Electric Cars and ElectricitySupply Requirements
Toyota Warns (Again)About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?
BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET
Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota isthe world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen viefor the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the otheras the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage ofsporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti,and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.
GM, America’s largest automaker, is about halfToyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota isactually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozenAmerican plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it wasprobably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introducegas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. Ithasn’t been afraid to change the car game.
All of this is to point out that Toyota understandsboth the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better thanany other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint throughacquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailoutas GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.
When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’sprobably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it hasoffered before. That opinion is straightforward: Theworld is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.
Toyota’s head of energy and environmental researchRobert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are tomake dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcomingtremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability,consumer acceptance, and affordability.”
Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’sannouncement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE)by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similarannouncements.Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make anysuch promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you takeits boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the automarket into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Strattonand the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and thelike.Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range,infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICEover electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized withtax breaks to bring pricetags down.
The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introducedinto the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline,there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent ofthem are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S.market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the ChevyEquinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market,mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Hondadominate, with a handful each in the top 15.
Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simplyaren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placedcharge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’sabout six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking aboutsupporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stopmaking ICE cars.
Simply put, we’regonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to thepower grids. A LOT bigger.
But instead of building a bigger boat, we may beshrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — thelargest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues withpowering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind andsolar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of whichprove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generatorsoffline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power whenwe tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storagecapacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.
We will need much more generation capacity to powerabout 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars.Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will becharging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today willhave to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to begreatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast chargingcannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems.Charging at home on alternatiing current can take a few hours to overnight tofill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like allelectricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas,petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to theU.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despiteAustin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power thecity, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far.Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.
Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend atan electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to thegas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank perminute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks.Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if asingle charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expectimprovements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no freelunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the powergrid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said wemight need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we goelectric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. HisTesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.
Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while itssmaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to winfavor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media.Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to beheard.
Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by theway. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near seriousenough to get things done.
YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE !
