Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
The point still stands - unless EVs become cheap enough for the average buyer, they will be a nearly useless novelty item for the wealthy. And they will never be enough of them to solve any issue with emissions you don’t like.
And that “better” and “cheaper” battery is still most likely decades away - despite all the pop media articles talking about all those incredible laboratory “breakthroughs” that are supposedly ready to be unleashed. The gulf between the lab and the production line is very large.
And you are correct that few people are willing to keep repairing anything forever unless forced to. And that is precisely why an inexpensive entry level EV is so important. And those high end cars far less so…
That’s the point I’m agreeing with. The wrong market is being focused. I think the horse has been beaten into glue at this point.
As for the rest, it’s gotta be done. If it were a simple problem, it’d have been solved by now. Worrying about quick returns on investment are what destroyed the world around us as we know it. I work in R&D, progress is incremental… Until it isn’t.