Comment by zyang
3 years ago
Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.
3 years ago
Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.
Toyota's hybrid tech is and has been the best and most reliable for a very long time.
I think it's a shame that the EV regulations and incentives (at least in America) are not as friendly for traditional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. They have basically zero downsides compared to full ICE or full EV, and would still make a massive dent in emissions.
PHEVs in particular - most people are going under 100 miles a day, so there would be 0 emissions.
Toyota has only recently put into production PHEVs that seem a lot more practical.
For example, the electric-only range for the 2012 Prius PHEV is 15 miles, not enough for many people's daily commute unless you can plug in at both destinations. The 2023 Prius Prime is around 40, which is much better, so maybe you can just plug in at night at home.
It is only the 5th generation Prius that is truly designed around having a higher capacity battery pack, ditto for the recent RAV4 PHEV model. The 4th gen Prius fits in the larger battery pack as compromise, with reduced cargo area and wasted volume.
I would have bought a Prius Prime in 2017, and tried to get the tax credit, but there were several issues. There weren't many available in my area, the standard 2017s had driving and parking assist, while the Prime did not, reduced cargo area with no spare tire, and the price, because even with the tax credit was a bit too high for my liking. Just went with a standard Prius instead, and definitely have not regretted the choice. Today I'd buy a PHEV RAV4 or 5th gen Prius though.
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Toyota just has to extend the range of the various plug-in hybrid "Prime" models to 100+ miles on EV, which is totally doable. Right now it's already 25-40 miles. In the US in particular that's going to be a good compromise for a lot of people.
I mean, even 40 miles is a significant portion of many peoples commutes. Elimination of 50-95% of gas consumption is a big win.
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> They have basically zero downsides
They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.
All machines of meaningful complexity need maintenance if you expect them to last, including EVs, and a fluid change that happens twice a year for most vehicles isn't exactly a huge inconvenience.
IMO getting under your vehicle twice a year is a good thing and more people should be encouraged to do it. Getting eyes on the stuff hidden underneath before it gets bad enough to start breaking is always useful.
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They often have no spare tire to fit the battery. Quite a few don't have battery thermal management, so the packs will degrade much more quickly. It seems like they have all the downsides.
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This is a valid concern. My Tesla has had zero maintenance in the 50,000 km since I bought it. Even as a former gearhead, I love not thinking about it.
PHEV sounds like best of both world on paper but actually worst of both worlds in reality. You are hauling a massive dead weight. Very little useful space inside. Most of them don't make past 10yrs due to the cost of complex system and battery replacement.
2022 Prius Prime gets better mpg than 2022 Prius, not worse.
And that doesn't count how much better things get if you fully charge the electric 25-mile range battery and measure the mpge.
Additionally, I offer into evidence what happens if you rent a Prius Prime and drive up to the valet at the hotel of your choice. Answer: they won't come and help you. Reason: they'll think you're an Uber driver. Upshot: the idea that Uber drivers could or would eat the cost of worse gas mileage due to dead weight is fatuous.
Toyota does a 10 year manufacturer warranty; the availability and price of used ones older than 10 years (I think they're called Prius Plug-in) should tell you that Toyota has a handle on the complexity of the system they built.
Toyota. Oh what a feeling.
Also, anyone who has one: hit me up if you're thinking about getting rid of one of these pieces of dead weight.
Hybrid vehicles are the most likely to catch fire.
Is the likelyhood of my vehicle, be it ICE, Hybrid, or EV catching fire higher or lower than me getting struck by lightning, or getting eaten by a shark/bear/goat?
Japan generally. They tried to pull a great leap forward move with AI a few decades ago, but just ended up wasting billions on dead end approaches right on the cusp of the AI winter. My personal opinion is that really top notch breakthrough software engineering and computer science is susceptible to an exponential cascade butterfly effect.
Yes you need big teams to deliver huge projects. Operating systems, compilers, languages, etc all take huge investment to build out. The thing is though the initial conditions have a massive downstream effect. The core contributions by genius 10x computer scientists and software engineers set the pace for everyone else. Unix, C, Linux, Git, LLVM, Perl, Python, who knows what else. It's the individuals or small dedicated teams doing it the 'wrong' way, or going for a weird untested approach that starts a small speck that snowballs into huge multi-billion industries.
The culture and economic conditions in the US are perfect for this to work. Japan, and for different reasons and certainly not the the same scale Europe, not so much.
> Many of them won't make the ev transition.
It's still not clear when (and if) the ev transition will happen. There are many unknowns.
I feel like it’s an architectural change, similar to how smartphone transition wasn’t just about touchscreens. Many flip phones in Japan gained touchscreen after iPhone like wings on a dragon, and died anyway.
