Toyota to electrify all models by 2025

Toyota has announced that all of its cars will be available with either an electric, hybrid or a fuel cell drivetrain within seven years as part of a major stepping stone to achieve its Environmental Challenge 2050 announcement made two years ago.

The challenge set by the Japanese maker to itself will see its own new car global emissions reduced by 90 per cent compared to 2010 levels and requires a significant number of cars sold to be electrified.

Read the Drive story - “Toyota to electrify all models by 2025.”

Beijing’s 67,000 taxis to go electric.

Beijing's nearly 70,000 taxis
will soon be electric. 

Plans have been announced to replace Beijing’s 67,000 petrol powered taxis with electric vehicles (EVs), in a bid to combat the capital’s crippling air pollution.

Under the move, Beijing’s nearly 70,000 petrol powered taxi fleet will gradually be replaced with EVs, and any new taxis on the road will be electric.

The electric transition is estimated to cost taxi operators around 9 billion yuan ($1.3 billion).

A conventional car costs approximately $10,000, while an electric car costs double that figure at $20,000.

Read the ClimateAction story - “Beijing’s 67,000 taxis to go electric.”

Heading down the road of the 'autonomous' car - a private and yet public mistake

A Melbourne designer set to become a global leader of car design says that within 12 months, car companies will have the capacity to produce "autonomous" or driverless cars. 

Michael Simcoe with the 1969 Holden
 Hurricane - he says we will have
"autonomous" cars within a year.
 

Michael Simcoe has achieved something no one from outside the US ever has, he has been appointed to the top design job at General Motors in Detroit.

Mr Simcoe has come a long way since his days as a student at Koonung High School in Melbourne's east and later RMIT - he will now head a design team of about 2500 in 10 design centres around the world for a company that produces 10 million cars a year.

And what does the 33-year veteran of GM Motors see as the next big change in design? Autonomous cars.

He said the public's perception of autonomous cars had changed.

"Once upon a time if you asked a customer or someone in the street about autonomous driving, no driver, no steering wheel, they probably would have laughed at you," he said.

Read Jason Dowling’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Watch out! Cars that can drive themselves are closer than you think.”

(Cars, be they driverless, autonomous, electric, or otherwise are not in and of themselves the issue, rather it is the private ownership of those cars and their anarchical-like use of them that demands an energy and space intensive infrastructure that is wasteful and a significant contributor to the worsening of Earth’s climate system – “worsening” in terms of how our activity is bringing changes to the weather that are antithetical to human needs.

The “driverless, autonomous, electric, or otherwise” car of tomorrow must be part of a public owned and used fleet, linked with an equally intensive public inter-town/city public transport system, that users book with their smartphone and then once they have completed their “movement”/journey the car returns to its predetermined based awaiting another user.

Such vehicles would be more convenient for the user, the road infrastructure would be more compact; energy would be saved in every sense; deaths and injury resulting from road accidents would be almost non-existent; parking would no longer be an issue, and congestion would be little more than a memory – technologically it is possible right now, psychologically it is so utopian that most people haven’t even yet imagined the idea – Robert McLean.)

The privately owned car is dead, now it is the electric, public pod

The driverless, electric Google controlled,
public pod just must be how we get
 about  in the future. The private car is dead.

Privately owned cars, driverless, electric or otherwise, are a problem for a clutch of reasons.

Removing the need for a car to be piloted by a human will not erase, at all, the global carbon dioxide emissions associated with road transport or the infrastructure from which it is supported.

The trouble arises from the fact that motor vehicles are privately owned and so are used only by an individual, or his or her family or those who work for whatever company that owns the vehicle, for transport and so has limited use.

The vehicle, despite its limited use (it’s driven 20km before work, parked all day and then driven home at the end of the day) still consumes an identical amount of energy, resources and space as a car used non-stop, with the difference being the amount of fuel used.

Most privately owned vehicles are grossly inefficient, both in terms of cost and their impact on our environment.

Many people still have ideas and values rooted in the 20^th Century and difficulties arising from climate change, worsened by the fascination we have for a privately owned motor vehicle, demand that we shift, faster than quickly, into this century.

The 20^th Century illustrated to us that technology could resolve any human difficulty and while that became startling obvious in the post-World War Two quarter century, many of us have intellectually remained mired in that golden innovative era.

Well, we have the technology and if we were to apply it today we could create and build a public transit system that would make the privately owned, driverless electric car as about relevant today as the dinosaur

The only thing that stands between us and the creation of a sophisticated, efficient and fast public transit system is our imagination and the desire of corporations for profit.

It is our consumptive behaviour and the intent by corporations in securing profit and growth is another barrier between what exists and a sophisticated and efficient public transit system that can be, and must be, driverless, electric cars that are public and so available to and used by everyone.

A privately owned, and so anarchic car is the real problem.

Read Aisha Dow’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Driverless cars could make Melbourne congestion worse.”

Zero emissions buses about to go into London service

F

ully electric double-decker bus with new compact battery to launch in autumn, as London prepares for ultra-low emission zone, reports China Daily.

For years, London’s red double-decker buses have dominated the capital, where nearly 1,000 routes are operated by 8,700 buses, many of them double-deckers. Although there has been a gradual move to hybrid vehicles, many are still diesel-powered.

This will all change in October, when the world’s first pure electric zero-emission double-decker bus, designed and built by Chinese automotive manufacturer BYD, will enter service in London.

The electric double-decker bus represents a technology breakthrough in public transportation, said Isbrand Ho, managing director of BYD Auto Europe.

Read the Guardian story - “Chinese-built zero-emissions electric bus prepares for service inLondon”.

Misunderstandings about hydrogen reach Toyota's highest echelons

T

he many misunderstandings about hydrogen appear to have filtered up to the highest echelons of the Toyota car company.

Even though it was already involved with Tesla, probably the most successful all-electric car manufacturer, Toyota has plumped for hydrogen fuel cell cars.

 A ClimateProgress story - “Tesla Trumps Toyota: The Seven Reasons Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars AreStalled” – tells us that “For reasons that mostly defy logic, the otherwise shrewd car company, Toyota, is placing a large bet on hydrogen fuel cell cars, starting with the Mirai. At the same time, it has backed away from its partnership with Tesla to build an all-electric vehicle.

Author, Joe Romm, says, “Toyota is going to lose this bet. There is little reason to believe hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) will ever beat electric vehicles in the car market.”

The question and confusion of 'sustainability'

The sign in the loo at the Cooroy library.

Sustainability is one of those words that can be twisted and used to fill almost any void, make it impossible to argue the illegible and frequently postures arguments that defy both reason and logic.

A sign in the public loos at the Cooroy library is just one such moment.

The toilets in the new near building were originally equipped with paper towel dispensers, but now, in the name of the Sunshine Coast Regional Council, desiring to become more sustainable, the paper towel is gone to be replaced by an electric hand dryer.

Those who understand public health argue that a clean paper towel is actually more hygienic and an electric hand dryer for the wiping motion plays a significant role in riding a person’s hands of germs.

Beyond that, and ignoring health for a moment, what is more sustainable, using paper towels or burning coal to create the power to drive the electric hand-dryer?

Of course, maybe the library has solar power and that would obviously make the electric hand-dryer for more sustainable, hands-down.