Category Archives: cars

My car runs on sunshine, which doesn’t need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz

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Donald Trump is known as a supporter of fossil fuels and an enemy of renewable energy. His administration has been creating roadblocks for wind power while encouraging increased production and use of oil, gas and coal. However, his war of choice against Iran has (very predictably) lead to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which normally about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas will pass (along with aluminium, nitrogen fertilizer, helium and other supplies needed by economies around the world).

The closure of this crucial naval passage has globally driven up prices of fossil fuels, despite vast amounts of oil being released from strategic reserves by governments in many countries. Because these strategic reserves are limited in capacity, the current response is not sustainable. If the blockade doesn’t end soon, prices will inevitably go much higher. Sustained crude prices of US$ 150-200 a barrel would probably trigger a global recession. Countries including Japan and Germany have used temporary subsidies to bring gasoline prices down again, but these measures are costly to government budgets and inevitably end up driving up profits of oil companies, which are still in control of pump prices.

Fortunately, the extra cost from higher gasoline prices to me has been zero. I bought my last liter of gasoline some time in early December, before I took delivery of a Hyundai Ioniq 5, a car that I love to drive. Now I just plug it into the wall socket in my garage some time while I am not driving it. This can be at night when I’m asleep but most of the electricity for charging has actually come at daytime from the solar panels on the roof of my house. The effective cost for me is 15 JPY (9.6 US cents) per kWH, which is what the grid operator would pay me if I were to feed the surplus into the grid instead of consuming it myself. Over the past 2200 km the car has averaged a power consumption of 15.2 kWh per 100 km, which is the equivalent of 228 JPY (US$1.46) per 100 km. With current gasoline subsidies in place, that amount of money would buy me about 1.5 liters of gasoline here in Japan. Not even a Honda Supercub motor scooter could go 100 km on that amount of fuel, let alone a car that comfortably seats 5 adults. And note that I am not actually paying that money: I just don’t get paid that amount from the power company if I charge the car instead of selling power to them.

A lot of people who would not ordinarily be considering EVs, either because they don’t think that much about the climate disaster or because of various concerns they have still had about the practicality of EVs, are now re-evaluating the situation and taking a serious look at available EVs, either new models on the market or cheaper second hand cars available without wait.

With skyrocketing LNG prices, countries that have invested in onshore and offshore wind and solar are somewhat insulated from these economic shocks as they consume less of the expensive imported fuels. Solar and wind are now the cheapest source of new generating capacity almost anywhere on the planet. This was true even before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but the price shocks are lending an urgency to plans for a shift away from fossil fuels that wasn’t felt by many before. Also, the falling cost of batteries has allowed renewable energy to displace more and more fossil power as output can be time-shifted via batteries, with a combination of solar plus batteries still beating fossil gas on cost. Battery farms can soak up cheap surplus power at midday and sell it at a profit in the evening, when demand is high.

“Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.” (Bill McKibben)

In the discussion about the energy transition, those who wanted to slow it down or delay it have often emphasized the supposed unreliability of renewable sources such as wind and solar, compared to dispatchable output from coal and gas power plants. Germans have even coined the unique word “Dunkelflaute” for a period when it’s dark and there is not much wind. However, many countries depend on imports for much of their fossil fuels and that makes them highly dependent on events outside their control. If it wasn’t already clear after the Ukraine war, the war between Israel, the US and Iran has now made it abundantly clear that fossil fuels are not the safe, dependable option: Renewable energies are.

From 2011 to 2022, Germany depended on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for supposedly cheap and secure Russian gas. Then on August 31, 2022, six months after Putin started a full scale war against Ukraine, a European country, he halted all gas supplies via the pipeline. On July 25, 2022 Russia had already throttled supplies via Nord Stream down to 20 % of capacity. At the time Germany’s largest gas storage site, the Rehden storage facility, was actually operated by Gazprom, the Russian gas conglomerate. It turned out that before the winter of 2021/2022 it had not refilled the storage site as usual, instead letting it drop to a mere 0.5 % of capacity by April and thus directly exposing Germany to Russian blackmail when Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Several weeks after the complete shutdown of Nord Stream 1, three of the four 1200 km pipes at the bottom of the Baltic sea were destroyed by an explosion.

The German government took over the Rehden storage facility but had to work hard to quickly secure alternative supplies of gas, relying heavily on LNG from Qatar. All shipments from Qatar to Europe have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. In March 2026, Iranian missiles knocked out 2 of the 14 gas-to-liquid trains needed for filling LNG tankers. Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen quickly, according to industry experts it could take as long as 3-5 years for the damage to be repaired to return to the previous export rate.

For many countries, use of fossil fuels sends wealth abroad. Germany spends 80 billion euros per year on fossil fuel imports, money which could be spent on setting up wind turbines, solar panels and batteries in Germany, thus creating local jobs rather than funding unsavory regimes abroad. More than half of Germany’s electricity is already generated from renewals. More than 20 % of new cars are EVs. These are far lower rates than in Denmark, Sweden or Norway, but much more than in Japan. Only about 2 % of new cars in Japan in 2025 were EVs. Solar and wind provided no more than 12 % of electricity in Japan in 2025. Meanwhile China has been adding more wind and solar power per year than the rest of the world combined.

The fossil fuel crisis triggered by the war with Iran has the potential to dramatically speed up the transition away from costly and unreliable fossil fuels. Even fossil fuel exporters understand this, as shown by the recent decision by the UAE to leave OPEC. It was a landmark step, as the UAE has been the second largest swing producer within OPEC after the Saudis. This step will allow them to increase their production rate without adhering to agreed ceilings, to maximize export revenue in the short term before global demand for oil ultimately collapses. If demand for oil was steady, it would make more sense for UAE and OPEC to artificially restrict supply to maintain high prices to rake in profits. This is no longer a viable option, as renewables are now undercutting fossils, putting an expiry date on the fossil fuel industry as a whole.

