What Went Wrong At Toyota? Hybrid Electrification Pioneer Is Now Working To Delay Electrification

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A must read for Toyota investors. I am leaving the Hot links in and the one about an anti-EV tirade is a doozy. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, frustrated that his folks failed to produce a decent EV, took over their EV project several years back, then failed himself! Much like Nikola investors found out, and GM with the Bolt they had built by Goldstar, building good EVs is not easy. Cheats eventually get found out like VW as well. So what's going on? This is a comprehensive article if you click all the hot links, that is a must read for investors in the automotive industry, especially Toyota, IMO. YMMV

Excerpt:

"If there were a Corporate Electric Vehicle Hall of Fame, Toyota would surely join Tesla as one of the inaugural members. The Japanese automaker’s introduction of the Prius hybrid in 1997 was a milestone in automotive history. Since then, the company has sold some 15 million hybrids worldwide, and has gradually added hybrid powertrains to more of its offerings — a majority of Toyota and Lexus models are now available in hybrid versions.

Toyota was also an early pioneer of fuel cell vehicles, and it has stubbornly stuck with this technology, although most experts now agree that it isn’t suitable for passenger cars, and most other automakers (including Daimler, Honda, GM, and Volkswagen) have abandoned it. (As detailed in my history of Tesla, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning investigated hydrogen fuel cells in detail before deciding to focus on battery-electric powertrains.)

Toyota has been an electrification innovator on several levels — in addition to its leadership in the hybrid and fuel cell fields, it produced an electric RAV4, with battery packs from Tesla, for a short time. Furthermore, the company recently launched three new electric models, although so far, these are only for sale in China.

Considering Toyota’s history, and its undisputed technological mastery, it’s very puzzling that the automaker has become the industry’s strongest voice opposing the transition to electric vehicles. In January, CEO Akio Toyoda made the company’s position clear with an anti-EV tirade in which he denounced the Japanese government’s recent proposal to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.

A Fuel Cell Fiasco

Even as Toyota (along with various oil industry-backed groups) lobbies global governments to enact hydrogen-friendly policies, a high-profile project that was meant to serve as a showcase for Toyota’s fuel cell vehicles may have turned out to be an environmental and financial fiasco.

Toyota supplied a fleet of hydrogen-powered buses, and several Mirai fuel cell cars, for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The climate benefits of fuel cells are predicated on the future availability of green hydrogen, which is made by electrolysis using renewable energy sources. However, CleanTechnica reports that the hydrogen used to power the Olympic buses, like almost all the hydrogen produced today, is grey hydrogen, made from natural gas. “The supposedly clean hydrogen available in Japan is made primarily from natural gas at existing chemical plants using a process that emits copious amounts of carbon dioxide,” writes Steve Hanley. Furthermore, “the country’s plans for a future supply of hydrogen amounts to importing large amounts of it from Australia, where it will be made from coal using carbon capture technology that does not exist.”

Toyota’s fuel cell buses fail on the financial front as well. The Financial Times reports that each one cost $900,000 for a 6-year lease, whereas a comparable diesel-powered bus with a typical service life of 15 years can be had for $220,000. Federal and local government subsidies covered 80% of the lease cost, but even that was not enough to make them competitive. “The fuel costs are also higher,” Daisuke Harayama, chief of operations at Tokyu Bus, a private company that introduced two of the fuel cell buses, told the FT. “The fuel cost is 2.6 times higher for [fuel cell vehicles] over diesel.”

The Financial Times concludes: “For now, the environmental benefit of the buses that will ship Olympic athletes and officials around the city is hypothetical.”

Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/03/what-went-wrong-at-toyota-hybrid-electrification-pioneer-is-now-working-to-delay-electrification/

Safe travels!