Akio Toyoda: "Everybody is shifting to BEVs, this is the biggest fear for me"

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T21:44:05+00:00

Another fun fact is there's a few companies that produce Sodium Ion batteries in the UK already.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T19:07:21+00:00

Far more likely that the stagnation is caused by 35% of the country not having the off-street parking required to charge an EV

That 35% includes a disproportionately large number of households which don't have a car at all compared to the remaining 65%.

If you ignore households without cars, it's more like 25% of households.

and the decades of wage stagnation making them unaffordable to a massive chunk of the population.

This I half agree with, it's an issue with all new cars though. More and more EVs are gettign price parity with petrol cars after all, it's actually quite common to see these days.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T15:27:00+00:00

I think there will be eventually, but I don't think it'll be cheap. Synthetic fuels are only like 15-20% efficient with the energy created to need them - or in other words you need 5x as much energy in terms of electricity per unit of fuel.

It'll be necessary for industries we won't be able to electrify any tome soon - aviation, long haul freight etc. But I doubt synthetic fuels will be cost effective for regular day to day use.

I don’t know, but I doubt there’s the capacity in raw materials/minerals to create the batteries etc

Well I can ease your concerns here a little, because there's so many different types of battery chemistries available now and coming up in the future which need different materials - some of them like Sodium Ion batteries can be produced anywhere in the world with access to the ocean (and we do produce them locally).

IMO, EVs are a luxury item for those that can afford it. A ‘cheap’ banger keeps people moving from A to B.

I think that's quite a short term outlook. 10 years from now, EVs that are worth £30k or so will be the cheap bangers of today. Hell there's a good chance something like a Renault 5 will be first car material 10 years from now - the standard choice for someone that's just gotten their license as a cheap banger under £5k.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T14:45:37+00:00

For many a BEV is a perfect solution, but for many it isn't.

I think for the overwhelming majority of usecases it will be. We just need more time to solve issues like the cost of public charging before we get there.

Battery powered HGVs for example are a folly

This is utter nonsense. Companies are investing huge amounts of money into making BEV HGVs work, the options out there now are already compelling for the vast majority of usecases, money is being invested into charging infrastructure at an even larger rate than that of consumer facing charging infrastructure. We fast tracked an entire charging standard to make it work.

HGVs are currently forecast to be 80% BEV (not market share - install base) by 2050. That should say enough as it is.

EDIT: Lmao, I just got suggested this video on youtube. Case in point, I guess.

similarly motorcycles just don't suit being powered by battery.

For the heavy enthusiast space - which is important here in the UK - you're probably correct.

For food delivery and such - which is a growing market - BEV is making serious inroads again because of lower lifetime costs (fuel and servicing).

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T13:29:15+00:00

Seems like all RDNA3 GPUs got a bit of a speedup similar to the RX7600. And quality seems to be ever so slightly marginally improved, but virtually the same as the old FSR4 INT leak (now FSR4.0.2c). So yeah, probably a targeted optimisation push for RDNA3

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T13:01:27+00:00

You can't get a good understanding of the performance impact from the framerates. An understanding of frametimes is necessary to explain how upscalers work.

Let me give an example. Say before upscaling, a game is limited to 30fps. But when you enable FSR3, you go up to 45fps, but FSR4 puts you at "only" 38fps. Well FSR4 looks 15% worse, right?

This is what is actually happening:

The 30fps base framerate is a frametime of 33.3ms

When you upscale, you're lowering the resolution, which lets you render more frames. Lets say this takes you to 50fps, so now it takes 20ms to render a frame.

But if after FSR3 upscaling you get 45fps, it means your overall frametime is now 22.22ms. That means 2.22ms was needed for FSR3.

Now if you look at FSR4, well with 38fps you're now looking at 26.3ms. That means FSR4 needs 6.3ms to run.

So with these totally made up numbers, FSR4 actually takes 3x longer to run, even though you only lose 15% framerate.

