‹G.K.›: The Toyota Prius was conceived as a hybrid with an internal combustion engine, which is why it’s very difficult to estimate what its successor models will be like. But perhaps it’s worth mentioning another vehicle, showing a development similar to that of the Prius which was launched almost 20 years ago: the fuel cell vehicle Toyota Mirai. In Japanese “Mirai” means “future.” The model is a vehicle which is purely electrically powered. It emits no exhaust gas, no CO2, and is therefore a very good mobility option for the future. Although the Toyota Mirai cannot be manufactured in the same unit numbers as vehicles with normal hybrid technology, the Mirai is still a hybrid vehicle with a hybrid structure and a hybrid battery. Now if you consider the analogy between the Mirai and the Prius, with which we started hybrid technology in the first place, you’ll soon realize what they have in common: a few manufactured 6 F O C U S vehicles in the first production year of the Prius and a few hundred vehicles in the first production year of the Mirai. Today, we are producing close to 1.3 million hybrid vehicles. So it’s impossible to make a reliable prediction of how a model will evolve in the distant future. With fuel cell technology, however, a scenario similar to that of the Toyota Prius is definitely likely – provided that it can be realized together with other companies. With the hybrid, we were able to overcome the challenge, whereas where the fuel cell is concerned, we obviously require the necessary infrastructure. For the infrastructure to justify the investment, we need partners to join us in making the fuel cell the propulsion technology of the future. ‹F.›: Do you think that the fuel cell will someday become a worthy competitor for hybrid drives, or rather electric drives? ‹G.K.›: We believe that there’ll be a whole spectrum of powertrains over the next decades. In cities there’ll be small cars, which may well be fully battery-powered electric vehicles, but, as I just said, it’s our guess that they’ll just be small vehicles. You see it’s extremely difficult to drive long distances with battery vehicles. So for the majority of customers, the internal combustion engine will remain an option. And in this respect, we naturally consider the hybridized internal combustion engine as a perfect combination. For vehicles that drive long distances – whether they are passenger cars or heavy-duty vehicles – we can easily envisage a future in which the fuel cell is a longterm alternative. With this in mind, we anticipate that all of these technologies will be reaching the market in the years and decades ahead. We believe that long-term CO2 emission reduction is top priority. That’s the reason why Toyota launched the Environmental Challenge 2050, and one of the environmental challenges Toyota has set itself, for example, is that we plan to lower the CO2 emissions in our new vehicles from 2010 to 2050 by 90 percent. Another challenge we have formulated is to reduce CO2 emissions to zero in vehicle production. We have set ourselves a number of tasks and goals we would like to achieve. The fuel cell will certainly be a major factor in meeting these challenges. ‹F.›: In view of battery electric cars, many end-customers have a certain amount of range anxiety. In what ways does Toyota address this issue? ‹G.K.›: Range anxiety is a big issue in electric mobility, particularly when it comes to battery-powered electric mobility. For that reason, and because we know how difficult it is to make a long-lasting battery, the batteries in our Toyota hybrids are durable and designed to match the vehicle lifetime. This means we know the battery’s total capacity and how much can be used to ensure long durability. We are also aware of how fast they have to be recharged and discharged. All of these factors are carefully considered during the development, which involves critical chemical processes where exact limits have to be met. cover story » WE BELIEVE THAT THERE WILL BE A WHOLE SPECTRUM OF POWERTRAINS OVER THE NEXT DECADES. « GERALD KILLMANN, Vice President, Toyota Motor Europe
Focus_2016_02_E
To see the actual publication please follow the link above