“Team Mirai”, a “technocratic” new party in Japan

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In July 2025, Anno Takahiro, the leader of the new political part Team Mirai, won a seat in the House of Councillors (Upper House) election in Japan. The party has been described as “technocratic” and focuses on subjects such as e-government and the use of AI. Anno himself is an AI engineer and science fiction author who graduated from Tokyo University.

I was curious about the party’s policy on energy. Looking at their manifesto, it is clear that their emphasis is on ensuring a steady supply for energy hungry AI data centers but not much thought seems to be given to the environment.

A massive amount of electricity is essential for the full-scale adoption of AI. It is estimated that the world will need an additional amount of electricity equivalent to the entire country of Japan in the short period leading up to 2030. For Japan to master AI and use technology as a driving force for growth, securing a stable and large amount of electricity is a prerequisite.

However, Japan is poor in fossil fuel resources, and relying on thermal power generation would result in a large-scale outflow of national wealth due to fuel imports. Furthermore, the limited plains of the country pose geographical constraints on the large-scale introduction of renewable energy.

Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate technological development and capital investment that will enable Japan to maximize the use of all energy resources available in the country while simultaneously securing large-capacity power sources and realizing a zero-emission society.
(“Policy Manifesto 2026: Energy”)

Their main objection to fossil fuel-based power generation is not the disastrous effects on the climate but the outflow of money for fuel imports.

A goal of “zero emissions” is not mentioned until the very end of the paragraph, almost as an afterthought.

Outside the power sector, it is mainly transport, heating and industrial processes that currently use fossil fuels and therefore produce carbon emissions. Electrification is the only way to decarbonize all of these, but none seem to merit a mention in the manifesto, unlike AI. To me, that’s a lopsided approach.

Renewables are mentioned primarily to claim that their scope in Japan was limited. In reality, wind turbines do not need limited flat land and they coexist quite well with agricultural use. They work especially well on the coast lines, of which Japan has plenty. Akita, Aomori and Hokkaido in particular have huge potential for both on-shore and off-shore wind. Rooftop solar is far from reaching a saturation point in Japan. Sitting on the “ring of fire”, Japan has some of the greatest geothermal potential in the world.

Team Mirai view of renewables is stuck in the past (though Mirai means “future” in Japanese) when they claim:

A significant increase in renewable energy will pose major challenges in terms of both the burden on the public and practicality.

The public burden due to renewable energy surcharges is expected to reach 2.7 trillion yen in fiscal 2024 and 3.1 trillion yen in fiscal 2025. The introduction of additional renewable energy will lead to an increase in the public burden.

Japan does have a system of renewable energy surcharges on electricity bills that was used to get solar projects online back when equipment costs were much higher than they are today. Back then, renewable energy suppliers were guaranteed a fixed feed in tariff high enough to cover those higher capital costs for a certain number of years. The renewable surcharges are to pay back the investments from years ago. They do not reflect the current competitive situation. Nowadays solar and wind are the cheapest sources of electricity in most of the world, which is why the International Energy Agency (IEA) writes:

Over 2025-2030, renewables are expected to meet over 90% of global electricity demand growth.
(Renewables 2025, IEA)

For example, Pakistan doubled its solar capacity from 2024 to 2025 not because of any feed-in tariffs or renewable energy subsidies (they don’t have the money for that), but simply because photovoltaic panels are so cheap to buy and install, their power is cheaper than grid power from hydro or coal.

When Team Mirai warns of the cost of an “unreasonable expansion of renewable energy”, it misrepresents the actual cost basis of renewables vs. fossil and nuclear power.

The problem for Japan is not that solar and wind would consume huge amounts of subsidies (they don’t). It’s that the Japanese grid is outdated and will need significant upgrades to move power from regions with the best potential for renewable energy to the regions with the highest demand. While China has been installing thousands of km of HVDC lines to bring hydroelectric, solar and wind power from rural areas to the cities and industries, Japan still has very limited power exchange capacity between eastern and western Japan (which use different mains frequencies, 50 vs. 60 Hz) or between its major islands like Honshu and Hokkaido.

So what is Team Mirai’s prescription for expanding power generation?

Like the LDP and several other mainstream parties, it wants to restart as many nuclear power stations as quickly as possible. Beyond that it wants to bet on unconventional nuclear technologies such as nuclear fusion and small modular reactors (SMRs):

We will strengthen investment in research and development of nuclear fusion technology , demonstrate our international superiority in nuclear fusion technology, and prepare for a fundamental solution to long-term energy problems.
We will support the technological development and dissemination of next-generation nuclear power (SMR, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, etc.) with an eye toward the late 2030s and beyond.

Japan is one of the major participants in the international fusion project ITER. However, under current project timescales (which already moved by many years from plans drawn up before the project was launched), actual fusion experiments that may produce energy (deuterium-tritium fusion) are not expected to take place before the year 2039.

Nuclear fusion is a highly complex technology that, if it can be made to work at all, will still take decades to make work at the scale needed to significantly contribute to supply. All this complexity has a cost. Meanwhile the cost of renewables and storage has been falling year after year. They are very mature technologies with tons of experience and benefiting from economies of scale. Whatever nuclear fusion technology wins the technology race, it will have to compete with fusion energy from a reactor appearing daily in the sky whose output can be captured by anyone using ever cheaper photovoltaic panels and batteries. It is far from clear if nuclear fusion will ever become as cheap as renewables.

