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.

Electric Vehicles From General Motors

I would like to think that information and education can be very important, that they can change people's minds and that changed minds can lead to changed behavior.

Stop me if you've heard this one: In the 1990's, California, dominated by Democratic legislators at the time, passed some laws, and one result of those laws was that if General Motors wanted to continue to do business in California they had to manufacture a certain number of plug-in electric cars. GM made their first electric car, the EV-1, launched in 1996, leased every one they made and had a waiting list of customers years long. That's right, they leased them, they refused to actually sell any of them.

Then in 1999 Republicans took control of the California legislature and repealed the legal requirement that these electric cars be made. Rather than continue to manufacture this wildly-popular vehicle, GM recalled and destroyed every single one of them. This was much easier to do since the cars had been leased instead of sold, and so legally remained the property of GM the entire time. When the recall was announced, many drivers offered to buy their EV1's. All of these offers to buy were turned down. It was more important to GM to make it completely clear that they weren't going to be pushed around by California liberals, than to make lots of money continuing to do what the liberals had forced them to start doing. (And presumably the environment was much further down the list of things which were important to GM.)

In 2010, GM started selling its 2nd electric car, the Volt. The Volt has only recently passed the 100,000 mark in worldwide sales. The Volt seems not to be well-liked by GM execs. Bob Lutz has been the most prominent supporter of the Volt within GM. Lutz is one of the most well-known "car guys" in the history of Detroit. (A "car guy" is an executive at an automotive company who also is an engineer and actually takes part in designing and manufacturing the cars. Opposed to the "car guys" are the "bean counters," specialists in finance.) The fact that Lutz has supported the Volt project seems to have hurt his image in some circles of the auto-exec world. It has also made him popular among environmentalists -- or at least it did, until he actually spoke with some environmentalists, and made it plain that he regards global warming to be a myth, and that his enthusiasm for electric vehicles is purely financial, stoked by fears of a future where gasoline costs $30 a gallon.

Toyota began selling the Prius around the time that the EV-1 was, literally, scrapped, and has sold 1.7 million of them in the US and over 5 million worldwide. It seems that different companies have different business models.

Fun Green Facts

In September 2014, Toyota passed the 7 million mark of hybrid vehicles sold worldwide. More than 4.7 million of those vehicles were Priuses and variants of the Prius. In 2001, the 5th year in which Toyota offered hybrid vehicles, they sold 36,900 of them worldwide; in their 10th year, 2006, they sold 312,500; and in 2013 they sold 1,279,200.

A hybrid-electric car was designed by Ferdinand Porsche, who later designed the Volkswagen Beetle and whose son Ferry founded the Porsche sports-car brand, and exhibited to the public in 1900, the first of several hybrid vehicles Porsche made. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, electric vehicles were fashionable among wealthy car owners but were never mass-produced.

From 2003 through 2014, 712,000 road-ready plug-in electric vehicles have been sold, and sales in 2014 alone accounted for 293,245 of that total.

A few years ago the 1st transatlantic voyage using only solar power was made.

In 2013 more than 38 gigawatts of solar electric capacity was added to grids around the world, bringing the solar electric total to 139 gigawatts. According to the WWEA, in June 2014 the global capacity of wind-generated electricity was 336 gigawatts. Denmark currently gets a third of its electricity from wind.

All that we need oil for any more is to build the stuff which will replace it. (And yes, Ozzie Zehner, it's also very good when people consume less energy. Riding a bike is better for the environment than driving a Tesla, and just walking is even better than that. You're right about all of that.))