If you mean battery EVs, it very likely won't happen. I would even go as far as saying it cannot happen. They are highly resource dependent and too expensive to make. Hydrogen EVs make significantly more sense once you realize renewable energy is going to be nearly free and "efficiency" is most a distraction.
I worked for Toyota Infotechnology Center in Sunnyvale in 2016/2017 on a robotics research project involving their HSR robot running ROS.
The robot had odometry from the wheels, though it was a bit noisy due to the construction of the omnidirectional mechanism. They decided to ignore wheel odometry and use only an odometry module based on the planar lidar, essentially visual odometry. This worked fine in most circumstances, but basically completely failed in hallways as they lacked distinctive features. This interfered with my work which involved the robot navigating around the office.
I had worked on this problem before, and ROS has an excellent sensor fusion library for dealing with multiple noisy sensor readings. You just need to combine wheel odometry and laser odometry with a kalmann filter, and the sensor fusion library makes this relatively easy.
However even though I worked at a Toyota office with full time Toyota employees, and the code was pretty much off the shelf ROS code, and the robots were produced in very low volumes and only in use at Toyota, they wouldn't give me the source code. I think maybe they wouldn't even give me root access.
Still, I was able to control the names of ROS topics using the ROS launch files (it has been a while since I worked with ROS and I forget some of the terms). I remapped the lidar odometry topic to an intermediary topic name instead of /odom, then directed the intermediary topic in to the sensor fusion module along with the wheel odometry, then mapped the sensor fusion output to /odom. The system got odometry information but now it did not come from the lidar odometry but from the sensor fusion module, so it was happy.
The fix worked great. It had normal behavior when lidar was good, and had reliable odometry in long hallways. I was finally able to implement my office navigation code.
I did my best to communicate these changes back to Toyota. They had not been very helpful when I was asking for help solving the issue, but I had hoped that since I had it working they would appreciate this. I asked where I could file a git issue or otherwise push the code to some private git repo.
They were not using git. Ultimately I was instructed to email the raw code files I had used along with instructions for how to integrate it. I found this quite surprising. I have no idea if they ever implemented the changes I suggested, but I kind of doubt it. From what I have heard of japanese software practices, they basically do not accept code suggestions from the bottom up.
I know of some people who worked for Toyota Research Institute who said they were trying to get the Toyota folks to integrate silicon valley coding rigor in to their systems. Maybe they had success, I don't know. But certainly 6 years ago things were a total mess.
> ... silicon valley coding rigor ...
That's not "silicon valley", that's "anywhere remotely modern" coding rigor. Sounds like they need to get with the times, especially with regards to developing systems with software stacks that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than in the recent past (like 15 years ago).
> silicon valley coding rigor
This was refreshing to read. Within my bubble in tech, it's often easy to get jaded about how _unrigorous_ our "engineering" often is.
The place I worked next was google, which has probably some of the most rigorous software practices in the industry. Not everyone is going to be like them, but one of the absolute basics is using revision control for code!
Where are all these American companies getting their batteries from? Mostly Japan... Rivian, Tesla, Lucid, Gravity, Ford, GMC.
Do you have any sources for that claim. Because the big 3 are CATL, LG, BYD. Panasonic is the only notable Japanese supplier but it's trending down fast.
Mostly China. But the Korean and American contributions are also very significant. Cell source is not a geopolitical monopoly at all.
> Many of them won't make the ev transition.
What exactly makes u come to this conclusion?
I think that's a little hyperbolic, but the Japanese are way behind. There was a decent analysis (as always) in the Economist recently.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losin...
No one needs to bother with that race. It is just a ploy by China to gain marketshare in the car industry. It won't work because it ultimately creates a massive new resource dependency. One that just happens to shift everyone's supply chain to China or Chinese controlled companies. I believe Western companies will eventually walk away from pursuing battery cars, at least in the sense of them being the only solution. it just has too many obvious problem.
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Toyota in particular has wasted a ridiculous amount of time and money on consumer-level hydrogen tech. As a result competitors that focused on battery EVs over the last few years have a decent head start.
The other companies are wasting their time. Battery EVs are a dead end and they will all have to move to hydrogen tech eventually. It is the other companies that are way behind.
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I would never bet against the Japanese or Korean auto makers lol
japan is a US protectorate. when china starts marketing their EV's abroad the US will just sanction them. don't worry, japan is safe.
If the US blocks China, the Chinese government will just kick all the Americans out of the Chinese market and nationalize their Chinese plants. I'm sure the big three won't be happy about that. Since corporations run the US, they will give the US Govt its barking orders and the Chinese cars will be let into the US.