Electric vehicles will add huge amounts of storage that can be used for vehicle to grid (V2G), which addresses a lot of the intermittency of renewables. A typical EV battery stores several days’ worth of electricity consumption of an average home. With an expanded HVDC grid, local intermittency is of much less concern when power generation can shift between different regions with different weather and climate (e.g. Kyushu and Hokkaido). Wind and solar peak at different times of the day and different months of the year, making them highly complementary to each other.

SMRs are becoming fashionable at the moment, but so far they are not in commercial use anywhere on earth. It remains to be seen if they can actually realize the cost savings their proponents promise. We have to remember that historically, nuclear reactors started out with much smaller sizes and then every generation grew in output per unit. Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers essentially are still powered by SMR designs from the 1950s, but these designs are not cost effective for commercial non-military use.

It’s only when they are mass produced that SMRs have a chance to produce power more cheaply than conventional reactor designs. So far those mass production benefits are only on paper. It will be around 2030 that the first new SMRs are expected to come online, with larger scale deployment not achieved before the middle of the 2030s.

To summarize, Team Mirai’s energy policy is not driven by scientific or economic realities. It grossly underestimates the potential of renewable energy in Japan while betting on technologies with an uncertain economic outlook that may simply come too late and at too high a cost to solve the problem of decarbonizing the Japanese economy before the country is devastated by climate change.

My Hyundai Ioniq 5 Test Drive in Izu, Japan

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Today, after a one week test, I returned the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

Yesterday I did an extended test drive to one of my favourite parts of Japan, the Izu peninsula. I often go there for bike rides to take pictures. This time I drove over 440 km, which is pretty long for any drive I do. My longest drive this year until now had been 310 km.

I had a great day. It was a perfect day to enjoy Mt Fuji views and ocean views in Izu and the Ioniq 5 was a great car to do it in, more about that below.

The two concerns that keep people off opting for EVs when buying cars are range anxiety and cost. Izu is not the most well served part of Japan, as far as charging is concerned, and yet I really didn’t have to worry. Even when starting from Tokyo with a battery only charged to around 75% of its capacity, I came back with 30% of charge left after only a quick charge while having a 25 minute coffee and snack break. I charged at a 50 kW fast charger at a Familymart convenience store in Matsuzaki to at least once try out public chargers (previously I only tested charging at home) and it added about 150 km of range in a little over 20 minutes. Given a fast enough charger, the Ioniq can actually charge 5 times faster than that.

I later passed a 180 kW charger, but didn’t use it because I had plenty of battery left to get home and drop off the car tomorrow. Given a suitable charger (e.g. 350 kW), the current model of Ioniq 5 can charge at up to 260 kW, but the fastest chargers available in Japan right now are 220 kW.

On cost, the Ioniq is quite reasonable, when compared to brands such as Audi, Mercedes or Volvo. There are EV subsidies available from the national government and prefectural governments (e.g. Tokyo). Long term, there are substantial savings from the cost of electricity vs. gasoline, especially if you have solar panels on the roof and can generate your own power. A hybrid that gets 18 km/l at 160 yen/liter costs 9 yen/km. A non-hybrid ICE could be double that. An EV that consumes 180 Wh/km at 15 yen/kWh (Tepco FIT rate) costs 2.7 yen/km. At 40 yen/kWh from the standard grid without low cost night time tariff it costs 7 yen/km. That and no annual oil changes, no new spark plugs, etc.

One huge difference between electric cars (BEV) and internal combustion engine cars (ICE) is noise. When you put the foot down, both more or less do the job, but one does it without any fuss at all while the other becomes noisy. The Ioniq impressed me by just how quiet it was throughout (which is an excellent basis for enjoying the Bose speakers that come standard in the Lounge version). Whether you’re taking it easy or pushing the car hard, it just does it quietly, except for a minimal amount of tyre rumble and wind noise. That makes for a very relaxed experience. I don’t think I ever came back from a 13 hour drive feeling as fresh as I did today.

I also loved both the suspension and the seats. The ride is neither too soft nor too hard and the seats stayed comfortable and supportive at all times.

This is a great long distance car. It does everything my 2013 Toyota Prius did, only better and without burning fossil fuels (if you charge it with renewable energy, whose share will only keep increasing from now).

If I had to pick anything I didn’t like, I can only mention the digital rear view mirror (which thankfully can be switched to analog). It’s an LCD monitor in place of the usual center mirror, hooked up to a camera at the back of the car. Every time I looked at it, my eyes had to refocus from objects far away as seen through the windscreen to a monitor only 30 cm from my eyes, resulting in fuzzy recognition for a fraction of a second. Analog rear view mirrors don’t have that issue, as they don’t force your eyes to refocus.

I realize that the Ioniq is too large or too expensive for a lot of people, but the Hyundai Kona and Hyundai Inster are also very capable cars that are smaller and cheaper while using much of the same technology.

After returning the Ioniq 5, I placed an order to buy one. It will arrive next month.

Shopping for an Electric Car in Japan

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It’s time to replace my Prius hybrid with a battery electric vehicle (BEV). Later this month I will be test driving a Hyundai Ioniq 5 for a couple of days to make up my mind.

My only experience with Hyundai so far was an I30 that we had as a rental car in Italy two years ago. It was a compact and not an EV. In 2024 Hyundai was the 5th largest car maker worldwide, selling more cars globally than either Ford or Nissan.

In the EV race, Hyundai reminds me a bit of the Chinese car manufacturers, which (unlike Toyota or VW/Audi) don’t have a huge established base of ICE cars and therefore can move more nimbly on the transition to BEVs, without fear of hurting their existing products. For many buyers of these underdog brands, the BEV will be their first car of that brand, as it would be for me.

I have had two Volkswagens, four Audis, one Honda and two Toyotas as my main cars over the last 44 years (not all of them personally owned, e.g. some were company cars), but for me it was never about the brand but about the features and technology. I loved the Audi inline 5 cylinder engines and the ergonomics of their cars. I switched to Toyota after the last Audi, an A4 2.6 V6 turned out to be a disappointment on fuel economy and reliability.

Now that there are cars that don’t rely on fossil fuel (as hybrids still do 100%), I want to make a move. My new house has solar panels on the roof and a battery, with which I’m largely electrically self-sufficient. I have a 200V socket in the garage for charging at home.

More than 5 years ago, I test drove a Tesla Model 3 (before I knew that Elon was crazy). At the time there were no Japanese BEVs except the Nissan Leaf, which was too small for our needs and and too limited in what it could do (no thermal management for the battery, really?). Years later Mercedes launched their first BEVs in Japan, as did VW with the ID.4 and Audi with the various e-tron models (Q4 e-tron) and finally Toyota and Nissan came up with the Toyota bZ4X and Nissan Ariya.

None of those really appealed to me:

  • The bZ4X looks like an electric RAV4, which I never liked.
  • The Ariya looks better but still too much of an SUV and too expensive.
  • There was much to like about the ID.4, such as its looks and its size (not too small, not too large) but infamous software issues at VW/Audi are a huge turn-off, especially now that they may be dumping in-house in favour of Rivian-sourced tech that may see older models orphaned for updates.
  • Audi: basically same as the ID.4 because the Q4 e-tron is the same platform, only more overpriced.
  • Mercedes – I would kind of avoid them because of people who buy them for status, but their cars are also either not yet based on pure BEV platforms, with all the compromises that brings, or they’re large and very expensive.
  • Volvo: see Mercedes

That leaves:

  • BYD: Great technology, very competitive great prices, but from the PRC, which in a few years may try to invade Taiwan… See Tesla 🙁
  • Hyundai: The Ioniq 5 has been on the market since 2021, has had a model update this year with a bigger battery and many other improvements. It will do over-the-air updates for its computers. DC charging is very fast due to its 800V architecture (usually only found in Porsche and other high end brands). It’s slightly taller than I would prefer but doesn’t look too SUV-ish and is only marginally longer than the Prius. Range is good, prices reasonable and equipment levels attractive. On paper it easily beats cars that cost 2,000,000 yen more, as long as you don’t care about brand image.

I’ll keep you posted 🙂

Next step: Test drive!

Links:
Hyundai Japan website

Toyota’s solid state battery plans

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Under Toyota Motor Corp’s new CEO the company finally seems to put more emphasis on battery electric vehicles (BEVs). However, this does not translate into short term product availability: The bZ4X is the only battery electric car Toyota is selling outside of China right now (in the Chinese market Toyota is also offering the bZ3 which is based on a battery electric platform by BYD, the leading Chinese BEV maker).

The wrong platform
Toyota is working on a new dedicated battery electric platform. The e-TNGA platform that the bZ4X is based on is a derivative of Toyota’s ICE-based TNGA platform. A platform that must cover both ICE and BEV is not ideal for either: In a BEV drivetrain, the heaviest part is the battery built into the floor of the car and there is no need for a classic engine compartment while in an ICE car the heaviest part are the engine+gearbox at the front. Build something that can cope with either and you end up with wasted space and extra weight that isn’t needed for one of the variants, plus it costs more to build.

Other manufacturers have already made the switch to BEV-only platforms. For example, VW initially offered the e-Golf based on the platform of the regular ICE Golf. In 2020 it discontinued the e-Golf and replaced it with the ID.3 which was based on a BEV-only platform (MEB). Toyota models based on the future BEV-only platform will be released in 2025 or 2026, meaning Toyota will make this architectural switch 5-6 years after VW!

Under its previous CEO Toyota was in no hurry to go battery electric. Instead it tried to maximize sales of its hybrid models which after all still offered the best fuel economy amongst ICE cars. The longer buyers stayed away from BEVs and stuck with ICEs the more Toyota could benefit from its ICE hybrid technology against less sophisticated non-hybrid ICE cars. Toyota was gambling on the absence of progress while we are heading full steam into climate disaster.

While Toyota was selling gasoline-powered cars it kept talking about future technology, including hydrogen fuel cells (HFC) and solid-state batteries. In 2014 it had launched the Toyota Mirai to showcase HFC but the technology was too expensive to build to be able to make a profit. HFC cars will need a completely new fuel infrastructure to be built from scratch.

Besides HFC Toyota is also working on hydrogen ICE cars and is researching e-fuels (synthetic hydrocarbons made using green hydrogen and CO2) for ICE cars. It’s like the company wants to try every possible alternative to BEVs instead of focussing on the most promising approach as Tesla, BYD, VW and other manufacturers do.

Solid-state batteries (SSB) hold the promise of higher energy density compared to current types of lithium ion batteries by using a solid electrolyte instead of a liquid but SSBs are still far from market-ready. Toyota only expects to be able to commercialize them by 2027 or 2028. A lot could happen until then.

When Toyota was expecting market penetration of BEVs to remain slow until 2030, waiting for solid state batteries to reach maturity and not custom-designing a platform specifically for BEVs before then seemed to make sense for them, but they completely underestimated the speed at which consumers in international markets are now making the switch. Only one fifth of one percent of Toyotas sold in the first half of 2023 were BEVs, even though one in 4 cars sold in China and one in 5 cars sold in major European markets are already BEVs. The biggest car manufacturer in the world is not even in the top 10 of BEV makers. It could be Nokia and smartphones all over. By next year BEVs will already reach higher market share in major export markets than Toyota had expected by 2030. To keep up next year Toyota would have had to make different decisions 5 years ago and because of this, it will fall further behind. Can it still catch up?

