Comment by krosaen
4 days ago
The CEO of Toyota Research Institute, Gill Pratt, had some good (albeit self-serving) points about the benefits of hybrids and PEVs to complement EVS a few years back that I bookmarked and keep coming back to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727090309/https://medium.co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210825054702/https://medium.co...
> Maximizing the benefit of every battery cell produced requires that we distribute them smartly.
> This means putting them into a greater number of “right sized” electrified vehicles, including HEVs and PHEVs, instead of placing them all into a fewer number of long-range BEVs, like my model X. This is particularly important because presently it is difficult to recycle the kinds of batteries used in BEVs. If we are to achieve carbon neutrality, we must pay attention to all parts of the “3R” process — Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
> For example, we hardly ever put gas into our RAV4 Prime PHEV, which has a battery ⅙ as large as our Model X BEV. For the same investment in batteries as our single Model X, five other RAV4 Prime customers could reduce their carbon footprint too.
I'm not sure about this, because a smaller battery pack with fewer modules needs to work much harder.
PHEV batteries are discharged at higher rate (C) while a BEV can spread the load across many more modules. EV range of PHEV is so small that the battery gets fully cycled daily, while a BEV with similar commute distances and charging can easily keep batteries at a more comfortable state of charge.
The recycling thing doesn't make sense to me. For getting raw materials back the difficulty is the same (get the cells out and grind them), and having more cells per pack should amortize labor cost better.
BEV batteries aren't recycled at scale yet, because there aren't many to recycle. They're easier to reuse for grid storage, since BEV packs already have many modules hooked up to a single BMS.
So this sounds more like Toyota is just supply constrained on batteries.