Dealership Rumor: All Electric Tacoma in 2020

What oil type?

 

Answer the man.

 

this is the internet, no one owes anyone an answer. If they dont like it, who gives two flying shits?

 

Who said owe?

Don’t be a ho

 

I think the ICE was also going up against the electric cars at that point in time too, if I'm not mistaken it was sometime around the 1890s are when electric cars got started.

 

Head engineering is in michigan/Wisconsin area, so that makes sense. They may be testing out new tech.

 

Oh. I for some reason thought it was in CA? My bad.

 

Corporate offices are in ca, tx, and a couple other spots.

 

Whew! I have not completely lost it. Haha!

 

This was in Southern California when I saw the truck, but it had Michigan Manufacture plates. I heard they have an EPA test station in Los Angeles (Long Beach/Signal Hills area).

 

I think Toyota corporate in CA is gone (Torrance) now, because of the high CA taxes.

 

Haha, it’s confusing, offices everywhere!

Didn’t know that, makes sense epa testing is in ca though.

 

Not surprising......

 

Yeah. The Ural peeps did laps down there when they were trying to certify their EFI design back in late 2013. It was interesting to read about.

 

Technology - even though rotary dial phones were "bullet proof" almost everyone switched to touch tone. Now we have "smart" phones.

Electric vehicles are just "computers on wheels", easier to engineer, produce, and maintain. Also tailor made for autonomous technology.

There really is no way around it, and it is going to be here sooner than a lot of people think, imo.

 

I’m keeping my gas powered vehicle till I croak, it might be held together by glue and duct tape by then, though!

 

I have no animosity re: electric vehicles; I just do not see them as the panacea many seem to. Someday there will most likely be a significantly more energy efficient universal alternative, however for now with today's and the foreseeable future's battery technology I (and many other physicists and engineers) view them more as an interim niche alternative to petroleum powered vehicles. The environmental consequences of massive piles of used L-Ion batteries is another not often discussed consideration.

I left out a lot more than that, not intending that it be a master's thesis. However regenerative braking is simply re-conversion (with inefficiencies) of kinetic energy to potential energy--kinetic propulsive energy that was previously converted (with inefficiencies) from the battery's potential store. Thus regenerative braking replenishes a portion of the battery's previously expended potential energy. It improves the overall efficiency of an EV with active braking v. one without, but does nothing to improve the EV's overall efficiency v. an fossil fuel ICE powered vehicle's overall efficiency.

Solar panels on the roof of a truck charging the propulsion battery sounds great--but there's a "gotcha", always is.

A contemporary high end solar panel can produce (generously) 20 W per ft² under peak ideal conditions (PIC). The roof of my '09 double cab is approximately 22.5 ft² (5' Lx 4.5' W).

So PIC output, if the roof were covered with solar cells, would be 450 W (20 W * 22.5 ft²).

If we assume it could do that for 12 hours/day (quite completely unlikely) then we have 5400 Wh (450 W * 12 h), or 5.4 kWh of power per day. A more likely number would be half that, 2.7 kWh/day.

The Tesla Model S has an 85 kWh battery and we are going to want that much as least, right?

Therefore charging that 85 kWh battery from 20% to 80% charge (51 kWh), which is the most commonly discussed EV "recharge" cycle, with our Tacoma rooftop solar "array" will only take 9-1/2 nice sunny days--and more realistically 19 days--assuming you did not drive on those days.

To put it another way, solar charging for one good sunny "ideal" day would replenish about 6.4% (3.2% more likely) of the 85 kWh battery's capacity--again assuming you do not drive on that day.

My main point in all of this is don't buy the hype without examining the empirical reality of what is being promised. If electric cars were all that the hypesters say they are we would all have one by now, 20+ years after GM introduced the EV1.

And in the last I beg all do not get me going about hydrogen...

 

All those numbers are using technology of today. You run those same calculations a few decades in the past and it'd be significantly worse. Run those same calculations a few decades in the future and it might yield itself feasible. I make this as a very broad general statement. I am no expert when it comes to batteries or solar power. Point is the technology isn't there yet but that doesn't mean it won't be in the future.

I definitely agree transitioning from fossil fuels to electricity isn't the end all solution to a cleaner fuel source but it's moving in the right direction. While there are many dirty sources of electricity there are also many clean sources of electricity and these sources are growing substantially right now. Fossil fuels are dirty no matter what.

 

Fake news for sure.

 

The 1899 Baker Electric is generally considered to be the first commercially produced electric car, the last models (1914 or so) had twelve 6 volt alkaline batteries (yes, alkaline invented by Edison ca. 1903), or plain ol' flooded cell lead acid batteries as a lower cost option...