PJMedia: Let’s stipulate a couple of facts right at the top: Toyota makes a lot of cars, so many that it’s the world’s largest or second-largest auto manufacturer every year. Toyota makes a lot of good, reliable cars. The Corolla, for instance, may not be flashy but the little things will go for a quarter-million miles or more and they mostly just run without breaking down much. Change the oil when you’re supposed to and you’re probably good to go.
Let’s stipulate one more fact: Whether cars keep burning gas or run on electricity, Toyota is poised to make and sell millions of electric vehicles. It already has the game-changing solid-state battery coming on line. It launched the Prius way back in 1997. Toyota has not only not resisted the adaptation of EVs, it has led the way. Fundamentally, Toyota does not care if cars are powered by gas or nuclear fusion engines as long as it maintains its position and sells millions of them.
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. more
But we have plenty of coal and coal plants are easy and fast to build.
Ridiculous!
Bring a box of mason jars and a hose and follow me to the unicorn farm.
Even IF we had the electricity ….we don’t have the infrastructure to provide the electricity.
THORIUM!!!!
I’ve been screaming this for over a dozen years!
https://energyfromthorium.com/
http://thorconpower.com/
The USA developed it in the 50’s and 60’s. Then abandoned it. Now it’s being develped by a foreign entity using OUR DESIGN!
There was already enough thorium mined during the Manhattan Project to fuel the USA easily for the next Century. It’s sitting in a stockpile somewhere in the desert. There are thousands of years worth right here in the USA.
And this limits how far you can go on a road trip. Less liberty. That seems to be behind everything the left pushes. And it takes X amount of energy to take a car from one point to another no matter what energy you use. There’s no magic solution.
The Green New Deal is about the submission of America, to rely on China.
90% of the minerals needed for solar panels and high efficiency batteries come from China.
If they take away your fuel, you’ll have to walk to the revolution.
If you took a whole bunch of politicians and buried them really deeply and left them there for a really long time, I bet you could drill some wells and pump up enough lard that when refined it could power a whole lot of muscle cars, SUVs, and duallies. Poetic justice, eh?
…bunch of politicians and greenie loonies…
This electricity claim is disputed
I truly believe that the oil and coal we are burning is a result of the atomic breakdown of large atomic elements in the magma in the earth’s core, breaking down into hydrogen and carbon in the intense heat and pressure, then forming into complex hydrocarbons as they perk to the surface. There is no way for all this oil and coal to be decayed plant and animal matter and also be so far down under the surface of the earth. They’re finding it miles below the surface.
@Walpurgis: “Less liberty.”
Yep. Couple your plugged-in electric vehicle with a smart meter and your vehicle’s battery becomes an energy storage device that the electric company can draw power from when the need/want.
“Funny, it should have been fully charged by now.”
@Jethro
I agree with both of your arguments completely.
Thorium apparently did not go boom enough for the military and they really wanted a Yuge Blammo.
There is no way that the huge reserves of oil and gasses that we currently use as fuel are solely dinosaurs, whale turds, & rotting cabbage.
How else can you explain all the OIL under the arctic where cold blooded dinosaurs would never have lived and way under the gulf of Tequila.
Jethro
What if the oil is the hydraulic damper for the earths crust. Removing it causes additional earthquakes and volcanoes.
Also, we all knew that we had nowhere near the Hydro capacity to power the vehicles needed.
California already has unstable hydro 3 months of the year.
Good luck if Home & business heating switched from natural gas & Oil over to all out Hydro. Most newer homes have a 100 Amp service with many older homes still using 60 amps. In an all electric world the minimum a house would need is 200 Amps.
@Jethro – COBALT-THORIUM-G !!!
There’s a bunch of uranium sitting around these parts I can t you have …
@Flip
They will easily be able to control your mobility & freedom by sucking the juice right out of your car battery in very Hot or Cold weather.
The Government will oversee the Utilities and will easily lock you down into your own little bubbles.
Sounds very COVID-1984 to me!
$900 Billion in stimulus money would build plenty of safe efficient nuclear plants.
Your entire lifetime’s need of energy is stored in a fist-full of thorium….AND…you can hold it in your hand because it is not radioactive until struck with a neutron in the reactor – then it becomes uranium 233.
Hey years ago NYS had a small solar powered car with solar panels on its roof. It was always parked in the dark lower levels of the South Mall in Albany, NY plugged into an outlet charging. I never saw it out in the sunlight charging.
What makes you think you’ll ever convince our brain washed government leaders want to accept that truth? They need to milk all the money they can out of us sheeple to send to other countries as fodder for kick backs into their pockets, like Biden.
C’mon now. All we need to charge the EV’s are diesel powered generators!
Actually, Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell car. We just need the infrastructure and that will be much easier than generating electricity to charge up the traditional EV’s. They emit water and tests show that they are very safe.
But we are told they are ZERO EMISSIONS vehicles.
