OK, Don't Listen to the Car Guy Who 's in the Top Two

Green enough: our 2018 RAV4 hybrid has a range of 400 mi.

In a largely overlooked speech from last December Toyota President Akio Toyoda derided the"excessive hype" over electric vehicles: [bold added]

advocates failed to consider the carbon emitted by generating electricity and the costs of an EV transition.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda said Japan would run out of electricity in the summer if all cars were running on electric power. The infrastructure needed to support a fleet consisting entirely of EVs would cost Japan between ¥14 trillion and ¥37 trillion, the equivalent of $135 billion to $358 billion, he said...

In a country such as Japan that gets most of its electricity from burning coal and natural gas, EVs don’t help the environment, Mr. Toyoda said. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets,” he said.

He said he feared government regulations would make cars a “flower on a high summit”—out of reach for the average person.

With models like the Prius, Toyota is a leader in hybrid cars, which combine a gasoline engine with an electric motor and can be refueled at traditional gas stations. It doesn’t sell pure battery EVs for the mass market in the U.S. or Japan, although it does have a model that runs on a hydrogen-powered fuel cell.

California has banned the sale of gasoline-powered cars after 2035. Also, California EV's will charge overnight using electricity from renewable sources, which are planned to power 100% of the grid by 2045. Therefore, the thinking goes, that unlike Japan recharging car batteries overnight will not cause CO2 emissions to spike.

Your humble blogger believes that 100% dependence on solar and wind power is nuts. Single sourcing of electricity and transportation systems should not be on notoriously unsteady renewable energy, especially during extreme weather events that knocked out power during the California wildfires and the Texas freeze.

Battery technology is improving rapidly, but it's not at the point where we can pull the plug on the oil and gas that run the vast majority of our cars and power plants. (For an example of how well government predicts construction of technologically advanced infrastructure, see California's high-speed rail fiasco.)

Well, there's no need for me to get worked up. When the conversion happens, I'll either be dead, too old to drive, or too addled to care.