From IEEE [as in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] Spectrum, June 7:
It can often seem like an inevitability that humans will completely and utterly fail to keep our carbon emissions in check over the next decade, which is the most important step we can take to minimize the potentially disastrous impacts of climate change. As Gill Pratt wrote in a recent article he authored on Medium, “carbon is our enemy.”
Gill Pratt is the CEO of Toyota Research Institute, which was founded in 2015 to develop practical solutions in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and basically whatever else Toyota thinks might be important to its future, including climate change. Toyota is one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world, and as such, provides the means by which millions of people will emit tons of carbon every year. It’s easy to say that Toyota is therefore part of the problem, but for the foreseeable future, our global society simply can’t function without the vehicles that Toyota (and other auto manufacturers) produce. However, this doesn’t absolve Toyota of the responsibility that it should have for taking action, and the company is working toward complete carbon neutrality by 2050.
With 2050 being a while from now, these kinds of pledges are easy for a company like Toyota to make. But for a company that makes vehicles primarily powered by fossil fuels, a transition to carbon neutrality seems like an enormous challenge. When we spoke with Gill Pratt recently, he talked about his optimism that Toyota will be able to achieve its goals through a careful shift to renewables that emphasizes practicality, and that if we work hard enough, global carbon neutrality is still within reach.
IEEE Spectrum: Can you describe Toyota’s approach to minimizing carbon emissions over the life cycle of its vehicles?
Gill Pratt: My thinking, and the consensus within the company, is that there’s not a silver bullet answer to achieving our climate goal, which is zero net carbon by 2050. The reasons are as follows. Certainly, geographically, CO2 emitted anywhere is going to end up having an impact on the whole world. And CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a really long time—many, many centuries. So, the CO2 we emit now, we’re going to have to deal with for up to a thousand years. We look at CO2 emissions integrated over space and over time to understand the budget of CO2 that we can put out, while still keeping within a one and a half degrees target over pre-industrial levels. It’s really, really hard to do, and we are quickly running out of that budget.
The question for us is, How do we do our part with the cars that we sell? And we think that without a doubt, it’s not just one answer. If the world was all renewable power which had zero CO2 output, and if the world was full of charging points where people could charge up with that type of power, then, of course, BEVs [battery electric vehicles] would be a great answer.
We’d still have to solve the CO2 that’s emitted during their manufacturing, which is not small. But still, that would be a very good answer.
But it’s not true that the world is all renewable power, and we know that it’s going to take time for that infrastructure to get rolled out. So the question is, what’s the way to eliminate the most carbon integrated over both space and time, given the diversity of the circumstances that exist in the world? Our answer is that a huge part of it is BEVs and that there are other parts, too.
For Toyota, we’ve announced that 35 percent of our production is going to be BEVs within the next eight years—by 2030. This is incredibly fast and a very, very high percentage of our production, but it’s not 100 percent. So what’s the other 65 percent going to be? When we look at the actual impact in terms of lifetime emissions for the entire life cycle of a car, there are other alternatives which are almost as good, but are actually practical sooner. And that includes PHEVs [plug-in hybrid electric vehicles], which have both a battery and an engine in them. They act like a BEV over shorter distances, roughly 40 miles or so for the models we have now. And that means that you get most of the advantages of a BEV, but you’re not as dependent on the charging network for longer trips. Even HEVs [hybrid electric vehicles] have substantial carbon reductions. And then, of course, there are fuel-cell vehicles, too.
There has been some criticism of Toyota’s approach here—specifically, that Toyota should focus more on BEVs rather than continuing to produce a substantial amount of cars that use internal combustion in some form. How would you respond to that?
Pratt: In general, I think it’s important to not oversimplify the solution space, and to not make assumptions. We think the important thing is to be results-based, and we have made a very honest pledge to get to net-zero by 2050. The models that we’ve seen show that if everybody did that, we would be fine, so we believe that means we’re doing our part. And I think what is important, not just for us but for everybody, is to not try to prescribe the answer, and to not assume that there’s a single easy answer. The one thing that I’ve learned in all of the scientific work that I’ve done is that when you have a diversity of situations, one size does not fit all....
....MUCH MORE
That's the first time I've seen the 35% figure for electric vehicles. In calendar 2021 Toyota sold 10,495,548 automobiles. Toyota sells very few battery powered vehicles, around 1200 per month. To ramp up to 3.5 million is going to take some management wizardry.
Chairman Toyoda has his work cut out for himself.
Here's the spreadsheet for April 2022 sales (they are on a March 31 fiscal year):
Click here for detailed sales, production, and export results ("Detailed data (Excel)")
See "sales of electric vehicles" tab at bottom. That compares with hundreds of thousands of hybrid electrics.
Source: https://www.toyota-industries.com/investors/index.html
