Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020 619
autofan1 writes "Toyota's vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, has said cost cutting on the electric motor, battery and inverter were all showing positive results in reducing the costs of hybrid technology and that by the time Toyota's sales goal of one million hybrids annually is reached, it 'expect margins to be equal to gasoline cars.' Takimoto also made the bold claim that by 2020, hybrids will be the standard drivetrain and account for '100 percent' of Toyota's cars as they would be no more expensive to produce than a conventional vehicle."
'100 percent' of Toyota's cars (Score:2, Insightful)
That's great, except that their new cash cow is trucks. I don't think Tundras are included in that prediction.
That's a scary thought (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose in Car Industry terms, 13 years isn't all that far off. I suspect that a car model is perhaps 5 to 7 years in the making, or longer for a really radical redesign.
But to think that I'll be turning 50 and cars will still be burning plain old gasoline, with only a moderate improvement in performance over right now... that makes me depressed.
Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What the Japanese don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
0% Zero Emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a dreadful idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, the other efficiencies of hybrids are side effects of regenerative braking - once you've got an infrastructure in the car to store kinetic energy and subsequently deliver it to the wheels, you might as well use that infrastructure to improve the running efficiency as much as possible.
Now, it's possible that for current hybrids, the overhead incurred by including that infrastructure outweighs the gains of regenerative braking for some driving profiles, but there's no reason to think that will always be the case, since that's an engineering problem, not a physics one.
Other things equal, vehicles with regenerative braking will always be more fuel-efficient than vehicles without. The challenge is to make other things equal.
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are engine technologies that exist now that are as good as hybrids and more versatile. For example 8 cyllinder engines that can shut down 4 cyllinders. Recent advances in experimental engines show enormous opportunities for gains using imogeneous fuel-air mixtures, pre-heated fuel, and better spark timing.
Now one might argue that anything that makes an engine more efficient could be turned around and applied to a hybrid engine, so hybrids should always win. But this sort of depends upon two other issues. is there a coupling loss at the point where the electric and mechanical power trains meet? Is the gasoline portion so low on peak torque or horsepower that it must store energy (at a large conversion loss) in the electric system to satisfy the power excursions out of it's narrow power band? IN such cases direct drives might be better. Conversely, perhaps being able to shut down the engine entirely in low use and idling situation will more gas. Finally going all electric and disposing of the engines might make sense for solar powered short range commuter cars.
Anyhow, I can see that hybrids are a good idea, but one has to imagine a range of different kinds of hybrids optimized for different usage patterns.
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why wouldnt they? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, that's impressive. You're currently beating 40mpg in a Mustang?
Conservation alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Toyota does not make cars (Score:4, Insightful)
My fridge serves my needs, keeping my food fresh, just like my car serves my needs, going from point a to point b as safely and as worry-free as possible, hence why I drive a toyota: because outside of taking it in for maintenance every 5,000 miles it's just like another appliance, reliable, efficient, and that does what I need with a minimum of fuss.
Toyota #1 car maker worldwide (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
The marketing efforts for customer education along with all the fanboy and hater noise as typical has made a complete mess of the publics understand as too what exactly is a hybrid.
All hybrid means is that it has more than one type of motor. It doesn't really have anything to do with how it transfers the mechanical energy about or even how it creates it. You could have a turbine (jet engine) internal combustion engine pair in a car (A.K.A. the Batmobile) and it would considered a hybrid too, a very cool, very bad-ass hybrid, but still a hybrid.
So lets go with an example that most people would be familiar with. Both the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight are hybrids, but they are really very little alike on how they go about it.
A Toyota Prius is a gas assisted electric car. The electric motor drives the wheels and the gas motor powers the batteries. On the other hand a Honda Insight was a electric assisted gas driven car. The gas motor drove the drive train and the electric motor kicked in with saved up breaking energy on the take off.
The neat thing is that most people don't understand is that for all intensive purposes a hybrid like the Prius is actually an electric car. It does not need the gasoline engine to get around. So if they ever decided to they could make the cars power cells and power plants modular things could get really interesting and mostly likely very confusing.
Want to be able to drive it all the time without stopping, get the big combustion engine.
Want to be completely electric forgo the engine and get a bigger battery pack with a wall charger.
Want something in between, get a much smaller engine (one that fits the strict polution requirements for your city) with the solar panel option. The motor would be big enough to help rechare the batteries but not large enough to actually propel the car along.
Really all the hybrid craze means is we are now on the verge of having truely customizeable cars where upgrading your engine really means that all you have to do is disconnect it from it's mounts and unplug it.
A little hybrid trivia: NASCAR actually put a ban out a few years ago because some clever mechanics worked out how to use the electric starters on the cars to squeak out a few extra horsepower to gain a small but very real advantage over other cars.
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or to, you know, learn something.
Look, the guys at the dealership aren't superhuman. They're mechanics, who have learned the new skills to work on newer cars. It's not rocket science. Are the skills different? Yes. Do they require PhD-level intellect? No. Are the tools impossible to obtain? No.
Re: '100 percent' of Toyota's cars (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess if it is good for 100+ ton trucks and 20,000HP railway engines, well, it should be OK for your SUV. And these need hell of a lot more torque. Plus a normal transmission would probably disintegrate instantly. Not sure if modern tanks have old transmissions or electic motors, but I suspect the former as tanks don't need to last that long. Lasts a month between service and that is long enough!
