3 ms·

My take is that Toyota is 100% correct here, but simultaneously too late with this messaging today. Imagine if the EU and others had taken a reasonable stance

My take is that Toyota is 100% correct here, but simultaneously too late with this messaging today. Imagine if the EU and others had taken a reasonable stance 15 years ago, and said "every car sold after 2015 must be an EV or a series hybrid with more than 50 km realistic range on pure electric". The transition towards zero carbon emissions from the road sector would have gone exponentially faster. I mean, even if you look at the countries with the highest rate of EV adoption, like Norway with 65% of the vehicles sold in 2021 being pure EVs, it's still only making a tiny dent in the amount of gasoline and diesel sold - around 5% decrease when you compare Q4 2021 to Q4 2019, and then it's still a bit unclear how much of that drop is attributed to WFH and covid.

blkhawk 4y ago
well its vehicles sold not cars driving. I would expect that to add up quickly over the next decade.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> Imagine if the EU and others had taken a reasonable stance 15 years ago, and said "every car sold after 2015 must be an EV or a series hybrid with more than 50 km realistic range on pure electric". The transition towards zero carbon emissions from the road sector would have gone exponentially faster. This is basically what they did. Generally laws try to avoid specifying the technology these days, to prevent locking things in, but the EU and other sensibly governed places have been putting tighter emission standards in place for decades. People were free to meet these goals with whatever tech they came up with, better aero, lighter materials and so on. If PHEVs were the answer, we'd have more of them, but pretty much everyone realised that going straight to BEV made sense as soon as the oil/battery price passed a certain ratio, and that it was only going in one direction in future. Here's a 2011 (11 years ago), McKinsey slide: https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mckinsey-battery-study-jpeg.jpg https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mck... This is also where the $100 per KWh target people talked about a lot comes from, if batteries get sufficiently cheap, BEVs win, and they did.
- semi-extrinsic 4y ago
  I don't buy this, and I'm very much against the principle of having laws that don't specify how to achieve things. The result has been that for several decades manufacturers have been meeting emissions targets by plain manipulation, whether it's dieselgate or it's creating ECU maps tailored for the test driving cycle. We have achieved only emissions reductions on paper, when we could have been mandating PHEVs and actually solving problems. If you look back at when California was actually able to do something about their smog problem, it was through mandating specific technologies - first it was positive crankcase ventilation, then catalytic converters.

blkhawk 4y ago

well its vehicles sold not cars driving. I would expect that to add up quickly over the next decade.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

> Imagine if the EU and others had taken a reasonable stance 15 years ago, and said "every car sold after 2015 must be an EV or a series hybrid with more than 50 km realistic range on pure electric". The transition towards zero carbon emissions from the road sector would have gone exponentially faster. This is basically what they did. Generally laws try to avoid specifying the technology these days, to prevent locking things in, but the EU and other sensibly governed places have been putting tighter emission standards in place for decades. People were free to meet these goals with whatever tech they came up with, better aero, lighter materials and so on. If PHEVs were the answer, we'd have more of them, but pretty much everyone realised that going straight to BEV made sense as soon as the oil/battery price passed a certain ratio, and that it was only going in one direction in future. Here's a 2011 (11 years ago), McKinsey slide: https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mckinsey-battery-study-jpeg.jpg https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mck... This is also where the $100 per KWh target people talked about a lot comes from, if batteries get sufficiently cheap, BEVs win, and they did.

semi-extrinsic 4y ago
I don't buy this, and I'm very much against the principle of having laws that don't specify how to achieve things. The result has been that for several decades manufacturers have been meeting emissions targets by plain manipulation, whether it's dieselgate or it's creating ECU maps tailored for the test driving cycle. We have achieved only emissions reductions on paper, when we could have been mandating PHEVs and actually solving problems. If you look back at when California was actually able to do something about their smog problem, it was through mandating specific technologies - first it was positive crankcase ventilation, then catalytic converters.