The German and Japanese camps can be regarded as two major "hostile camps", and their development paths are completely different. In the past, if these two camps were compared together, they might be scolded to death by keyboard warriors. Fortunately, the atmosphere has been significantly improved now, and in terms of automobile electrification, the Japanese Toyota and the German BMW seem to have very consistent ideas.
Both Toyota and BMW seem to believe that achieving electrification is an inevitable product of market development, but comprehensive electrification is a "false proposition" and is quite outrageously wrong. Toyota's head Akio Toyota has criticized the full electrification in public more than once, and BMW CEO Oliver Chips also believes that setting a date for eliminating fuel vehicles is a very crazy decision, which will lead to low-priced models disappearing from the market and making low-income groups unable to afford cars.
From the attitude of the heads of these two car companies, we can clearly feel that they support electrification, but do not support comprehensive electrification, at least in terms of attitude. They say they support electrification because Toyota and BMW have formulated their own electrification development strategies, and BMW and Toyota have also begun to try to launch pure electric vehicles.
But they made these changes just to adapt to the pace of the development of the times and increase their competitiveness in the new energy vehicle market, rather than to completely cancel fuel vehicles by 2030 or 2035 as required by the European market. Both Toyota and BMW are only electrifying and upgrading their models on the basis of ensuring the sales of traditional fuel vehicles.
Toyota is the world's largest automobile platform, and BMW is also the most representative company among first-tier luxury brands. They have good car manufacturing capabilities. Why are they so persistent in the issue of comprehensive electrification? Is it because of poor technology or is it really not feasible to fully electrify? Industry insiders have analyzed two reasons.
First of all, it is because Toyota and BMW occupy a very large amount of fuel vehicle market, and it is easy to change the current pattern, which will lead to their loss of a large part of the market. Although the domestic new energy vehicle market structure has indeed changed in recent years, sales have also increased to millions. However, compared with the global sales of 5 million new energy vehicles, there is still a gap like the Galaxy.
Even in the domestic market, the sales of these millions of new energy vehicles are not as high as 1/4 of that of fuel vehicles. From this stage, the market share of traditional fuel vehicles is significantly higher than that of new energy vehicles. Abandoning traditional fuel vehicles and comprehensively building pure electric vehicles is tantamount to "grasping small and enlarging".
Secondly, the production capacity cannot keep up at this stage, and the production cost of pure electric vehicles is too high. If the full electrification is achieved, it will be meaningless to both car companies and consumers. You can take a look. The current pure electric vehicles on the market with a range of more than 500 kilometers are basically sold at more than 200,000 yuan. This price is not an easy task for Chinese people and foreign consumers.
electrification transformation is actually a product that was born under the promotion of "carbon neutrality". It is also a compromise solution to automobile exhaust pollution. Cars have changed from burning gasoline to consuming electricity, and automobile exhaust pollution has been suppressed, and the consumption of non-renewable resources, such as oil, has been reduced.
But everyone should know that although electricity is renewable, the battery that supports it is non-renewable. Although the safety and capacity of the battery are getting stronger every year, the waste battery recycling system has not been fully established. The recycling cost of lithium batteries is high and the process is relatively troublesome. Once it is not handled properly, it may cause secondary pollution to the environment.
Although my country's electric vehicle industry has developed relatively fast, it has become the country with the highest sales of new energy vehicles in the world in just a few years. But all this is not the result of domestic consumers actively accepting pure electric vehicles due to their own needs, but the result of policy-driven by subsidies and green brands such as " right to road ". Without these subsidies, the popularity of pure electric vehicles is likely to decline.
In Toyota's view, the fundamental purpose of developing new energy is to reduce carbon emissions, and the way to reduce automobile carbon emissions is not only to develop pure electric vehicles, but also hydrogen energy vehicles can achieve this goal. So while other car companies are vigorously developing pure electric vehicles, Toyota has taken a different approach to research hydrogen-energy vehicles.
From the perspective of carbon neutrality, there is only water vapor in the exhaust gas of hydrogen energy vehicles, and there are no harmful gases such as carbon monoxide , carbon dioxide , and will not pollute the air. Moreover, the cost of hydrogen is lower, which can also reduce people's car maintenance costs.
However, although pure electric vehicles reduce environmental pollution, the cost of using a car is actually higher than that of the fuel version. Take BYD Qin as an example. The price of the fuel version is about 70,000 yuan, while the price of the hybrid version reaches 140,000 yuan, which directly doubles the price, which invisibly increases the cost of buying a car for ordinary people.
After all, Toyota and BMW have such a firm attitude on the issue of comprehensive electrification. In fact, it is not that they refuse to accept the change in the direction of electrification, but that they think that the solution to achieve "comprehensive electrification" is too radical and should be gradually changed in terms of transformation.
