"While GM’s Mary Barra signals virtue, the grandson of the founder of Toyota speaks an inconvenient truth.
Because there’s no mass market for electric cars, which are too expensive to be mass-market cars."
... This idea that people who can barely manage a six-year-loan on a $25,000 car will somehow manage a loan on a $32,000 electric car (the lowest-priced electric car currently available) is ... ridiculous ...
... You cannot sell cars that people can’t afford to buy.
Toyoda ... added up the volts and watts that would be needed to power the replacement of the existing fleet of non-electric cars in Japan with electric cars and found there isn’t enough electricity to power an all-electric car fleet in Japan and power everything else that runs on electricity in Japan ...
Where will that money come from?
It doesn’t take an MBA to understand that a person who can just barely manage a six-year-loan on a $20,000 car cannot afford a $32,000 electric car – the least expensive electric car on the market.
... the loan term cannot be extended to compensate, not only because of depreciation but also because electric cars depreciate faster than non-electric cars, on account of their shorter useful service lives. Which is due to the shorter life of their very-expensive-to-replace battery packs, which are the equivalent in cost-to-replace of a non-electric car’s engine.
But the non-electric car’s engine will usually last the life of the car – 15-20 years or even longer ... existing electric car’s battery packs will have to be replaced at a much sooner interval, due to the physical/chemical facts about batteries and the degradation of charge capacity that inevitably takes place.
An (old) EV with a battery that can’t hold a charge – or only half its original charge – isn’t just a useless car. It is a worthless car. Few will spend the $4,000-plus it takes to replace a tired EV battery when the EV itself isn’t worth $10k anymore."