dgpcolorado
Well-known member
No surprise to those of us who have been paying attention to Toyota's strategy:
Electric cars won't spread even with rapid chargers: Toyota engineer
Electric cars won't spread even with rapid chargers: Toyota engineer
Of course, this comes from the engineer in charge of the hydrogen fuel cell car boondoggle.(Reuters) - Battery-powered electric vehicles don't have a practical future as a long-range alternative to conventional cars even if technological breakthroughs allow them to be charged quickly, a top engineer at Toyota Motor Corp said on Thursday.
Electric vehicle (EV) supporters have touted developing high-speed charging technology as the way forward for cars like Nissan Motor Co's Leaf. But Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of Toyota's hydrogen fuel-cell car Mirai, said that would guzzle so much energy at once as to defeat the purpose of the EV as an ecologically sound form of transportation.
"If you were to charge a car in 12 minutes for a range of 500 km (310 miles), for example, you're probably using up electricity required to power 1,000 houses," Tanaka told a small group of reporters at the first test-drive event for the production version of the Mirai, the world's only mass-market fuel-cell car.
"That totally goes against the need to stabilize electricity use on the grid."