One of the great writers at Clean Technica recently shared with us something that I don’t think
many of you have seen. They talked about how Toyota’s so-called incredible hybrid technology is actually ancient and in fact, it’s just straight rubbish.
Toyota claims it makes more electric cars than any other car company in the world. It also claims that there’s only enough lithium in the world for every car to have a tiny one kilowatt-hour battery. Now that’s obviously completely false. It’s just a statistic fabricated by Toyota to justify the fact that their hybrids and gasoline cars are well better than having an EV because they don’t have any compelling EVs.
Due to the overwhelming and positive interest, Clean Technica says that according to Statista, Toyota has consistently produced and sold about 8 million cars a year for the past 20 years. All the hype about Toyota is it legit or is it actually hot air? Is there any evidence Toyota circling the drain? David Waterworth says, is there any evidence that Toyota is circling the drain? This is basically what I’m saying and this guy, David, who is an impressive author says that I’m wrong.
He says, “As Paul and I have asserted here, should the Japanese automakers misjudge the timing of the transition to electric, it could have disastrous consequences for not only the automotive sector but also the domestic economy and globally.” On a number of times, I’ve talked about how the Japanese economy is in dire straits. GDP will collapse. It will be in the minus by possibly 10% points, which sounds drastic. More than likely, there will be an economic devastation in Japan over the next 10 to 20 years. It’s inevitable, in my opinion. Now, David says that “Thankfully, according to rethink energy, it appears that the
Japanese auto industry is starting to awaken to the urgent need to electrify and is taking tentative steps forward.”
\The problem is here that I see with this, the Chinese have been just barging ahead at full steam while the Japanese have just said, no, no, no, we’ll hold off. We’ll hold off. So can the Japanese and Toyota actually start, you know, get into this race and catch China, catch Tesla? Well, I say, no. David says that Suzuki has announced it will be spending US 34.5 billion through the fiscal year 2030 on R&D and capital spending to allow it to make the transition to producing EVs. The money will be split evenly between research and development, autonomous driving, and electrification, and battery manufacturing incorporating renewable energy facilities. Honda just announced that they’re going to spend more than 40 billion between now and 2030 to try and play catch up. But some of that is marked for building rockets, seriously, they are planning on building rockets? Some of that’s marked for hydrogen plants, some of it’s for hydrogen cars, some of it’s for just, you know, making better hybrids. That’s what Honda is doing. Suzuki intends to produce key cars in Japan by mid-2023. Obviously, the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV has been a very influential car. It’s one of the world’s best-selling electric cars. Sometimes the best, depending on the year you’re looking at. And it’s not hard to see where the model has landed almost a million sales in the past few years. I mean, the average sales price is $6,000. And it’s actually pretty good. Suzuki’s micro car will be marketed to urban commuters who do not require long-distance capability. And Suzuki hopes to sell them for around $7,000. That’s amazing if they can do that and make a profit if they’re making them in Japan. But the Japanese automaker is starting from a long way behind its Chinese competition. A long way. I say it’s insurmountable.
Suzuki announced as well at the same time, it would continue R&D into hybrids and internal combustion engine vehicles. Suzuki justifies the continuance of developing internal combustion engines, citing a lack of charging infrastructure and concerns of raw material availability.
Obviously, they’ve been listening to Toyota too much. Well, they are Toyota, aren’t they? Yet, hybrids are a very expensive strategy to follow. And as EV batteries get cheaper, hybrids will become stranded. They already are. Look at the sales of hybrids in many countries around the world. They are declining rapidly. This split focus is exactly why Japanese companies like Toyota, Suzuki, Mazda, etc. are so far behind in EV production figures. So these companies from Japan
are splitting their focus in numerous different areas. So are General Motors, and unfortunately, so are Ford. But these companies are doing that. Whilst these Chinese electric car companies are dead set focused on manufacturing EVs, only on production efficiency, how to get prices down, how to make better EVs, how to compete with the hundred other electric car companies in China. It’s a battleground there. We’ve got the fiercest competition in China. Well, the
Japanese are saying, yeah, well, we’re taking a multi-pronged approach. We’re going to do this a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of that, a bit of this. Who do you know who does that successfully? I don’t think anyone does. Imagine you hired someone to come and build the frame of your house, right? Imagine you want a builder or carpenter to come and do that. And then you found out that actually they only spend one day a week building houses. The rest of the week they’re doing other things. Mondays, they’re a banker, Tuesdays, they’re making pizzas. On a Wednesday, they are selling insurance. On a Thursday, yeah, they build houses again. On Friday, they make YouTube videos. Yeah, you can see my point. Other minor automakers finally letting go of Toyota’s influential leadership in Japan. Suzuki didn’t mention hydrogen in its R&D plans. And last November, Mazda announced investments in EV technology. Yet, Japan is at least five years behind B.O.D. and Tesla in technology and manufacturing NUS.