The cure for range anxiety
Recently Toyota has been talking about SSBs and technical breakthroughs:

Kaita said the company had developed ways to make batteries more durable and believed it could now make a solid-state battery with a range of 1,200km (745 miles) that could charge in 10 minutes or less.
(Guardian, 2023-07-04)

Even if we assume that they can make SSB work by 2028, a battery with a range of 1,200 km that can be charged in 10 minutes makes no sense: If it can be really charged that quickly a much smaller battery would be a better fit. That way you could get 400 km or 600 km of range at 1/3 or half the cost and weight penalty. Nobody needs that much range if charging takes no longer than a toilet stop or how long it takes to buy a cup of coffee unless you’re trying to cross the Gobi desert.

Range anxiety has been an obstacle to the spread of BEVs but the cure is not super sized batteries, it’s a denser charging network equipped with high speed chargers. Japan still has a lot of work to do here, both in terms of the number of chargers and their maximum power output. Highway service areas and also most Nissan dealers tend to have fast DC chargers installed but Toyota dealers by and large only offer 200 V AC charging which barely covers plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) but not BEVS. Most public car parks do not include charging spots.

This must change and will change. A BEV with 1,200 km of range would have made perfect sense 3 years ago when the charging situation was even worse. Five years from now there will be far more DC fast chargers and they will be everywhere. Consequently the price of BEVs will be a much bigger factor in buying decisions than ultimate range. Chinese manufacturers have been using lower cost LFP batteries instead of the more costly NCM batteries that the bZ4X uses and even cheaper sodium ion batteries (NIB) are now being commercialized.

Are solid-state batteries the game changer?
Talking about super long range BEVs is supposed to send two messages:
1) Toyota will be a future technology leader again, so please don’t sell your shares yet and
2) Current BEVs don’t have enough range for peace of mind, so your next car should still be a hybrid ICE car.

It remains to be seen if SSBs will work out for Toyota and Honda. It can be a long way from lab results to mass market deployment. I am not saying that there won’t be a market for SSBs (once somebody can make them work): There will be, especially at the high end. But for the volume market, the game will be decided via the density of the charging network (especially using high output chargers) in combination with lower cost battery technologies that will eventually make BEVs cheaper than ICEs.

Give me a BEV with 400 km of range that can add 300 km of charge in 20 minutes and costs no more to buy and far less to run than an ICE car: When that happens then it will be “Game Over” for gasoline and diesel cars.

Anti-battery propaganda on Facebook

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Perhaps one of your Facebook friends posted this piece of propaganda on their feed:

This machine is required to move 500 tons of earth/ore which will be refined into ONE lithium car battery.
It burns 900-1000 gallons of fuel in a 12 hour shift.
Lithium is refined from Ore using sulfuric acid.
A battery in an electric car, lets say an average Tesla, is made of …
25 pounds of lithium,
60 pounds of nickel,
44 pounds of manganese,
30 pounds of cobalt,
200 pounds of copper,
400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic etc.
That averages 750-1,000 pounds of minerals, that had to be mined and processed into a battery that merely stores electricity …
Electricity which is generated by oil, gas, coal, nuclear, or water (and a tiny fraction of wind and solar)….
That is the truth, about the lie, of “green” energy.
There’s nothing green about the green new deal… Just a lot of pockets being lined and our environment being destroyed by greed, wilful ignorance and selfishness.

Fossil fuel companies have a lot to lose when the energy transition to renewable carbon-free energy sources takes place. Their whole business model of extracting, refining and selling fossil fuels will collapse. The longer they can delay that transition, they more money they can still make. That’s why they have an interest in spreading propaganda like that post above.

No verifiable source is given for any of the numbers in that text but here are some facts: Typical lithium ores (spodumene) in Australia contain about 1-2% Li, meaning for the 12 kg of Li in a car battery listed above you’d have to mine 0.6 to 1.2 t of ore, a far cry from the 500 t claimed. Since they gave no source it’s hard to know how they came up with such distorted figures.

Another major source of lithium are brines which don’t involve any hard rock mining at all though the quantities available are more limited and there are some issues with water consumption. Some companies are working on extracting lithium from geothermal brines as a side product of geothermal energy production.

The majority of Li-ion batteries produced in China these days are based on Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which unlike earlier Li-ion chemistries (NMC, NCA) do not require either cobalt or nickel (the C and N respectively in those acronyms).

In April 2022, LFP batteries in electric vehicles sold in China already outsold other types of Li-ion car batteries by about 2:1 (8.9 GWh vs 4.4 GWh). Tesla’s entry level models made at the Shanghai Gigafactory have switched to LFP too.

By the time most of us will switch to battery electric vehicles, i.e. within the next decade, LFP is likely to be largely superseded by sodium ion batteries. This new chemistry is technically very similar to Li-ion batteries. German battery expert Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer (@FrankWunderli13) estimates that by 2026-2028 sodium ion production will exceed lithium ion on a GWh basis. Why is sodium ion cheaper? Unlike lithium which only occurs in special ores that require processing, sodium makes up 39 percent of common table salt. A cubic meter of sea water contains about 14 kg of it. So any time someone says we don’t have enough lithium needed for replacing internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, they are not really looking at where the industry is heading over the next decade.

