this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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The impact they're hoping it'll have is people will think this isn't the right time to buy an EV so they'll keep buying Toyota gas cars. That's why Toyota is constantly in the news regarding battery tech - it's to support their fossil fuel business.
More likely that they’re trying to hedge their bet on their hydrogen fuel cell technology that they’ve heavily invested in. It’s actually fairly impressive.
Hydrogen is not going to happen. It's wildly impractical and there is no infrastructure for it. EV is the way of the future, but Toyota's strategy is to bring customers along with hybrids first. Most of their lineup has a hybrid powertrain, and in most cases it is the same 2.5L HEV engine, just retuned for more HP on larger vehicles. The Camry up to the Grand Highlander and their Lexus counterparts use it. Meanwhile, if they are successful with solid state battery technology, it'll make the rest of the market obsolete. Their strategy is to make incremental steps toward EV vs trying to force the market into an EV.
The problem is it hasn’t been their strategy.
They had a fantastic start with the Prius technology, and have been improving over time. The current models are better than ever, and solid state batteries a great evolution at low cost. They had all the pieces, even if moving slower than we need.
However, all their talk was about hydrogen as the future, and pushing hydrogen technology, and that’s just not going to happen for personal vehicles. I know part of it was government support, part sunk cost fallacy, but they were heading down the wrong path, were the last manufacturer to realize that, and got defensive about it. BEV technology reached a critical point where the rest of the industry made a choice, but Toyota was stubborn about saying they were all wrong
I wonder if hydrogen is a better solution for commercial vehicles or semis that need to haul. I'm not aware of how they would perform, but EVs are not very practical for medium and heavy duty use
Yeah, we’re going to need hydrogen in places where batteries won’t scale. I don’t think we know where that is, but I have a hard time picturing batteries for construction or farming equipment … ever.
Several companies have BEV semis under test so we should soon have better real world data on where batteries currently work for trucks, and batteries get better every year