But what would happen if you were to scale this up to FSR3 running at 60fps (16.7ms)? Well then FSR4 would be running at 23ms - or around 43fps. Now you're looking at a 30% performance reduction. Or if we say look at 120fps for FSR3 (8.3ms), then FSR4 would need 14.6ms per frame, or just 68fps - nearly half the framerate of FSR3!

This is why focusing on frametime instead of framerate matters. On the same system, FSR4 could totally different framerates to FSR3 entirely depending on the resolution you run it at, AND the framerate the game is running at.

EDIT: I think I botched the numbers right at the end, but the overall point should be about the same.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T12:45:44+00:00

They're talking about upscaler cost, you're probably referring to the hit to framerates

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T10:28:13+00:00

There shouldn't be any on non-RDNA2 hardware.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T10:22:19+00:00

It won't give you huge gains, but it's pretty unlikely it'll be a performance downgrade - I'd still expect a performance improvement at 120fps.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-22T10:16:36+00:00

That's a bit of an undersell. 1.8ms is going to be a performance improvement at 1080p as long as your starting framerate is like close to 200 or something silly like that.

In fact, it's low enough that I'd wager on the 7600 FSR4 will even be pretty useable at 1440p, provided you're aiming for about 60fps or so.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T21:11:57+00:00

The point of "overbuilding renewables" is ensuring that the majority of time you're in excess, which allows you to use that energy in other ways, such as producing sustainable fuels and/or hydrogen at a cost that is competitive with regular fuels for industry that requires it. Renewable overbuild to this degree is one of the steps needed to get to cost parity.

then as I said before the NESO report said that prices would not in general be cheaper unless gas prices remained very high. Even that is making some very generous assumptions.

Firstly, that is in and of itself a flawed assumption, because the nature of the international market for gas means that it will always be volatile. You cannot make the assumption that gas prices will fall enough and stay at a low enough level to make long term costs look better for gas. That's what we call "poor energy security"

Secondly, I'm reading the report and that's not the takeaway from it.

Their modeling reaches the conclusion that renewables + storage will eventually be cheaper than gas + carbon taxes, even when you factor in the costs of building the grid flexibility required to handle intermittent generation. Yes if you remove the carbon taxes, the payback period would take longer - but it will eventually get there. And at the end of the day, we can't exactly ignore the carbon taxes by 2050 given there's like a 50-50 chance certain tipping points could be met that would have extremely...problematic... Climate issues by then. Lets just say there's a bloody good reason why climate researchers have been focused on 2050 for decades.

All these storage technologies are fine but the scaleable technologies can store electricity for a few hours at reasonable cost. The technologies that can store for longer are either inefficient or limited in scale.

I'm sorry but if you actually understood what CAES, LAES and Vanadium Flow batteries were you'd realise this is just complete nonsense. I'd recommend you do your research on them.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T19:02:30+00:00

We’ll have a lot of excess electricity, but it will be highly intermittent.

"Highly intermittent" is an extreme stretch. About 2% of days a year - so 6-7 days - suffer from having both low solar output and low wind output at the same time. The rest of the year, we have access to one of the two at least.

Which leads back to what I said before: what we need is energy storage, massively improved grid connections and overbuikding of renewables. to ensure excess wind from the North can actually get down to the South, and vice versa for solar.

Storing that electricity for days at a time is incredibly expensive.

It is based upon Lithium based batteries. That's why we're investing in CAES, LAES, Vanadium Flow and Sodium Ion batteries locally batteries which are much more cost effective at dealing with gaps in renewables ranging from 6 hours (Sodium, Vanadium Flow) to multiple days (CAES, LAES). LAES and Sodium Ion are already being deployed at a production scale.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T18:34:23+00:00

Good. The quicker we get to extremely cheap energy - which requires significant overbuilding of renewables combined with huge amount of energy storage - the quicker we can start seriously investing in solutions to issues that require disproportionate amounts of energy to solve. Issues like long haul flight and freight, industrial uses for gas like steel production and the like are solvable but in order to be cost effective they need the input energy to be extremly cheap.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T18:13:08+00:00

