Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 315 posts

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#71

Post by throwaway0a5e »

bildung wrote: post #21

The FUD accusations seem a bit hasty here. The linked Senate hearing doesn't seem to contain negative things about BEVs (it only criticizes the "narrow focus" on them), but instead opts for including hybrid and hydrogen, with the argument being that "recent data shows that plug-in hybrids can achieve nearly the same or better GHG reductions than BEVs depending on your daily driving patterns, the carbon in the electri…

Specific facts don't really matter in this case. What matters is that Toyota is engaging in behavior (lobbying against EV adoption mandates) that its prime customer demographics (in the West at least) consider icky.

Because of how media works these days writing about that is worth money. There's a lot of rage clicks and eyeball hours to be gleaned by pointing out to these people that yes, Toyota, a brand you people have been putting on a pedestal for a decade will sociopathically act in its own interest including influencing legislators, just like every other bigCo.

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#72

Post by chairmanwow1 »

bittercynic wrote: post #60
stevev wrote: post #49

In addition to not betting on evs, Toyota along with many other car makers fail to understand the human desire for safety and convenience in their vehicles through the use of current camera technologies and computer applications. A typical Tesla vehicle has 8 cameras thus providing a 360 degree vision to help assist the car/driver in a few applications. Security, safety and convenience. A close second in terms of saf…

>Sense of safety from the pcs is non-existent. This feels like a feature to me. I believe making drivers feel safer causes them to drive more dangerously.

Making drivers feel safer requires less focus on the “driving task” which IMO is a huge win.

Accidents happen frequently from driver fatigue and distraction

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#73

Post by sokoloff »

specialist wrote: post #69

Toyota should pull an Intel, and become the TSMC of automobiles. I've waggishly said I'd buy a Tesla made by Toyota. Surely there are other EV efforts that would benefit from Toyota's manufacturing prowess and capacity. -- Solid hydrogen fuels will be the next wave. Specifically non-gaseous, before anyone has a spaz attack. We know! Storage, transportation, distribution of H2 is not practical. Plasma Kinetics' has a…

How much of Toyota's very good outcomes are a matter of Toyota manufacturing versus Toyota design (to including continual improvement based on experience in the field)?

Many of Tesla's teething pains are self-inflicted at the design stage rather than being solely a manufacturing problem.

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#74

Post by drewda »

This looks like a rewrite/gloss of recent New York Times reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/climate/toyota-electric-h...

Same thing happened the other day when a gloss by The Verge was trending on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961606 I get that some folks may not want to pay to subscribe to The New York Times, but it's unfortunate that HN is sending so much traffic to sites that are just rewriting others' original reporting (and slapping their own advertising on it).

Perhaps another dynamic is that as these sites post their rewrites, HN posters can submit fresh URLs for the same topic over multiple days, rather than just the "canonical" NYT URL?

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#76

Post by modeless »

bluGill wrote: post #51
modeless wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen for cars was an obvious boondoggle for a decade or more. There's making guesses and then there's ignoring obvious trends. Toyota did the latter. Edit: And to prove that I thought it was obvious a decade ago, here's my opinion from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070004

To engineers it was, but to politics things are more complex. If the politics of the world demand hydrogen it doesn't matter how stupid the idea is you have to do it. Politics can shut your company down completely overnight, bad engineering can do it, but only after decades of bad decisions. Politically the powers were pushing hydrogen not long ago and nobody should be surprised if they do again.

Nobody was going to shut down Toyota for stopping hydrogen car development 10 years ago.

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#77

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

KineticLensman wrote: post #55
ajmurmann wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why mandate how emissions are cut, instead of heavily taxing carbon emissions and having the market find the best solution?

> heavily taxing carbon emissions and having the market find the best solution? Public perception may be one reason. If a carbon emissions tax directly leads to big increases in fuel costs, it can cause problems for drivers / vehicle users for whom fuel cost is a significant concern. The 2018 Gilet Jaune protests [0] in France were partly due to public dissatisfaction with fuel price rises. Regulatory instruments (su…

If societies answer to climate change is "Don't punish/impact poor people who negatively effect the environment" Then we might as well just pack our bags for Mars now.

Over the next 100-200 years, every (poor) 3rd world country is going to continue to get more and more industrialized and impact the environment more and more. Maybe I'm 100% off here but i'd be surprised if we (rich countries) can lower our emissions enough to offset the increases elsewhere in the world. And limiting the increases of "their" impact will directly effect "their" quality of life improvements unless "we" step in and aid them with more complex (expensive?) solutions. Likely at the expense of any domestic improvements that could be done without added cost of that aid.

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#78

Post by dapf »

bildung wrote: post #21

The FUD accusations seem a bit hasty here. The linked Senate hearing doesn't seem to contain negative things about BEVs (it only criticizes the "narrow focus" on them), but instead opts for including hybrid and hydrogen, with the argument being that "recent data shows that plug-in hybrids can achieve nearly the same or better GHG reductions than BEVs depending on your daily driving patterns, the carbon in the electri…

May I ask, what business does the Senate have on what car you would be buying?

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#79

Post by ricw »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #44

The Japanese car companies have done pretty poorly in the 2010's in supporting the energy transition. Toyota has been extremely slow to adapt after the Prius, which makes sense because of their ridiculously large volume of sales of basic, gas-efficient passenger vehicles. I give Toyota big props for the Prius, which was the original Green Vehicle 15-20 years ago, and still is a HUGE player in the efficiency space. II…

Toyota in particular has been quite dirty and backwards facing. They strongly opposed the tightening of vehicle emissions standards in the USA as one of three companies (fiat-Chrysler and GM being the others). They are constantly lobbying against EV tech, whilst pushing hydrogen as a technology which is no viable alternative in the medium or near term future (this can be seen as a big oil ploy as hydrogen is and will be made using “natural gas” / methane). Plug-in electric only became a thing with Toyota very recently, despite them having had hybrids for decades.

All quite a sorry state for one of the largest car companies out there.

At this point, they’re doing more harm then good and I’d call them a dirty company and would avoid buying any of their products. They are wasting all their good will that they gained due to them pushing hybrids.

Re: Toyota has stepped up lobbying to preserve its investments in hybrids, hydrogen

#80

Post by dapf »

stevev wrote: post #49

In addition to not betting on evs, Toyota along with many other car makers fail to understand the human desire for safety and convenience in their vehicles through the use of current camera technologies and computer applications. A typical Tesla vehicle has 8 cameras thus providing a 360 degree vision to help assist the car/driver in a few applications. Security, safety and convenience. A close second in terms of saf…

If that is so, just let the market punish Toyota.

If they bet wrong, they will lose, unless the State bails them out.

Post reply on HN