Hyundai Ioniq 5 N simulates engine revs and gearchanges in ‘Ignition’ mode
How involved would you like to be? You might remember that last year Toyota filed a patent for a battery-electric vehicle with an H-pattern gearshift, so that an electric powertrain would respond like a manual internally combusting car, complete with a clutch pedal that felt like the real thing, even though, like the gearlever, it would be false.
As yet, no Toyota has arrived with this hardware, but Hyundai’s N performance division has taken a similar concept.
2020 Hyundai IONIQ (Image: Hyundai)
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is the first electric product of Hyundai’s N fun division. “For N, fun to drive is the highest priority. Electrification has transformed our lives but [so far] not our hearts,” Till Wartenberg, N’s vice-president, told me before we drove a prototype. “Car enthusiasts are the last group who can be electrified,” he said. I have a feeling he’s right. I like electric power, but it’s quite telling that when I recount the most fun I’ve had in EVs, an original Tesla Roadster, a Renault Twizy and a Nissan Leaf with plastic ‘drift tyres’ at the back all still feature heavily.
Finally, the Ioniq 5 N on a circuit eclipses all of those. It’s meant to be the car that finally sucks enthusiasts in, and part of the way it does so is by giving us the chance to pull on our muscle memory and aural sensibilities.
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Amid new leadership changes, Toyota is reshuffling its business structure, claiming the “time is right” to accelerate battery electric vehicle (BEV) development. Toyota says it will take a new EV-first approach, starting with its luxury brand Lexus.
Last week, Electrek reported Toyota’s longtime CEO Akio Toyoda was stepping down from his position amid mounting pressure to accelerate EV development and keep up in a rapidly changing industry.
The news comes after the 66-year-old grandson to the company’s founder has been one of the most outspoken opponents of going all in on electric vehicles.
Electric car on the road. ‘We are literally driving on sunshine,’ write James and Lesley Willis. Photograph: EPA
Toyoda insisted on sticking with a hybrid approach (including fuel cell, EV, hybrid, and gas vehicles) despite the industry moving forward with zero-emissions EV technology, putting the company on track to rank as one of the world’s most obstructive companies in 2022 with oil industry leaders.
After announcing his departure, Toyoda alluded to the fact that his successor will be tasked with leading the automaker’s transformation as it enters a new mobility era.
Incoming president Koji Sato is set to take the reins on April 1, 2023. Sato addressed the situation, saying Toyota will prove it’s committed to making cars better through “concrete actions and products, such as accelerating the shift to electrification.” He added the timing is now right to accelerate EV development with a new approach.
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Toyota Motor became the world’s most successful car company through the spirit of or continuous improvement. Now, with electric vehicles on the rise, kaizen might prove to be its undoing.
Kaizen is all about evolution and refinement. It helped Toyota (ticker: TM) break into the U.S. market with the Toyopet Crown sedan in the late 1950s, take 5% of market share by the 1980s with its fuel-efficient Corollas, and finally become the top-selling auto maker in North America. Along the way, it became the car manufacturer to emulate,…
Charging Station in Sunderland (Image: Fastned)
Investors have piled into energy stocks this year, sending prices sharply higher, but bargains remain in the sector. Shell, the United Kingdom–domiciled energy giant, is one.
Shell (ticker: SHEL) has some of the most attractive assets in the global energy business, notably the world’s largest liquefied natural-gas business and the biggest network of service stations. But at a recent $55, its U.S.-listed shares trade for just six times projected 2022 earnings of $9 a share. Exxon Mobil (XOM), at $86, fetches nine times estimated…
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The bZ4X leaves us wondering who Toyota made this for?
Toyota isn’t the first automotive brand that pops to mind when it comes to battery electric vehicles.
Toyota might be the largest automaker in the world — reportedly selling more than 9.5 million vehicles globally and stealing the crown from Volkswagen Group — but the company has been markedly absent from the battery electric vehicle (BEV) space.
That is, until the 2023 Toyota bZ4X came along.
VW ID.3 electric car in camouflage wrap (Image: Volkswagen)
Toyota has shown off 30 different hybrid, battery-electric and alternative powertrain concepts in everything from a pickup to a sports car and has promised to deliver them all by 2030. The company has even committed a whooping $17.6 billion investment in battery technology and announced that it will build a battery plant in North Carolina.