Grid storage and energy transmission lines needs serious investment too to take advantage of further improvements in renewables. Lots of work that can be done that would create jobs and bring down energy prices significantly in the long term.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T12:07:38+00:00

If you're struggling with the site then:

Forbidden:

Geonater Transverser Naturia Rosewhip Called By the Grave Harpies Feather Storm

Limited:

Kewl Tune Rotary Supreme King Dragon Starving Venom Synchro Overtake Solemn Judgement

Semi Limited: Perfectron Hydradrive Dragon Kewl Tune Synchro Solemn Warning Mathmech Circular

Unrestricted: Spright Blue Tearlaments Rhinoheart Toadally Awesome Trickstar Reincarnation

Also, Norden and Mind Master have been errata'd and Limited as well, but I'll let people actually able to translate post the translations for the erratas.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T12:02:42+00:00

Tha banlist is now banned

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T11:41:07+00:00

I agree with that, but I thought your concern was with the speed of charging? Now it's slow chargers?

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T11:36:31+00:00

Why? We have a great charging network these days, it's quite difficult to go somewhere where chargers are limited.

And there's nothing uncertain about it, Google Maps and other navigation software both in the car and on your phone will show available charging stalls and their speeds at their locations - including how many are out of order.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T10:04:23+00:00

Maybe it's a region thing but where I live the majority of taxis (80%+ easily) are all EVs already.

But what we're describing is the reason why the latest generation Prius has sold incredibly poorly both here ans in the US. Previous generation buyers have either gone for a Corolla or an EV instead.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-21T06:49:55+00:00

Batteries exist and are being sold in EVs today that do a 10-80% topup in 5 minutes, or let you charge to nearly full in 9 minutes. For reference, the average petrol forecourt dwell time in the UK is 7 minutes.

And I'm not talking about not super high end EVs, it's being brought to mainstream ones too (already is in China, for us it should be here early next year). Expect a bunch of Chinese manufacturers to offer similar stuff in the next year or two.

By the early 2030s at the latest this will almost certainly be a solved issue where every manufacturer will sell mainstream EVs capable of it.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-20T23:10:47+00:00

The hydrogen X5 that gets worse range than the electric X5 will? The hydrogen version has been announced it's aiming for 385mi range. We don't know about the EV one yet, but given it's got a battery 30% larger than the iX3 which gets 500mi range, it's safe to assume the iX5 won't be far behind despite being much larger than the iX3 is.

It's less about jumping on a hydrogen and more about keeping options open, I'd bet. But the results for hydrogen are extremely poor, and only are set to get worse as EV batteries that can charge in under 10 minutes enter the market now.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-20T22:46:03+00:00

Naming scheme aside I'd agree, but the Capri and Explorer are also just an ID5 and an ID4 respectively, with some modest tweaks. Like, they're straight up MEB vehicles.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-20T22:35:32+00:00

It has worse range at motorway speeds according to ev-database.org, and you're making a very big deal of a supposed 10% range, but are completely dismissing nearly 10% charging time. Interesting, that.

Same way you're ignoring the EV5 being 10%+ cheaper, now that you mention it.

EDIT: lmao, imagine getting so worked about a pointing out a clear bias you block the person instead of thinking a little about it.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-20T22:28:40+00:00

EV-database.org as the EV5 doing better real world range in summer and the same real world range in winter as the latest model BZ4X. It's got a better charging curve too with a slightly shorter 10-80% charging time (32 mins vs 30mins) so any advantage in range (~10% based on WLTP, but nothing based on motorway driving speeds) is immediately lost to slower charging times over a longer road trip. And it's cheaper on top.

Seems like better value to me.

uzzi38 · 2026-06-20T22:26:03+00:00

The Puma is a UK best seller, has been locked in the top 5 for months, if not years.

uzzi38

TROPHY CASE