Talking about the CO2 output from electricity production is a distraction: Even in places like Poland or West Virginia where much of the power is produced from dirty coal, an electric car is responsible for less CO2 output than an ICE car because power plants are far more efficient than car engines. But the main point to remember is that the mix of energy sources will dramatically shift over the next 15-20 years, the lifetime of a car produced today. This will make BEVs cleaner every year. 20 years from now a gasoline powered car will still depend 100% on gasoline and emit as much CO2 in 2042 as it did in 2022. Meanwhile a BEV will run on a zero-carbon mix of solar, wind, nuclear and geothermal once the grid has been fully upgraded.

For those promoting hydrogen as an alternative to BEVs: That’s not going to happen. Hydrogen is not a viable alternative to BEVs, except maybe for trucks, ships and airplanes. There are several reasons for that. For a start, fuel cells are much more expensive than batteries. Battery prices have been falling faster than fuel cell prices which depend on platinum, a rare metal much more costly than any of the metals mentioned when people talk about batteries. Not coincidentally it is also the most widely used material for electrodes of electrolysers. Its second largest producer is Russia, a country now widely sanctioned because of a war that its government started.

BEVs have greatly benefited from demand for batteries by phones, laptops and other mobile devices that have paid for R&D, scaling up production and thus bringing down prices. In fact the first Tesla was based on the same battery cell type that laptops were using at the time. There has been no such synergy for hydrogen. It lacks economy of scale for fuel cells and its distribution system lags far behind while BEVs harness the existing electric grid.

The biggest problem with hydrogen however is the inefficiency of green hydrogen production: It takes roughly three times more electricity for making and consuming hydrogen than to charge and discharge a battery for a given driving distance. That’s because there are more energy losses turning electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity than there are in charging and discharging a battery. Because of this we’d have to build three times more wind turbines and solar panels to replace the same number of ICE cars with hydrogen cars than we would with BEVs. And it’s even worse with ICEs running on hydrogen, a concept promoted by some car manufacturers. On top of that ICEs burning hydrogen have higher smog-forming NOX emissions than ICE cars running on fossil fuels. BEVs don’t release any NOX. If you want clean air, BEVs beat hydrogen hands down.

In a world facing disastrous climate change that urgently needs to get down to zero carbon emissions, ICE cars have no future. Sticking with ICE cars isn’t an option. The choice is not between ICE cars or BEVs, it’s between either BEVs or walking, riding a bicycle or using public transport.

Battery electric cars in Japan

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BYD, China’s leading EV maker announced it will release three models for the Japanese market in 2023.

Meanwhile Toyota has only launched a single battery electric model in its domestic market (Toyota bZ4X SUV in 2022) while Nissan has launched two (Nissan Leaf in 2010, Nissan Ariya SUV in 2022). Both brands are still concentrating on gasoline-powered hybrids. The bZ4X is also offered as the Subaru Solterra, with some minor differences from the Toyota-badged model.

Germany’s VW is still holding back on its ID.3 and ID.4 models in Japan, perhaps because it can’t manufacture enough of them even for the European market. The VW group is only represented here in the battery electric market by its luxury brands Audi and Porsche.

Korea’s Hyundai launched the Ioniq 5 this spring, with the larger Ioniq 6 to follow next year.

It looks like 2023 will be an interesting year for BEVs in Japan which until now has been lagging far behind China, North America and Europe in the electric mobility transition.

On my last trip to the UK I was amazed by the number of BEVs of every brand and model I saw in London compared to Tokyo. In 2021, only 10,843 Nissan LEAF and another 8,610 imported electric cars were sold in Japan (about 60% of which were Tesla). That’s under 20,000 in total or 0.2 % of about 6.9 million new cars sold. The UK, with roughly half the population of Japan, bought 190,727 new electric cars the same year. About 1 in every 6 new cars registered in June 2022 in the UK was battery electric.

China recognized that BEVs are a strategic move. Taking the lead will allow them to leapfrog laggards like Toyota who are too wedded to their own past successes to make the necessary transition to a decarbonized future. And it’s not just about the cars: China also added more solar and wind power last year than the rest of the world combined to make it possible to charge these cars without burning fossil fuel. It has heavily invested in long distance HVDC transmission to shift renewable power over great distances while Japan’s grid still consists of separate grids in West Japan, East Japan and in Hokkaido with extremely limited interconnection capacity.

A couple of months ago Toyota upgraded its forecast for electric vehicle sales in 2030 from 2 million a year to 3.5 million a year, which is about one third of its current annual sales. That’s for almost a decade in the future! This suggests it doesn’t see a tipping point where battery electric overtakes internal combustion engines until later in the 2030s. It is hardly surprising then that during the recent G7 conference in Germany, Japan lobbied hard to remove a goal of at least 50% zero-emission vehicles for 2030 from the climate goals communique, presumably at the request of its car industry. Meanwhile 80 percent of new car sales in Norway are already battery electric.

When Toyota launched the bZ4X into the Japanese market this year, it announced a sales goal of only 5,000 units, roughly 1/10 of annual sales of the Toyota RAV4 that it most closely resembles and half of the annual volume of the 11 year old Nissan LEAF.

Furthermore, the bZ4X is not offered for sale to individual consumers who can only get it through leasing contracts. Supposedly this is “to eliminate customer concerns regarding battery performance, maintenance, and residual value.” This move paints long term performance of battery electric cars as a weak point when it isn’t (at least it isn’t with Tesla and other brands). By offering only leasing contracts, Toyota is casting shade on the technology.

At least due to the launch of the bZ4X Toyota will install DC fast chargers at its dealerships by 2025. Many Nissan and Mitsubishi dealers already have 30 kW DC chargers installed and a few have 50 kW chargers (more kW means a faster maximum charging rate) while most Toyota dealers still only offer 200 V AC charging, the most basic of all. The maximum charging rate with 200 V AC is a mere 6 kW. In countries with three phase AC, a 3 phase domestic AC charger that supports 11 kW will be offered by Toyota from the end of 2022. Until then, home charging in your garage or driveway will be limited to the lower rate.