For now, the 2023 Toyota bZ4X is the lone representative of the company’s EV plans — an awkwardly named crossover that raises some questions about what the company really believes to be the future of battery-electric vehicles and just how committed they are to the entire thing.
TechCrunch, along with other media, had a chance to get a first drive of the Toyota bZ4X. Here’s what we found.
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Over the last few years, a war has been brewing between Toyota and battery electric vehicles, particularly those produced by Tesla.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda (grandson of the company’s founder) has been openly vocal in his criticism of Tesla and its upstart nature compared to the traditional incumbents. Most recently, though, the rhetoric has taken a more desperate tone, and a much more worrying one for the future of the Japanese giant.
Akio Toyoda has now widened his criticism from Tesla to the whole plan surrounding the transition to electric vehicles as a means to reduce carbon emissions. His argument isn’t about the environment, however. It’s about how many jobs will be lost in the Japanese car manufacturing industry from a switch to BEVs. He seems to be basing this on what Toyota in particular manufactures – fossil fuel vehicles made a little greener with hybrid drivetrains. Battery-electric vehicles require fewer laborers to make and have fewer parts, so the third-party supplier ecosystem is smaller too. Also, Toyota hardly makes any of them.
It is a valid concern that the switch to BEVs can have a major impact on employment. German car companies have been having the same concerns. This has been worrying German auto labor unions and this is one reason cited for BMW’s hiccup in its plan towards electrification, which had started so well with the i3. But the growth in BEV sales worldwide, particularly in Europe and China, has convinced vehicle manufacturers in Germany and France that this is a bandwagon they need to be on for existential reasons, whatever the short-term costs. Toyota, in contrast, has only released one BEV so far, the Lexus UX300e, and merely teased further BEVs such as the bZ4X, with no clear launch date.
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Executives at Toyota had a moment of inspiration when the company first developed the Prius. That moment, apparently, has long since passed.
The Prius was the world’s first mass-produced hybrid car, years ahead of any competitors. The first model, a small sedan, was classic Toyota—a reliable vehicle tailor-made for commuting. After a major redesign in 2004, sales took off. The Prius’ Kammback profile was instantly recognizable, and the car’s combination of fuel economy and practicality was unparalleled. People snapped them up. Even celebrities seeking to burnish their eco-friendly bona fides were smitten with the car. Leonardo DiCaprio appeared at the 2008 Oscars in one.
As the Prius’ hybrid technology was refined over the years, it started appearing in other models, from the small Prius c to the three-row Highlander. Even the company’s luxury brand, Lexus, hybridized several of its cars and SUVs.
For years, Toyota was a leader in eco-friendly vehicles. Its efficient cars and crossovers offset emissions from its larger trucks and SUVs, giving the company a fuel-efficiency edge over some of its competition. By May 2012, Toyota had sold 4 million vehicles in the Prius family worldwide.
The next month, Tesla introduced the Model S, which dethroned Toyota’s hybrid as the leader in green transportation. The new car proved that long-range EVs, while expensive, could be both practical and desirable. Battery advancements promised to slash prices, eventually bringing EVs to price parity with fossil-fuel vehicles.
Toyota Prius Plug-in hybrid 2017 (image: Toyota)
But Toyota misunderstood what Tesla represented. While Toyota invested in Tesla, it saw the startup not as a threat but rather a bit player that could help Toyota meet its EV mandates. In some ways, that view was justified. For the most part, the two didn’t compete in the same segments, and Toyota’s worldwide volume dwarfed that of the small US manufacturer. Besides, hybrids were just a stopgap until Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cells were ready. At that point, the company thought, hydrogen vehicles’ long range and quick refueling would make EVs obsolete.
Yet, Toyota hadn’t picked up on the subtle shift that was occurring. It’s true that hybrids were a bridge to cleaner fuels, but Toyota was overestimating the length of that bridge. Just as Blackberry dismissed the iPhone, Toyota dismissed Tesla and EVs. Blackberry thought the world would need physical keyboards for many more years. Toyota thought the world would need gasoline for several more decades. Both were wrong.
In tethering itself to hybrids and betting its future on hydrogen, Toyota now finds itself in an uncomfortable position. Governments around the world are moving to ban fossil-fuel vehicles of any kind, and they’re doing so far sooner than Toyota anticipated. With EV prices dropping and charging infrastructure expanding, fuel-cell vehicles are unlikely to be ready in time.