Anyway, whoever modded you Insightful is a freaking moron.
Re:Hmm... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:That's a scary thought (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What the Japanese don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers.
Re:0% Zero Emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
No H2 or fuelcell vehicles?
You seem to have a reading comprehension problem. There was nothing stated that it would be an all-gasoline fleet. It would just be an all-hybrid fleet. That is, even if H2 or fuel cells were cheap and available, they would still have the regenerative braking, electric assist, and batteries of a current gasoline hybrid. The costs will be so low that there will be no single-source engine more efficient than a hybrid. Or, to ask another way, why would you waste H2 by not using regenerative braking? Why do you think hydrogen would not work with hybrids?
Re:I want a plug-in hybrid. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not looking for a car DESIGNED for that particular 250 mile each-way trip. I'm looking for a car CAPABLE of that particular trip.
However, like the EPA emissions test cycles, this is a real usage pattern, with a mix of types of travel that puts a load on power train and charge control performance that must be met to have a practical vehicle.
It's also likely to be a common cycle: While my particular trip is Silicon Valley to Antelope Valley, its characteristics are virtually identical to trips from Silicon Valley to:
- Reno via Donner Pass,
- Carson City via Carson Pass and Echo Summit, or
- Minden/Gardnerville via Carson Pass, Echo Summit, and the Geiger Grade.
Trips from Silicon Valley to the skiing areas around South Lake Tahoe and Stateline are a nearly complete subset of the Carson City / Minden / Gardnverville trips (cutting off only a few miles of downslope at the end.) Similarly with Reno vs. the (north) Lake Tahoe and Incline Village areas.
There are a LOT of people who make these trips quite regularly, with a load of recreation gear (or gambling money B-) ). (Try it during the winter skiing season, summer camping season, or any three-day holiday and count the cars.) Ordinary gasoline vehicles - SUVs, town cars, compacts, and pickup trucks - can all make them just fine, even in bad weather, on less than a tank of gas each way (and with a safety margin for traffic jams, chain-up lines, and getting stuck in snowstorms on a summit overnight). A plug-in hybrid should be able to do the same, with no penalties on performance, safety, travel time, comfort, or extra fuel stops. (And it should be able to do so with the sort of fuel efficiency improvements that hybrids are noted for, thanks to regeneration on the long downslopes.) If it can't manage this it isn't a viable replacement car for, not just one of the largest urban markets, but the one with the highest concentration of politically-correct tree-hugging early-adopters with massive disposable incomes.
If it CAN hack it, at a reasonable price, it can handle the driving cycles thoughout virtually all of the US. It should sell like hotcakes in the SF Bay Area, paying off the development costs quickly, then go on to take the rest of the country by storm.
So IMHO this trip would be an excellent target for automotive engineers to shoot for in their plug-in hybrid designs.
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the Japanese don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
{shaking head} This is all well and good, except that most of Toyota's North American product is produced in Cambridge, ON, the NUMA plant in California and their Texas manufacturing facilities. They're expecting to have 100% "Toyota" production for North America IN North America by about 2010.
The domestic problems are more systemic than health care costs. Union strife, inefficient plants, plant sprawl, poor designs, overburdened support (warranty) costs due to poor initial quality, etc. Much of the domestic product is also produced in foreign countries (Mexico, South Africa, South Korea) which, again, provides extremely cheap labour, virtually no health care overhead and massive tax benefits in the hosting third world nations.
It goes deeper even into the smaller details. Toyota actively encourages a healthier lifestyle for their workers, requiring the Cambridge employees to maintain a membership (free, BTW) for themselves and their family, to the on-site health club. They provide healthy, balanced meals in the cafeteria. Domestic plants, by contrast, offer the likes of pizza, fried foods, etc. in their cafeterias and the exersize plans include the long walk to the bar across the road for beer and wings on lunch break.
Because domestic workers, by and large, do one thing and one thing only (weld door seams, install windshields, etc.) for years on end, and because of the environment in which they work, they have no real pride of ownership in their product. In a Japanese run plant, after a certain number of years each and every employee can claim to have built an entire car - every single component assembled. They work in teams, they get a regular change of scenery so there's less doldrum, less stress, and better productivity.
Domestic workers are chastised for stopping the production line. Their profitability is measured in dollars/minute of line time. Japanese product workers are encouraged to stop the line if they spot a defect. As I said; pride of ownership.
Domestic workers have "pride" in domestic products under a union and propaganda inspired sense of self preservation, but it's a false notion. I live near, and for several years lived and worked in a plant town and saw the Good 'Ol Boys driving around with their "Buy Domestic - Save Our Jobs" plate frames on their vehicles. Many (most) of which were built in third world countries for dollars a day!
Except that he figured his car to be totaled for sure a friend of mine was considering buying one and installing it on the plate of his Corolla. 100% assembled by Ontario born and bred workers in Cambridge!
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:3, Insightful)
This "problem" won't be solved until either gas is $10/gallon or we move to some kind of lighter transportation vehicles as the standard. Not likely to happen in my lifetime though...
Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? (Score:4, Insightful)