Category Archives: Toyota

Toyota’s solid state battery plans

Posted on by
Reply

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 a 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, costs no more to buy and far less to run than an ICE car: When that happens then it’s Game Over for gasoline and diesel cars.

Battery electric cars in Japan

Posted on by
Reply

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 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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.