology improves. At a point the electric engine will become the main source and ICE will become secondary, pretty much the opposite of today’s hybrids. When that happened then we can start talking about how relevant the EV is for mass production and become mainstream.
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[Source: Yahoo! Finanace]
