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Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

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Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#61

Post by ChatGTP »

nostrademons wrote: post #31
legohead wrote: post #17

Toyota is so weird about their EV stance. What I particularly like about EVs is their low maintenance. You remove many components that are required with ICE. Regenerative braking makes your brake pads last a crazy amount longer. And now with this ammonia engine we are adding even more components to the vehicle? No thanks. Not to even mention the fuel distribution problem.

It destroys a lot of the competitive advantage Toyota has. Toyota is very, very good at making mechanical components to very high precision & quality levels. They've built up this core competency by careful attention to detail over decades. It's one of the main reasons why people buy Toyotas. With EVs, you remove many of the components that are required with ICE. Hence, it doesn't matter how good you are at making th…

They're also operating in a country where life long employment is the norm, people work very hard to get a job at Toyota, it's seen as quite an honor to work there. They're facing a crisis here. In my opinion they either adapt and win, or the majority of staff will lose their job anyway.

They can't fire tens of thousands of factory workers so they're doing absolutely everything they can to keep those production lines going in some way or another.

I personally don't understand why they can't retrain those staff and build other things such as an EV charging station factory. But yeah, I guess they have little imagination or drive to actually solve the problem and instead play with stupid moonshot ideas like this.

The only thing they have left is a great reputation for building ICE cars. Not sure how long that will last though if this madness continues.

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#62

Post by ChatGTP »

johnea wrote: post #21
ClassyJacket wrote: post #9

Toyota will do anything except take electric cars seriously. Shame. They were the industry leaders with hybrids.

Toyota, along with all other Japanese auto makers, have developed the worlds most long running internal combustion engines. Now, electric is threatening to completely eliminate their market advantage of high longevity cars. So, they'll come up with any excuse not to switch away from complex mechanisms. Since this is their primary advantage in the market. Hybrid, which is still a gas powered vehicle, is even more comp…

What's also kind of stupid is, if they entered the EV market, people would just buy them on their reputation alone. This hope is fading now as the competition takes over, but they absolutely no doubt would be able to build a reliable EV and once that reliable EV was for sale world wide, it would be a huge success just because people love Toyota.

I personally think they could've dominated the market on reputation alone.

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#63

Post by ephbit »

jfengel wrote: post #51
brohee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you dismiss hydrogen as fuel made from renewable electricity, and frankly you should on density and safety basis, the two most practical options are methane and ammonia. Ammonia got an easy electrity to fuel process, easier than methane that starts with hydrogen. Ammonia is kinda nasty but used plenty (for example in cooling) without a terrible safety record. Not sure that safety is a better argument against it th…

If you're making methane and ammonia, why not go further and make hydrocarbons? I'm sure you lose some energy in the process, but you gain the ability to re-use all of your existing infrastructure unchanged.

I think the motivations to produce ammonia instead of hydrocarbons are:

For one, energy efficiency. For hydrocarbons you need carbon. Either you take carbon from existing renewable hydrocarbon waste streams (biomass) or you pull CO2 from the air. The first doesn't make much sense because those hydrocarbons would better be used to produce chemicals. The second (direct air capture DAC of CO2) is - as everyone knows - hugely energy intensive, because CO2 comes in concentration of 420 ppm.

Yes, I know the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia is hugely energy intensive as well.

But if you regard ammonia synthesis as well as synfuel synthesis as fundamentally the same processes - both reduce elements in their oxidized forms (C as in CO2, H as in H20, N as in N2) to store energy in them - you need one extra heavily energy intensive step to get synthetic hydrocarbons compared to the sythesis of ammonia: pulling CO2 from the air where it's got a really low concentration (420 ppm).

Compare that to nitrogen which is the main component of our atmosphere (780,000 ppm) and thus much less energy intensive to isolate.

So neither source of carbon to produce CxHy makes sense in the long term IMO.

Also, as soon as you use/burn the synthesized hydrocarbons, the carbon ends up back in the atmosphere (at least in mobile applications where you can hardly capture it) which goes against the main goal of putting less CO2 in there.

Ammonia on the other hand requires nitrogen which is abundant in the atmosphere and thus relatively easy to get (compared to the carbon from DAC). The hydrogen that's needed is also readily available in many places, in the worst case from sea water.