I assume the electricity used to charge these comes from fairy pixie dust.
…speaking as someone who has managed a fleet of autonomous battery powered industrual cargo vehicles for 25 years, I can tell you for certain that battery powered vehicles are expensive to purchase and costly to maintain, the batteries are not difficult to damage with jarring or improper charging and maintenance, are expensive to replace, the manufacturers don’t promise to make them forever which is HUGELY important because they have a weight and configuration SPECIFIC to that vehicle, and that disposal can be problematic, just to hit SOME of the low lights.
They BARELY make sense in a low speed, indoors, climate controlled, dedicated duty oveure being serviced by trained people who are paid to do it, so I can’t IMAGINE they’re a good idea for every idgit who knows nothing about cars now other than where the gas goes…
RadioMattM
DECEMBER 23, 2020 AT 7:01 PM
“…Actually, Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell car. We just need the infrastructure and that will be much easier than generating electricity to charge up the traditional EV’s. They emit water and tests show that they are very safe.”
…that’s what they thought on the Hindenberg too, how’d that work out anyway…
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/files/oss/styles/hd/public/screen_shot_2017-03-21_at_3.25.12_pm.png?itok=1WU14dix×tamp=1490124366
H2 is only useful as a feedstock for liquid hydrocarbon synfuels or as feedstock for ammonia production. H2 must be extracted from other things. It is not naturally occuring as H2. The energy cycle takes more input than output.
See: Energy and The Hydrogen Economy:
https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/hyd_economy_bossel_eliasson.pdf
and: https://phys.org/news/2006-12-hydrogen-economy-doesnt.html
If people will steal a car battery worth $100, how long do you think a $200,000 fuel cell will last?
Thorium has uses and problems. But it is part of the overall solution:
https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html
If anyone wants to understand the options for a Thorium cycle, read this carefully: https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1450_web.pdf
The standard Tesla EV charger is 60 amps, 230 vac, or 13.8 kW.
US homes are wired for 200 A, 240 VAC, or 48 kW, since the 1980s.
Older homes may have 100 to 150 A services. ie, 24 – 36 kW.
However….
The distribution transformer is rated to serve 4 or 5 homes at about 7 kW / home. So it is limited to about 40 to 50 kw.
If you want to plug in an EV, the first 2 homes get power. Or, you get 4 homes that can choose to charge their car or heat/cool their home, or have hot water, or run a dryer.
If you want a “fast charge” EV charger, it takes 120 amps, or 27 kW.
Once EV charging is more than “an odd pittance”, the distribution lines, transformers, substations, transmission lines, and switchgear, all have to be doubled or tripled to accomodate the higher loads. This is not a trivial issue. Try 2 to 4 Million dollars/mile for transmission lines, 1-2 Million/mile for distribution, and a 3 to 5 year leadtime for substation transformers and switchgear.
USA has 1200 GW of generation. USA consumes 13 Million barrels/day of petroleum for transportation. That is 921 GW/hrs of generation. So you need to double the US grid capacity to “charge” the EVs in 24 hrs. If you want it faster than that, 3 or 4 times grid capacity is needed.
It has taken 120 years and 10 Trillion dollars to get what we have now as grid status.
Whatever happens at night? Or when the wind isn’t blowing? Continental Blackout?
Learn about Black Start. It takes 6 times the power that “was” consumed at the point of blackout, to restart the grid. Where does that come from?
Unless you like the Dark Ages, misery, poverty, pestilence, death, and servitude, why not keep the grid as it now works? Reliable, affordable, maintainable, accessible, and durable?
Liberal navel gazing @ss hats don’t know about reactive power, dispatch, voltage collapse, frequency collapse, grid collapse, designated swing unit reactive power providers, or lots of other things required to make modern life tolerable.
Smart people would “just say No” to Unicorn Farts and Pixie Dust “solutions” to actual, physical, real, issues. But then, again, far too many people “think” they understand grid scale reactive power systems and far too many actually understand them.
far too few actually understand reactive power systems. Sorry for that.
@Lance
I’m curious about your name and your knowlege of energy technology. Are you familiar with this guy?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Larson
Completely agree oil and gas are not from dinosaurs, but dinos did live in the Arctic regions. Fossils show this.
The pre-flood world was WAY different than it is now. Mostly land, it had a water canopy above which pressurized the atmosphere, The enormous amount of plant life made the oxygen level in the atmosphere about 50% higher – @ 30% instead of 20% like now.
It was a hyper-baric earth with even temperatures everywhere.
The whole world was inhabitable then instead of the approximate 3% we have today.
This is why people lived to 900+ and the reptiles never stopped growing and were able to support those large bodies with such small nostrils and heads.
Dinosaurs lived at the poles.
The Bible explains what we find hard to explain on earth today. Real science backs it up with what we find all over the world. Godless scientists make up scientifically impossible solutions for what we find shouting the creation record at us.