Another green pipe dream, electric cars, bites the dust. Toyota, one of the leading hybrid car manufacturers, sees no future for the purely electric car.
“There is still no business model that can succeed on the market,” said the spokesman of Toyota Deutschland on Tuesday. Instead, Toyota will focus more on hybrid models over the coming years.
Toyota wants to continue development and sell electric cars for field tests, but only to a few selected customers in the USA and Japan. No sales are planned for Europe at this time.”
The main problem with the electric cars is their lack of efficiency with the batteries, and there are no technical breakthroughs in sight.
Meanwhile, the Rheinpfalz daily here reports on the dismal sales of electric cars in Germany. Pure electric cars, charged by renewable energy, were once hoped to be the answer to the dirtier combustion engine and would herald in a new era of clean transportation. That is now looking more and more like a pipe dream.
The Rheinpfalz daily writes:
“For years they dominated international car shows and were to seen everywhere in the media: electric cars. However up to now, they have been completely missing on one decisive place: the streets. In the first part of 2012, only 4541 electric cars were registered, and that in a total market of about 51.7 million vehicles.”
Once again, as is the case with some forms renewable energy, nobody in the free market is willing to give electric cars the time of day. Not even the fans in the media and government are buying them. For the money, they simply do not provide mobility solutions that people have come to expect.
The Rheinpfalz daily writes:
“Because of skimpy demand, the French PSA concern is stopping both of its electric models: the Citroen C-Zero and Peugeot iOn. For the same reason, production lines will be stopped for the Ampera sister model the Chevrolet Volt at the end of the month.”
That means the German government can forget about reaching its lofty target of having 1 million electric cars on German streets by 202o.
“Nobody believes it’s going to happen,” says Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a professor for automotive economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, according to the Rheinpfalz.
The problem with electric cars is all the impracticality involved with charging them, their low range, and massive battery weight. The batteries themselves pose huge environmental challenges that every proponent refuses to take into account.
Worse, studies show that electric cars mean a limitation in mobility, and not an expansion. The infrastructure for charging electric cars is also plagued with problems. The Rheinpfalz asks:
“Does the connection fit with my car? Can my charging cable handle the electric current load that is supplied by the charging station? For example, does the charging station supply 32 A while my cable can only handle 16A?
Other electric cars have also been shown to be unsafe, some catching fire.
Even the German government, probably the biggest proponent of electric cars on the planet (at least judging from all the promotional literature it cranks out) is snapping them up. According to the Rheinpflaz: “In 2012 the car fleet of the Federal Ministry for Transportation has only 2 electric cars and one fuel cell car. It has lots of electric bikes.”