Toyota to have 2010 plug-in; GM invests in cellulosic ethanol
I won’t dwell here — there are many announcements at the Detroit auto show and they’ll get tonnes of coverage by other bloggers and reporters. But two, so far, have stood out for me. First, GM said it had invested an undisclosed amount in cellulosic-ethanol maker Coskata, one of Vinod Khosla’s many biofuel investments. For details, read Greentech Media story here. Coskata is one of several companies going after the holy grail of biofuels, and certainly cellulosic ethanol is the only way this renewable fuel will have a major impact on fuel consumption without devastating food markets and causing other unintended consequences, as we’ve seen with corn ethanol production.
The other announcement came from Toyota: the Japanese auto titan said it would be producing a plug-in hybrid vehicle by 2010, and that it would use a lithium ion battery (a departure from what it has said in the past). This more aggressive schedule, and the fact that Toyota appears to have gained a new appreciation for lithium ion technology, puts Toyota on a crash coarse with GM in a race to bring the first mass-market plug-in hybrid to market.
There you have it. Two stories supporting two of the better trends in the cleantech space: cellulosic ethanol and plug-in vehicles.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
January 17th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
While Toyota says they’ll have a PHEV by 2010 they also say that it will only be a few hundred ‘test’ vehicles. To my way of thinking that doesn’t compare to production.
I hope that the PHEV doesn’t become just a publicity war. I want a technology war.
I don’t care if it’s GM or Toyota so much, but I’d like to see a production PHEV with a 40 mile EV range and a 10 year life.
I know most people just want the results, but I see GM’s series electric as a step toward pure electric. I see Toyota’s hybrid as a step toward hybrids.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
GM is a company that is easy to hate … but it looks to me like the company that brought us the Hummer is poised to really take the lead in the EV market. They dropped the ball, missing the hybrid thing completely, failing to realize that buck a gallon gas wasn’t going to last forever.
Toyota is ahead right now — I love my Prius — but the 2010 plugin announcement looks just like a “me too”. They are promising limited production and only a 7 mile pure electric range. The GM volt is an EV with a gas backup; the plug in Prius is a hybrid with a little extra on the electric side.
But now they seem to have awakened to a market ready for EV’s, and GM has tons of data and experience from their previous EV work, as well as their work on hydrogen. The earlier EV product failed mainly because of cheap gas and inadequate battery tech. Gas isn’t cheap any more, and advances in storage technology combined with GM’s experience make it look real this time.