Now, I would actually strongly disagree with that. I’d say Japan is at least 10 years, maybe even 15 years behind because they’re not only behind in actual development. They’re behind in producing the factories, the production lines, and even having the product, but they’re also behind in terms of their debt. Their debt sags over their head. They’re all production lines, they’re all facilities, they’re all workers, they’re all processes, they’re all everything. That is something that slows you down. It drags you. It’s like basically being in the ocean and having a sinker tied to your leg. Now, Clean Technica says it will take them another five years to bring even a second-generation EV to market. And then there will also be a decade behind the Chinese and Tesla. Further, we strongly recommend not buying an EV that is not generation three or above. Nissan is planning to invest half a billion dollars into Renault’s pure electric vehicle division. But at the same time, Renault has reduced its hold over Nissan by decreasing its voting power from 43% down to 15%. Renault will still profit from the alliance, but Nissan will gain more autonomy. But whether or not Nissan can actually start mass manufacturing EVs is anyone’s guess. No one really knows. Sony and Honda have a joint venture to make EVs called Afeela. Now, they’re making an expensive electric car that they believe won’t have any real competitors. It’ll just occupy some sort of magical niche where we have to sell as many as they need to make a profit. Honda are providing the physical architecture of the vehicle. Sony will provide the software focusing on entertainment features and self-driving capabilities.
Honda’s major markets are China and North America. That’s where most of their sales are. And Honda doesn’t really have any good short-term strategy for those two markets. In fact, Honda doesn’t really have any EVs at all at the moment. They have the Honda E, but it is only sold in a couple of countries and it’s very expensive. Toyota, on the other hand, is committed to engaging the EV market with the BZ4. Fully charged podcast presented by Jack Skelet says, “Toyota’s BZ4 is surprisingly good. However, the sales figures tell a different story. Toyota has sold about 600 in the US, 7 in China, and 2,500 in Europe. In all, it is a very disappointing second-generation car in capability and technology. In fact, yeah, I have to agree here with CleanTechnica. I don’t agree with Jack here at all.” In fact, I think Jack is just saying this because he’s being nice. Truthfully, the BZ4 is mediocre. Even Toyota engineers themselves agree it’s not up to scratch. And the Europeans, they believe it’s not up to scratch either. In fact, there’s a petition and several people, several journalists, a number of publications who have written to Toyota, asking them why the range is 40% less than what it should be, well the battery pack capacity appears to be 20% less than what Toyota says.
There’s some pretty serious problems with the BZ4. It’s been had its price reduced by around 10,000 US dollars in China. Now you can get it from 20 to 24,000 US dollars. Yeah, it’s unfortunately a flop. Even the BZ3. Toyota’s new car that is basically being manufactured by BYD, has already had its price reduced significantly on the day of launch because of the lack of demand. So right now, 0.2% of Toyota’s cars sold worldwide are electric. When will the Pivot to EVs gather some stream for Toyota? As the leading Japanese automaker and one of the largest or the largest automakers in the world, Toyota has a lot to lose and a lot to gain. But it only has a tiny little touch into the EV market. I mean, 0.2%. It’s not even one of China’s 50 best-selling electric car manufacturers. It just doesn’t rank anywhere. In Japan there is a lot of responsibility for the current situation. The key reason for that, Toyota’s former CEO who is now the president, the overlord of Toyota, obviously he is there because of his being the great grandson of the founder of the company. But he is the president of the Japanese automotive industry. And he has led them here. He has a lot of influence over the Japanese automotive industry.
Toyota’s scientists justified their lack of manufacturing EVs by saying they assumed a shortage of lithium was coming and so needed to continue to produce hybrids. Now, today, the price of lithium has gone down by 40% in the last couple of months because actually there’s more lithium than manufacturers need right now. In fact, there’s a glut of batteries right now. There are more batteries than car manufacturers can take. That’s the truth. This shows that Toyota has no real grasp on reality. They don’t really know that there isn’t a shortage of lithium and that there isn’t in fact a shortage of batteries. The battery companies are actually moving and pivoting towards sodium batteries anyway. There are more than enough batteries to go around and that will never be an issue. Toyota doesn’t actually appear to do any research on this. They seem to just look for facts that confirm their confirmation bias. Now, Toyota hopes that if they can just manufacture a compelling EV that everything will be okay, it’ll all be fine. But the reality is there’s a lot more that goes into this, a lot more to making an EV those include having a car be the into these things, autonomous driving, elimination of the middleman, getting rid of dealerships to some degree at least.
Bottom-up, EV-only design, making an EV platform that’s only for EVs, not as a kind of a cover all everything. Use it for gas cars, use it for other hybrids, use it for EVs, and just hope that it works. Then there’s vertical integration in manufacturing. There’s giga casting, there’s using structural battery packs.
There are so many things that Toyota doesn’t know about, doesn’t do, and doesn’t seem all that interested in even fighting out about. What about lithium-ion phosphate batteries? What about sodium-lithium-hybrid batteries? Now, Clean Technica says that they must have a method of vertical integration is the absolute opposite of Toyota’s Tizen and the distributed production method that Toyota has refined over the last 20, 30 years. Many people believe would work. They had the most efficient company producing gasoline-powered cars and they were. But now that we’ve moved to a different product, that’s no longer the case. Now, considering the fact that Toyota still plans on only selling 20% of its cars electric in 2030, what situation will they be in then? Will people be willing to buy a hybrid with nickel-metal-hydride batteries in 2030? I don’t think so. Will people be willing to buy a hybrid that is primarily a gas car with a little bit of lectrification in 2030? I don’t think so. Will people be willing to buy gasoline or diesel-only car from Toyota in 2030? Highly unlikely. This idea that Toyota has this great technology that they use in their hybrids is false. The technology in their hybrids is perfectly adequate for 2018. In 2023, it’s been fast superseded. And Toyota has really nothing to replace it with. Even they have admitted that. Now, let’s just end with this. There is only one company in the world with 190 billion US dollars of debt. That, my friends, is Toyota. They are the most indebted company in the history of the planet.
