Is Toyota Getting Serious About the BEV Game?

Toyota finally released a mass-produced BEV, a Battery-Electric Vehicle, in May 2022, and now they actually seem to be advertising it. You say BEV if you want to make it perfectly clear that you're not talking about a hybrid, but a vehicle which is 100% electric. As opposed to a Prius. Yes, there certainly are other hybrids besides the Toyota Prius, but Toyota has sold about 20 million hybrids. I think that's most of the hybrids. 

Toyota has made all-electric vehicles before this, but it's been a while. The latest BEV version of the RAV4 was discontinued in 2014, and, as in the case of General motors' EV1, it would be a stretch tpo call the RAV4 BEV mass-produced. In the past several years, not only has Toyota concentrated on making millions of hybrids, they're also made a lot of positively hostile remarks about BEV's. A few months ago there came a high point in this anti-BEV messaging, which  is to say a low point: an advertising campaign which showed a Toyota hybrid going on and on and on through an animated desert while ICE vehicles and BEV's stopped, stranded.

They had another ad campaign where they referred to their hybrids as "self-charging hybrids." Please allow me to be the last person on Earth to inform you that there is no such thing as a self-charging hybrid.

So now, finally, a decade and a half behind Nissan, GM, and Tesla, years behind VW and BMW and Jaguar and Audi and Porsche and Ford and Volvo and Honda and Rivian and Lucid and Nikola, Toyota has a mass-produced BEV, the bZ4X, yes, that's small b, capital Z, 4, Capital X. 

 

But even more bizarre that the name of the BEV is Toyota's new advertising campaign for the vehicle, with the slogan: "Beyond Zero."

I checked several times, and, no, that's not "Behind Zero," as in an honest admission that Toyota is way, way behind most of the rest of the world getting started on this. It's Beyond Zero. Because, as Toyota proudly says in their new ad campaigns, they want to go even farther than zero emissions, and have a positive effect on the planet, and that they have plans for many more BEV's.

Again: years and years behind everyone else.

But better years late, and with yet another ridiculous ad campaign, than never.  Welcome to the present day, Toyota. 

Yes, the bZ4X has actually been available for a year and a half. But the new advertising campaign makes me think that Toyota may actually be getting serious about BEV's. If they've fooled me again, then shame on me.

Bashing EV's, and Ecological Action in General

Some say that EV's are bad for the environment, because some pollution is involved in making them. I disagree, because I think you've got to measure their effect by comparing it to the effect of ICE vehicles. Yes, not owning a car at all would be even better. 

 

But saying that EV's are bad for the environment, imho, is like saying that rooftop solar panels are bad for the environment because it would be even better if humans just went extinct. Which some environmentalists actually want. See for example Jeff Gibbs and his recent, disgusting documentary Planet of the Humans, which basically takes a big long piss on everybody who's trying to combat climate change and pollution for not doing a 100% perfect job of it. News flash: nothing is 100% perfect, not everyone who's trying to help is a fool or a dupe, and it is possible that humans will reverse the damage we've done to the environment. People don't deserve to be castigated for trying to help. Jeff Gibbs is a huge jerk and a pathological misanthropist. He's not trying to help.

Improvement is improvement. Some ICE vehicles are, in fact, much cleaner than others. A hybrid is better for the environment than an ICE vehicle. An EV is better than a hybrid. Walking, riding a non-electric bicycle or taking public transportation is better than driving an EV. 

Misinformation or disinformation (deliberate misinformation) is bad. It tends to encourage people to think that their actions make no difference, and that they might as well just give up, keep polluting as much as anybody does, and get ready to die, because the whole planet is going to die soon and there's nothing we can do about it. Which is completely inaccurate, there are all sports of things we can do about it and are doing about it. We need to keep on doing those things, and doing more. For example, the charge that EV batteries are going to end up causing horrible pollution in landfills, besides coming from people who never before in their lives expressed any concern about pollution or landfills, also happens to be dead wrong: those batteries, after lasting much longer in EV's than anyone expected, will be used in other ways, such as storing energy in people's homes or for utilities, and when they finally do expire, they will be recycled. No part of them will go into landfills. So if you've been telling people that EV batteries will soon be choking landfills and killing us all, please stop, and inform yourself on the topic. Thank you very much.

Of course, the belief that global warming is a hoax and that burning coal doesn't harm living things and that windmills are causing birds to go extinct, and so forth, that form of misinformation and disinformation is bad, too, but, thank goodness, it's finally dying out. Which shows us that other forms can be overcome as well.