In a bid to protect its investments, Toyota has been strenuously lobbying against battery-electric vehicles. But is it already too late?
Hydrogen dead end
Having spent the last decade ignoring or dismissing EVs, Toyota now finds itself a laggard in an industry that’s swiftly preparing for an electric—not just electrified—transition.
Sales of Toyota’s fuel-cell vehicles haven’t lit the world on fire—the Mirai continues to be a slow seller, even when bundled with thousands of dollars’ worth of hydrogen, and it’s unclear if its winsome-but-slow redesign will help. Toyota’s forays into EVs have been timid. Initial efforts focused on solid-state batteries that, while lighter and safer than existing lithium-ion batteries, have proven challenging to manufacture cost-effectively, much like fuel cells. Last month, the company announced that it would release more traditional EV models in the coming years, but the first one won’t be available until the end of 2022.
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Panasonic Corp. sees the future of solar on car rooftops.
The Osaka-based electronics maker has started producing a 180-watt array of solar cells that can be fixed to the roof of an automobile. In February, Panasonic announced that its photovoltaic module would be used on the roof of Toyota Motor Corp.’s latest Prius plug-in hybrid.
Cars represent a potentially lucrative new outlet for solar cells in an industry where intense competition from Chinese manufacturers has pushed down prices sharply. That’s prompting some manufacturers to adapt solar cells for everything from home roofing tiles and the outer skins of buildings to backpacks and tents.
Solar panels on the roof of Toyota Motor’s Prius plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHV). Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
“Car roofs have the potential to become a new market for solar panels,” Shingo Okamoto, the general manager at Panasonic who was in charge of developing the technology, said. “We made history in the auto industry and in the solar industry with the sun powering mass-produced cars for the first time in the world.”
New Market
Cars could hold the promise of a giant new market for solar panels from Panasonic, which also is partnered with Tesla Inc. in making batteries at its Gigafactory outside Las Vegas. There are 264 million cars and light trucks in operation in the U.S., according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.
Others are noticing the potential. Tesla Chairman Elon Musk tweeted in November that his company’s Model 3 car may come with a solar roof. He’s also beginning to sell a type of roof tile for homes featuring embedded photovoltaics. Nissan Motor Co. offers an add-on solar panel option for its Leaf electric cars, giving extra charge to systems such as the air conditioners and radios, according to Nicholas Maxfield, a spokesman for the company.
Plug-in Prius is a technological achievement, but it’s pricey and we wonder if the regular hybrid is better for day-to-day driving
Toyota has been making huge strides with its latest Prius, managing to improve both the driving dynamics and fuel efficiency over the car it replaced last year. Now the plug-in hybrid version of the new generation is about to land in UK dealers – and although we sampled the car in American form last autumn, this is the first opportunity we’ve had to try a UK-spec model on European roads.
Toyota Prius Plug-in hybrid 2017 (image: Toyota)
Plug-in hybrids are all about pure-electric range, of course, because if you aren’t bothered by the ability to drive without any combustion engine noise, you’ll just buy the regular hybrid instead. The old Prius Plug-in could manage a claimed 15 miles on electric power alone, but the new model doubles that figure.
The gain is down to a more efficient electric motor in the middle of the 121bhp powertrain, and the latest lithium-ion battery tech; Toyota’s engineers managed to double its capacity compared with the unit in the old car, in fact – but in physical terms it’s only two thirds larger and 50 per cent heavier.
Toyota has also fitted a clutch to its innovative drive system, allowing the generator to be switched into a secondary electric motor; this has allowed engineers to raise the maximum speed in pure-electric mode to more than 80mph.
The other significant numbers on the Prius Plug-in are a 0-62mph time of 11.1 seconds, combined fuel economy of 283mpg and CO2 emissions of just 22g/km. A 43-litre fuel tank means that you can still travel a meaningful distance when you’re away from a plug socket, too. A full charge on a rapid domestic charger will take you about two hours; add just over an hour to that figure if you’re going to use a 13A plug.
The Prius Plug-in comes in just two trim levels in the UK. Business Edition Plus brings more than enough kit, with safety features such as rear-cross traffic alert, a pre-collision system with pedestrian detection, road sign assist and adaptive headlights. You also get an 8in touchscreen with sat-nav, plus dual-zone air-con, a wireless mobile phone charger and heated front seats.
