Tag: Hybrid Cars

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Toyota now claims just the electric car market will never be bigger than 30% – you have to be kidding

Akio Toyoda is the chairman of Toyota ($10.2 million earnings in 2023) claims electric cars will never exceed 30%

So, when someone who is chairman of the car company which sells the most cars in the world says something, people listen. Toyota sold a total of 11.23 million cars in 2023, out of a market of around 92 million cars, or around 12% of global car sales. So perhaps he is right? Well a large number of people do not think so.

His arguments against electric cars include

  • access to electricity – 1 billion people worldwide do not have electricity. However, there are only 1.475 billion cars in the world, or 2 for every 11 people in the world. Further more, it seems likely that the 1 billion without electricity, probably also do not have a car.
  • Customer choice – he argues that customers should be able to choose the powertrain they want. However, the electric car has not been explored by Toyota, as they only have one fully electric model, the BZ4X and the UX400e (under the Lexus brand). The BZ4X is a premium car, but it only has an official efficiency of 2.9 miles per KWH, which is worse than the large tesla X gets (this car is over 34cm longer, and almost 9cm taller. This makes it more comparable to the tesla y (still 6cm longer, 2.4cm higher, slightly less ground clearance, but 34% more cargo space), however this car (which you can see is bigger) gets 4 miles per kwh, over 33% more efficient.

Well, lets look at the statistics.

Continue reading “Toyota now claims just the electric car market will never be bigger than 30% – you have to be kidding”
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What should the government do about hybrid cars

I believe hybrids should be banned alongside pure petrol and diesel engine vehicles: they generally only have a range of 20 or 30 miles at most before you need petrol or diesel and as such even on a standard commute usually they cannot run purely on electricity. Furthermore unless the buyer is a person who for instance is elderly and only used it to go to the shop once a week this setup means the majority of the use will be in a fossil fuel mode. Hybrids are away for fossil fuel cars to make themselves look cleaner. However, this requires you to have a full working fossil fuel engine and a fully working electrical propulsion which means the vehicle is more complicated and more likely to break down as well as not doing either job particularly well. 

At the moment the plan is to ban hybrid as well which is good. A hybrid that does not allow more than 90 % of travel miles to be done on electricity is not good enough.

However other countries are being more ambitious on when they banned the sale of new new fossil fuel cars, and it is being suggested actually bringing this date forward further 2030 would save UK consumers a considerable amount of money. One of the reason that government set targets so far in the future is so that all the Industries involved can be sure of where they stand, the UK may have been one of the first countries to say that they were going to ban fossil fuel cars but their date was so on an ambitious that one year later they are already moving it 5 years sooner still,  and there is a potential to need to move it soon as still- which would suggest that the government has failed miserably to to give a clear framework for what is going to happen in the future.

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