The charge that driving EV's causes people to stop worrying about other causes of climate crisis such as overconsumption and overpopulation, seems to be untrue as well. On the contrary, while a few EV owners may be unconscientious, massively-polluting pigs who own six huge EV's which are all powered by coal-generated electricity and never carpool, most tend to support climate science and renewable energy (including putting solar panels on their own roofs in a high percentage of cases), and to be better than average at reducing consumption of plastic, to be vegan more often than non-EV drivers, and in general: it's crap, the charge that driving an EV makes a person think they've done all they ever need to do for the environment, and they're done.

Thank goodness, more and more people already know all of the things I've said in this post, and it's getting harder and harder to attack EV's, or solar or wind energy, or climate science, or engaged, woke people in general, without looking like a complete fool.

Nonsense Used To Disparage Alternative Energy

Remember the claims that the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries used in hybrid and electric cars would generate much more pollution than would be averted by lower vehicle emissions? Or that Wind-electric turbines were killing massive amounts of birds, or that solar panels were killing turtles?

You don't? I suppose more of you might remember those claims if there had ever been anything to them.

How about this: people going with remarkable speed from claiming that wind and solar would never generate enough electricity to be significant, to claiming that they will generate too much electricity and overload the grids, leading to catastrophe?

I'm no engineer, but I can easily imagine a grid which would automatically switch off a source of electricity if and when it produced too much electricity.

Unfortunately, it's more difficult for me to imagine an end to sheer oil-industry-funded nonsense used against the spread of green energy.

We Can Cut Down On Petrochemical Consumption Right Now

Did I hear that correctly on Chris Hayes' show last week -- you can get solar panels installed on your house for free and pay for them later out of the money you make selling surplus electricity back to the grid? Maybe I didn't hear that correctly, or maybe I did, and it was a bit of solar-energy-industry hype which doesn't apply to every potential home-solar customer. Much of Hayes' segment on solar consisted of businessmen saying this and that and Chris reacting: Really? Wow! without seeming to have done a lot of fact checking before putting it all on the air.

However, it does seem that if it's not true for every house right now, it will be pretty soon.

Hayes pointed out that utilities don't like this. One more reason for utilities to be publicly-owned and like what's good for the public. I did hear someone say -- again, this didn't seem to have been fact-checked -- that utilities had brought brought something like 40 lawsuits against people who dared to try to free themselves from them, and had won in only 2 cases. 2 cases in Oklahoma, where people with solar panels on their houses must pay a tax. (Environmentalists in Oklahoma, stay strong! It MEANS something to be an environmentalist there! Alaska too!)

[PS, 30. May 2016: I heard correctly. And the information is accurate in most of the 50 states. In some states the legislatures and utilities have combined to screw you out of such possibilities -- for the present time. For the love of Clarence Darrow, educate yourself about what's going on around you and vote in state and local elections!]

Alfred Doeblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in 1929. Had I remembered correctly, were the passenger trains electric in Berlin in 1929? I had: on the 1st page of the 1st chapter, it reads: "Er ließ Elektrische auf Elektrische vorbeifahren[...]" ("He let electric after electric go by[...]") They called them "electrics," maybe because electric trains were still a novelty in 1929? Maybe not: London's Tube had electric trains in 1890, the Paris Métro had them in 1900, Cleveland and Denver in the 1880's. So why are some trains in the US, not just in the Punjab and Mexico, but also in the "Home of the Brave," still burning diesel oil in the year Two Thousand And For Crying Out Loud?

Actually, I think most of those trains are mostly diesel-electric hybrids by now. Big new ships are hybrids too.

You may've heard about that solar-powered plane circling the Earth recently. Did you know that there's still no passenger train service to or from Columbus or Phoenix? In Europe the trains stop at just about single little town -- and they're not hybrids, they're all-electric. And there are well-tended bicycle paths all over the place, riding a bike doesn't equal dodging cars and trucks.

I'm trying to make you angry. Angry at oil companies. BP. Exxon. Gazprom, which is basically just another name for Boris Putin. Angry at the politicians, mostly Republicans in the US, who keep the companies alive and their owners rich from continuing to endanger human life. Vote the bums out! Let's get those solar panels up. Help me and Chris Hayes shine more light on things like those Oklahoma utilities taxing people for daring to put solar panels on the roofs of their homes. Ask who killed the electric car in the 1990's and who's slowing it down today, and why you can't ride a train cross-country to Columbus or Phoenix, and why Amtrak isn't all-electric with all of its electricity coming from wind or solar, and why in most places in the US you can't walk or ride a bike separately from the motorized traffic, and other questions like that, and keep on asking and asking until you get something resembling intelligent answers. What do you say, how about if we attempt to stand up for ourselves and keep some anti-social billionaire creeps from wiping out the human species?