Search Results Found For: "Toyota"

Five companies produce almost all EV battery cells for the US market

Five companies (AESC, LG Chem, Panasonic, Samsung and SK Innovation) produced almost all the battery cells used in plug-in vehicles for the US market over the past decade. Total capacity produced was 75,933 MWh. Panasonic supplied 74% of all the cells, and a majority of these were installed in Tesla battery packs.  A small percentage… Read more »

New CEO confirms Honda will go all-electric by 2040

Honda has become the first major Japanese automaker to set an official date for phasing out sales of fossil-powered vehicles. New CEO Toshihiro Mibe has announced that his company hopes to go all-electric by 2040. Mibe’s announcement confirms a shift that Honda has been hinting at for some months. In 2020, the company partnered with… Read more »

Plug-ins surpass 10% market share in California as Tesla sales surge

We can’t let Europe and China have all the fun—EV sales in North America’s EV capital, California, are finally taking off. According to the California New Car Dealers Association, some 53,261 plug-in vehicles were sold in the Golden State in the first quarter of 2021, representing 10.8% of the total auto market. The pandemic was… Read more »

Slow fleet turnover means ICE vehicles could be on the roads for decades

Sales of EVs are growing—in some ahead-of-the-curve markets, plug-ins are outselling internal-combustion vehicles—and countries and regions around the world are announcing deadlines to phase out fossil-burners. However, as a recent New York Times article points out, it could take years, if not decades, before electrification leads to substantial reductions in emissions. The problem, ironically, is… Read more »

Honda hopes to go electric in North America by 2040, will develop solid-state batteries

Have the last two holdouts among major automakers just hopped on the electric bandwagon, or are they just indulging in some fast-follower greenwashing? Following Toyota’s announcement of a new line of battery-electric vehicles, Honda now says it plans to make battery-electric and fuel cell vehicles 100% of its North American sales by 2040. There are… Read more »

Hino speeds production timeline for its Class 4-8 electric trucks

Hino Trucks, a subsidiary of Toyota, is accelerating the production timeline for its suite of battery-electric vehicles. The new Class 4-8 electric trucks are now slated to go into low-volume production in Q4 2022 and full production by the end of 2023. The company originally planned to have its BEV range in production by 2024,… Read more »

Can the global battery supply chain keep up with anticipated EV demand?

As global demand for EVs increases, many are questioning the adequacy of the existing battery supply chain. A recent article in Transport Dive discusses the challenges involved in building a global supply chain that can keep up with the anticipated growth in EV production. Elon Musk said in October that a shortage of battery cells… Read more »

Machine learning could lead to durable fast-charging batteries

Scientists at Stanford University are harnessing machine learning (ML) to design better batteries. In addition to using ML to speed up scientific analysis by looking for patterns in data, the researchers combined it with knowledge gained from experiments and equations guided by physics to discover and explain a process that shortens the lifetimes of fast-charging… Read more »

Heavy-duty electric trucks start to appear in fleets

Charged has been reporting on electric trucks for a decade, but the electrification of real-world fleets has been frustratingly slow, and several would-be e-truck builders have gone bust waiting for fleet operators to conduct years-long pilots. Now we’re finally starting to see some large orders. Will 2021 be the year of the electric truck? A… Read more »