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This. They've been fighting the EV transition tooth and nails, it really needs to be called out. I mean, how nice an EV would that new Insight of theirs just r

This. They've been fighting the EV transition tooth and nails, it really needs to be called out. I mean, how nice an EV would that new Insight of theirs just released have been? The design is gorgeous. Instead we get yet another hybrid, which makes sense in a good few use cases I guess - primarily related to charger availability - but just puts them further behind on the EV development experience curve. Edit: And their investments in Hydrogen, doubling down on it along with the Hybrid tech is indeed a great sunk cost fallacy example. Check Toyota's market share in Norway over the past few years for a fun example of consequences.

runarberg 4y ago
I’m curious how the calculations work here. I know that any individual battery electric car is better in terms of GHG emissions than any individual hybrid car. However, given the limited number of battery electric cars, and the limited production, battery electric cars will remain the minority of all cars at least until the end of this decade (probably even longer). Now my question is, en masse, since the production of hybrid cars are a lot more capable then battery electric, are we not better off (in terms of total GHG emissions) with as many hybrid cars as we could get? That is, don’t hybrid cars shave more GHG emissions just by the shear number of them? Of course I believe this is a moot question because we could save way more by focusing on public transit, and simply have fewer cars. After all: battery electric are more efficient than hydrogen, which are more efficient then hybrids, which are more efficient than ICE but transporting 20 people in 15 battery electric cars comes nowhere close to the efficiency of transporting these same 20 people in a single ICE bus.
- dev_daftly 4y ago
  I can't find it right now, but a toyota engineer has actually discussed this. Toyota looks at it this way, especially since you are wasting significant battery capacity on BEV's that don't get utilized daily if the battery supports significantly longer range than daily commute.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    I often wonder, since we are in a climate emergency, and we are still increasing our GHG emissions, and we need to electrify so much as quickly as possible. And we have these lithium ion batteries which work pretty well for that, but the production capabilities are limited, so you would think we would put them where we’d get the most use our of them, but alas, most we get is a bunch of Tesla SUVs and maybe a Hummer EV.

runarberg 4y ago

I’m curious how the calculations work here. I know that any individual battery electric car is better in terms of GHG emissions than any individual hybrid car. However, given the limited number of battery electric cars, and the limited production, battery electric cars will remain the minority of all cars at least until the end of this decade (probably even longer). Now my question is, en masse, since the production of hybrid cars are a lot more capable then battery electric, are we not better off (in terms of total GHG emissions) with as many hybrid cars as we could get? That is, don’t hybrid cars shave more GHG emissions just by the shear number of them? Of course I believe this is a moot question because we could save way more by focusing on public transit, and simply have fewer cars. After all: battery electric are more efficient than hydrogen, which are more efficient then hybrids, which are more efficient than ICE but transporting 20 people in 15 battery electric cars comes nowhere close to the efficiency of transporting these same 20 people in a single ICE bus.

dev_daftly 4y ago
I can't find it right now, but a toyota engineer has actually discussed this. Toyota looks at it this way, especially since you are wasting significant battery capacity on BEV's that don't get utilized daily if the battery supports significantly longer range than daily commute.
- runarberg 4y ago
  I often wonder, since we are in a climate emergency, and we are still increasing our GHG emissions, and we need to electrify so much as quickly as possible. And we have these lithium ion batteries which work pretty well for that, but the production capabilities are limited, so you would think we would put them where we’d get the most use our of them, but alas, most we get is a bunch of Tesla SUVs and maybe a Hummer EV.