Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don't Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
So Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s comments at the company’s year-end press conference deserve notice and no little amount of respect. He knows more about cars and their economic ecosystem than just about anyone else on the planet.

The Wall Street Journal was in attendance and noted the CEO’s disdain for EVs boils down to his belief they’ll ruin businesses, require massive investments, and even emit more carbon dioxide than combustion-engined vehicles. “The current business model of the car industry is going to collapse,” he said. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets… When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?”

CarBuzz has mischaracterized Toyoda’s comments. It’s not “disdain for EVs” he’s expressing. It’s disdain for the failure to count the cost of what politicians are proposing. More EVs will demand more electricity.

Toyoda is getting at two things. One, EVs are not powered by magical unicorn emissions, they are powered by the means we use to generate electricity. In Japan, the United States, and everywhere else, that’s fossil fuels to the tune of a huge majority of our electric power generation (61% in the U.S., with wind and solar making up about 17%, while Japan relies more heavily on nuclear power than most due to its lack of indigenous oil). Imagine taking every car in Japan or the United States and powering it not by gasoline or diesel, but by electricity. This will require a dramatic expansion of the amount of electric power we currently generate. There is no getting around this fact. We would be displacing gasoline or diesel for another power source. We’re still pulling something out of the ground and burning it in some way. The main question is where is it being burned?

How will we generate power to meet the new level of demand? Some will claim we can do it by ramping up renewables wind and solar but that’s not realistic. Drive out through West Texas between Llano and San Angelo out to Midland-Odessa and you’ll see a curious sight: hundreds and hundreds of towering windmills. Those are just the ones you can see from the road. There are more of them farther from the beaten paths. That part of Texas generates more wind power than the entire state of California. Wind farms cover mile after mile after mile. But all those hundreds of windmills only generate about 15% of Texas’ electricity. Wind is not economically competitive yet, so it’s subsidized by the government. Neither wind nor solar are cheap or reliable enough to displace oil and especially natural gas in our grid. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Oil and natural gas always burn.


 

glhs837

Power with Control
Ah, one thing to note, when you say "fossil fuels power 61% of the grid". A lot of that is natural gas, which burns clearer and more efficiently in thos eplants that gasoline or diesel ever will in a car motor. So in that sense, it's still cleaner than gas cars. You are better burning coal or oil or gas in a plant where efficiency can be maximized.

And no, I know the gird of today cannot handle the load of electric cars of five or ten years from now. Luckily, we have years to start upgrading the gird and adding capacity. The grid isnt fixed, you can add capacity.

And no, i DO NOT agree with givt mandates to shift to EVs, I say, as I always have, that government should stay out and let the market do what the market does. Develop better products, and let consumers buy them. Tesla's shown that BEVs can indeed replace a huge amount of ICE vehicles, just let this progression happen.
 

BOP

Well-Known Member
Electric cars don't have to run in order to make the wokesters feel good about it; that's irrelevant. The point is: they forced electric vehicles, and that's what counts.
 

Kyle

ULTRA-F###ING-MAGA!
PREMO Member
Toyota CEO Agrees With Elon Musk: We Don't Have Enough Electricity to Electrify All the Cars

Gee, if only a few thousand of us had been saying that over the last ten years!
 

Hijinx

Well-Known Member
Let's forget the damned cars, If all homes were forced to heat by electricity, would there ba nay power left over for cars?

Yet the retards want to raise the price of gasoline and diesel which raises the price of heating fuel.
Raises the Price of whatever kind of fuel the power plants use and The price of Diesel fuel for the long haul truckers.
Which raises the price of Food.

Do these people have even an inkling of the Clusterfuk they are creating?
 
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