DC charging of the bZ4X can go as fast as 150 kW, but available public DC chargers in Japan right now tend to be limited no more than 50 kW (most of them at car dealerships). For example, right now there are only 4 locations in Central Tokyo that offer 90 kW or more.

I think we will see change in the battery electric vehicle market Japan in the next few years, largely driven by foreign manufacturers introducing new models that Toyota, Nissan and other manufacturers will struggle to compete with. But they will have no choice but to step up the pace of the zero-carbon transition if they don’t want to lose their existing market share here in Japan and in export markets. Otherwise Toyota may become the Nokia of the car industry.

Toyota Hydrogen Combustion Engine Cars

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Since 2014 Toyota has sold a little over 10,000 Toyota Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV). The starting price of this 4 seat sedan model in Japan is about 7.1 million yen (currently about US$63,000) which is more than 50% more expensive than a battery electric Tesla Model 3 which seats 5 adults. And it seems unlikely that Toyota can make a profit on a car being made in such small numbers as the Mirai, unlike Tesla does with the cars it makes in large numbers in its plants on three continents.

Tesla sold about half a million battery electric vehicles (BEVs) last year and looks set to sell somewhere between 900,000 and 1 million cars in 2021. This means Tesla will have sold twice as many BEVs every week in 2021 than the total number of FCVs Toyota has sold since 2014. The sales gap between BEVs and FCVs is getting bigger and bigger.

Recognizing that the high cost of fuel cells makes it difficult to compete, Toyota has announced that it sees a market for cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) that burn hydrogen instead of gasoline. They should be cheaper to make than fuel cell cars and will not produce any CO2 if hydrogen is made from non-fossil energy sources.

It’s not a novel idea though. BMW tried it in its BMW Hydrogen 7 technology carrier based on its 7-series back in 2005-2007. It never went anywhere. Besides the absence of a fuel supply network, there were also issues with emissions. Hydrogen flames burn extremely hot, which means you end up with a lot of smog-forming NOX emissions — worse than diesels.

In terms of efficiency, hydrogen ICEs are worse than FCVs which are much worse than BEVs. While BMW used cryogenic tanks with liquefied hydrogen at -253 °C, Toyota most likely will use high pressure tanks like in its Mirai for its hydrogen ICEs. They hold hydrogen gas at pressures of up to 700 bar. Both liquefaction and compression require huge amounts of electricity that can not be used for propulsion but is effectively wasted. An FCV consumes three times more electricity for electrolysis to make the hydrogen fuel it consumes than a BEV uses to charge a battery to drive the same distance. A hydrogen combustion engine is even less efficient. Where will this hydrogen come from? We don’t currently have a surplus of solar panels or wind turbines to produce this electricity. That means a hydrogen economy will need significantly larger investments in renewable energy than with battery vehicles. Hydrogen for cars makes no economic sense whatsoever.

It makes even less sense for hydrogen ICEs than for hydrogen FCVs. Fundamentally, it’s no more than an excuse for not giving up on building internal combustion engines, pretending that nothing has changed even in a world that is facing climate change that we need to address as soon as possible.

I am afraid Toyota will not make a turn-around and face the reality that the industry is switching to BEVs within the shortest time possible until it replaces Toyoda Akio, its current company president. Mr Toyoda is the grandson of the founder of the company and a keen race car driver. He lacks the vision that Toyota will need in the transition to a carbon free future. Mr Toyoda needs to retire, along with the dead-end technologies he is committed to.

Subaru announces the Solterra, it’s first battery electric car

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Perhaps not by coincidence Subaru chose the week of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow to launch its first battery electric car, the Solterra (the name is a portmanteau of the Latin worlds for sun and earth). To say that it’s based on the same “e-TNGA” electric vehicle platform as the Toyota bZ4X understates how much the two cars have in common: They are basically one and the same car fitted with different badges. Even the wheels are the same. You have to look very carefully at this pair of genetically identical twins until you find a minor detail that distinguishes them: Yes, the rear lights are a bit different.

Toyota owns 20% of Subaru and they have shared models before (Toyota 86 / Subaru BRZ), but I did not expect to see so little recognizable Subaru DNA in their first battery electric vehicle. Yes, there is a four wheel drive model of both the Solterra and the bZ4X and one assumes that Subaru had a hand in design choices for this, but 4WD is by no means unique for BEVs, as models ranging from the Tesla Model 3 to the Volkswagen’s ID.4 are also offered in dual motor 4 wheel drive configurations. Even the hybrid Prius is available in an electric 4WD version.

What seems a little odd is that the non-4WD model is front wheel drive (FWD). In internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, FWD offers some advantages as it saves having to have a long drive shaft between the front engine and the rear differential. The engine and the gearbox can be bolted together and directly drive the nearby front wheels. At the same time the weight of the engine and gearbox provides good traction for the driving wheels, especially in wintry conditions.

With a BEV however, the bulk of the weight is not in the engine but in the battery under the passenger compartment. Thus there is no real advantage in driving the front wheels as opposed to the rear wheels.

An electric motor driving the rear wheels can be very compact, not much bigger than the rear differential and exhaust system in rear wheel drive (RWD) ICE car. Without the traction advantage of the engine over the wheels, it would be better to go for RWD to get more weight on the driving wheels when going uphill or when accelerating. The turning circle would benefit too if the driving wheels don’t have to steer. It is no coincidence that both Tesla and Volkswagen use RWD for their BEVs, in the case of Volkswagen despite the fact that its best selling models such as the Golf and Passat are FWD. So why not Toyota and Subaru? It’s a mystery to me.

