Cor van de Water via EV wrote:
I am wondering if Toyota... invested in Hydrogen, and now feels burned with developing new technology... or is comfortably milking their Hybrid technology... Or this was purely a *dealer* driven story, which should not determine their strategic direction…. Time will tell.
Agreed. Toyota is a very conservative company. They have always stuck very close to proven technology. They only built the RAV4-EV because the CA mandate forced them into it.
So it is ironic that Toyota developed the Prius, and became the leader in hybrid technology. It was completely out of character for them. I'm sure their dealers weren't clamoring for it, and I don't think it helped their regulatory situation with the CA EV mandates.
Nissan is struggling with the choice of not cooling their battery packs and the sometimes excessive deterioration of their packs in heat. Others invest in temp regulation for their packs and are enjoying single digits of capacity loss over several years of usage…
The auto industry is famous for its NIH (Not Invented Here) approach to things. Basically, "if we didn't think of it, we won't use it". They will go to any lengths to avoid a patent or technology used by a competitor.
Unfortunately, this means when they got into EVs, they ignored 100+ years of history of what to do, and not to do. Anyone in the EV industry could have told them that thermal management of the battery pack is a virtual necessity.
Nevertheless, it seems like every automaker ignored thermal management in their first EVs. They had to learn the *hard* way to add it to their later EVs.
Last I checked, the future will be electric – with or without Toyota.
I've always felt that an EV future is inevitable... eventually. But I'm not sure it will come any time soon. We haven't reached the "tipping point" yet. The ICE and oil industries are still very powerful, and will do everything in their power to maintain their monopoly on transportation.
Maybe it's time to re-read my little Christmas EV story "A Christmas Car". It's amazing to think that I wrote it almost 20 years ago. It's at <http://www.evdl.org/pages/xmascar.html>
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