As the goal is a reduction of the amount of CO2 emissions, in the really long-term, hydrocarbons will probably just be the less efficient option compared to ammonia. And since all existing infrastructure does get exchanged/altered in the long-term anyway, slowly switching to ammonia won't mean wasting this infrastructure.

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#65

Post by oofdere »

spacemadness wrote: post #30
legohead wrote: post #17

Toyota is so weird about their EV stance. What I particularly like about EVs is their low maintenance. You remove many components that are required with ICE. Regenerative braking makes your brake pads last a crazy amount longer. And now with this ammonia engine we are adding even more components to the vehicle? No thanks. Not to even mention the fuel distribution problem.

I also like quiet. EVs gave me some hope for less noise pollution since Americans will never give up their cars. Reintroducing ICE brings us back to square one.

EV's are only quieter inside of the car, at speed they're just as loud as ICE cars, sometimes louder. [0]

If we're going to reduce car noise, the only option is to make them go slower and move them away from residential areas.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#66

Post by tempestn »

rini17 wrote: post #54
BenoitP wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota is the top company in global market share [1]. They are way more affected by global systemic issues than others. This means: * They can't retreat into a niche * Their bread and butter is efficiency, accumulated through tears and scale effects through decades of experience. That's a pretty deep moat. All that is partially reset with an industry-wide change * Global copper, cobalt, lithium reserves (new deposits…

If they expect the classical BEVs to run into problems with supply of the metals, that still does not explain the weird choices Toyota makes. Why don't they explore options that don't require consumers directly handling large amounts of dangerous substances like hydrogen or anhydrous ammonia.

Options such as?

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#67

Post by tempestn »

oofdere wrote: post #65
spacemadness wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like quiet. EVs gave me some hope for less noise pollution since Americans will never give up their cars. Reintroducing ICE brings us back to square one.

EV's are only quieter inside of the car, at speed they're just as loud as ICE cars, sometimes louder. [0] If we're going to reduce car noise, the only option is to make them go slower and move them away from residential areas. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

They're clearly not. Source: my ears listening to EVs vs ICE cars going by me on the road. At high speeds and/or on wet roads, tire noise can dominate, but in the city there's far more noise from engine/exhaust.

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#68

Post by robryk »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #36
brohee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you dismiss hydrogen as fuel made from renewable electricity, and frankly you should on density and safety basis, the two most practical options are methane and ammonia. Ammonia got an easy electrity to fuel process, easier than methane that starts with hydrogen. Ammonia is kinda nasty but used plenty (for example in cooling) without a terrible safety record. Not sure that safety is a better argument against it th…

Some argue that liquid nitrogen is a decent option for short range. It's cheap, can be contained in relatively low-cost tanks (compared to hydrogen, certainly), and can be refilled quickly. The LN2 doesn't actually burn. It's more like a steam engine, where the pressure from the vaporizing nitrogen drives pistons or turbines. The nice thing here is that the LN2 comes straight from the atmosphere and goes straight bac…

That seems to have energy density lower than even batteries though.

When you vaporize LN2, you apparently need 0.2MJ/kg of heat. The amount of mechanical energy you extract out of vaporizing that (when heat is provided by the environment) can't exceed the heat required to do so (because condensing the nitrogen back into LN2 is exothermic). Apparently current Li-ion batteries have ~250 Wh/kg = ~0.9MJ/kg energy density, which is significantly higher than the upper bound above.

Am I mistaken somewhere?

Re: Toyota CEO: "Our ammonia engine is the end of EV's" [video]

#69

Post by jeo123 »

nucleative wrote: post #35

"A company cannot disrupt itself" - Clayton Christensen Toyota has mastered precision replicable production of internal combustion engines and related components. This has been Toyota's perpetual money tree. I'm sure the reward systems inside Toyota management favor those who improve it and protect it. I'm sure at first they laughed at these pipsqueak EV guys with software backgrounds. Toyota engineers who propose an…

Whether Toyota will pivot to EV or not doesnt matter. This is solar all over again. The Chinese EV market absolutely dominates any EV markets in the world. BYD alone would make Tesla look like just Porche vs Toyota. I forsee Tesla will just fizzled out. Their solar already gone. Their cybertruck is a joke. Their sales in China after so many years with advantage of tech and factory still dwarfed by almost every other EVs in China. Now imagine those Chinese EVs are Huawei and let loose.
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