Another detail that surprised me was that even though DC charging on this car can reach a respectable 150 kW, AC charging at home is limited to mere 6.6 kW, which is less than for a compact Chevy Bolt. A Golf-sized ID.3 actually handles up to 11 kW. Some of this may be due to the Japanese Chademo charging standard and domestic grid considerations, as Japanese households only have access to 100 V and 200 V single phase current while the US and Europe use the CCS standard and 120 V / 230 V respectively, with 400 V 3-phase AC available anywhere in Europe. So even if there were technical reasons for limited AC charging speeds in Japan, export models should be able to do much better. Toyota may have specified its home charging module to the smallest common denominator, which if true is a bit disappointing.

As for the looks of the Toyota bZ4X / Subaru Solterra, to me they look like a close cousin to the existing Toyota RAV4 that I personally do not find very appealing. However, it is a big seller in the US market and this similarity may help move existing RAV4 owners over to BEV models once they become available some time in 2022.

Toyota has never been enthusiastic about battery electric vehicles. Its official line has been that hybrids are good enough for today and tomorrow we’ll get hydrogen fuel cell cars like its own Toyota Mirai, with all the benefits of battery electric but none of the drawbacks. There was no real space for battery electric in this vision. Toyota clearly over-promised and under-delivered on this strategy: Hybrid cars still spew CO2 into the atmosphere while almost all hydrogen today is made from fossil fuels. Battery electric does much better than that.

In Japan Toyota could rely on the government to help promote its “hybrids today, hydrogen tomorrow” story but in international markets that won’t fly. There the war for the future of the car is over and battery electric won hands down. No other country has a comparable push for hydrogen refuelling infrastructure as Japan has. Even if there were a domestic market for hydrogen cars in Japan, there won’t be any export markets.

Most experts agree that hydrogen vehicles are at least three times less energy efficient than battery electric vehicles, a flaw that would kill them even if the cars and the necessary fueling infrastructure could be built for the same cost, which isn’t the case. Batteries are far cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells and DC chargers are cheaper than electrolysers and hydrogen fuel stations. With battery prices falling further and further, within a few years BEVs will become cheaper to build than hybrid cars. Then the speed of conversion will only be limited by battery production capacity. It’s not clear Toyota will have the right investments in place by then, since it says its future BEVs will eventually be using solid-state batteries, an as yet unproven technology that only exists in the lab.

Until now Toyota had been avoiding BEVs except for the Chinese market, as it hoped buyers would keep buying its existing more profitable hybrid models. That is becoming a risky bet. Drastic changes needed to avoid the worst of a climate disaster no longer seem so radical compared to worldwide measures taken to deal with SARS-CoV-2. Huge numbers of consumers are ready for change. New BEVs by competitors are picking up market share in the US and in Europe. Toyota can no longer afford to wait on the sidelines or it will be seen as becoming irrelevant due to obsolete products.

This new BEV model is a very cautious move by Toyota and Subaru. Instead of competing head on with Tesla or Volkswagen, Toyota and Subaru are entering the BEV market only about as far as they absolutely have to, to still be a credible global player in 2022. The two companies will have to up their stakes to keep up with market developments.

METI and Japan’s exit from the Carbon Economy

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On the eve of COP26, the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the Japanese government took out a full page ad in the Japan times to talk about “beyond zero”, a series of events and initiatives related to Climate Change. It struck me that none of them were specifically about renewable energy, the essential ingredient for a carbon-free economy.

The title of “Tokyo Beyond Zero Week” already had me confused: It reminded me of the Toyota bZ4x, a battery electric SUV that is the first mainstream battery electric vehicle for the Japanese market that Toyota has announced. Toyota has become notorious for bucking the Battery electric trend by plugging hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells, despite hydrogen fuel from renewable sources being 3 times less energy-efficient than battery electric vehicles. The bZ4x is too little, too late when Toyota is telling potential customers that they should really be buying hybrids like the Prius or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai.

METI, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has been sponsoring vehicles based on hydrogen fuel cells using hydrogen made from Australian brown coal (lignite), with the resulting CO2 emissions sequestered using “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) and the hydrogen shipped to Japan in cryogenic tank ships developed by Japanese shipyards with METI funding. Essentially it’s a massive pork barrel project, designed to pay industry players to go along with a Rube Goldberg project that will not be economically viable. It’s a way of keeping ecological laggards such as Toyota and the huge Japanese shipbuilders and trading companies relevant. Some of the initiatives sponsored by METI are:

  • LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) Producer-Consumer conference
  • International Conference on Carbon Recycling
  • International Conference on Fuel Ammonia

There is no place for LNG in a zero carbon economy. “Carbon Recycling” aka CCS is a fig leaf to keep burning fossil fuels. Ammonia may be a necessary fuels for ships and airplanes, but if it’s made from coal it won’t be green energy.

Why is the METI ad not talking about offshore wind and geothermal power, two of the most important energy sources for green baseload electricity? It’s because they are primarily concerned about creating and maintaining business opportunities for Toyota, trading companies making profits from fossil fuel imports and other companies wedded to the fossil fuel industry and not about how to get Japan ready for the zero carbon age.

I find this very sad. As a country with limited fossil fuel resources, Japan could become a prime player in the post-carbon era, developing new technologies to help other countries move beyond fossil energy sources. Japan has huge opportunities in offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and geothermal but its government has been largely turning a blind eye to them because those energy sources can not be controlled by its big trading companies. Likewise, its biggest automobile manufacturer is a laggard in battery electric vehicles which is determined to sabotage the switch to BEVs.