Why Toyota Hybrids Are So Popular
In this video we’re going to do something a bit different it seems like every other vehicle we drive today has some type of hybridization to it and Toyota was one of the first so I wanted to talk you through some of the technical reasons why they’ve become so
Popular and so successful at this formula and then take the car for a drive and walk through some of the things that are great about it and not so great Now to better understand the Toyota hybrid and now plug-in hybrid strategy and why it’s relevant and so popular today you have to do a brief history lesson you go back about 25 years and you see Honda and Toyota coming up with their own versions of how to Electrify
Cars Honda went the ultra Innovative approach they used the electric motor to augment a small three-cylinder Engine with the Honda Insight but it wasn’t just about that part they wereing looking at weight reduction so they took a lot of their learnings from NSX and even had some some of the same body
Engineers working on the aluminum body for the insight and then working on aerodynamics really again breaking the breaking new ground on all these different solutions to make a car more fuel efficient yet lightweight and engaging to drive the problem with the Honda setup was it wasn’t designed to be
Scaled out across hundreds of thousands of vehicles and that was a big mistake going forward as they tried to put it in a Civics and Accords it just was not the right setup to to make so many vehicles and heavier weight cars Toyota took a different approach they took a far more
Conservative less complicated approach they weren’t dealing with all aluminum body structures they built a a motor system that could be used in a small car and then scaled up to sedans and then later on SUVs and cuvs and now trucks without having to completely throw out the design and all the development they
Did over decades so this iterative approach of adding an additional motor generator unit to drive the wheels or just purely charge the battery pack you know it’s flexible enough to apply across multiple applications and that’s why you see it in every single one of their cars and it’s this commitment to
Not constantly changing and constantly just experimenting that they built out one of the best hybrid systems and you could argue of course is it the the most powerful is it the most fuele efficient design they could possibly do no it was a design meant to go into millions of
Vehicles a good example is their trucks their new hybrid Max and the people ask this all the time like why would they put a nickel metal hydride pack an old design into a truck versus a lithium ion or a prismatic cell or you know whatever you whatever battery track the newer
Stuff you want to talk about they haven’t done that when you look at the battery pack in the hybrid Max it goes under the rear seat I mean and it’s fan cooled so if you have a problem with it you’re not taking a forklift and having to have specialty tools and dropping this
Massive multi PB pack down out of a truck or a car to service it most shops could do this and because Toyota supply chain is so strong with these types of Technologies you’re going to get a battery pack in 10 years without spending $220,000 to replace it like
Some of the newer lithium ion packs are it’s this plan for the future and it’s the plan to make normal cars more reliable and easier to service now they are definitely not perfect they have they have problems and you can see where they’ve had to cut cost in other places
When you look at some of the more upper end German cars there’s more aluminum there might be more body adhesives in other brands some cars might be quieter more refined but again it’s about finding that balance between Innovation and technology and this is the big thing
That I saw you know we’re talking about this at the Chicago Auto Show this year I did an interview with Moto man and we’re talking about the cars being so expensive and trucks being so expensive and Toyota has some really expensive products too they’re they’re guilty of
That but the auto show was a big push towards Innovation because we have technology we have innovated and that’s not how things work Innovation does not mean technology for technology sake Innovation is pushing things forward and I think a lot of these Brands confuse that they’re spending so much money to
Put technology in that’s not going to be relevant in 5 or 10 years for the sake of trying to Market that product now and by marketing all this technology as Innovation and it winds up not having the staying power not lasting or not working long term you’re making a much
More disposable product that cannot be fixed or supported so when you want to boil it all down how do you get millions of cars on the road that people can keep on the road that is again not rewriting or Reinventing the wheel on every single aspect of a car and namely being very
Conservative with technology application which brings us back to this thing the prus prime despite it not having unbelievable range you can get 40 miles on paper with EV range in the cold I’m getting 32 there’s the efficiency hit there however the big difference here is when you get down to one mile Eevee
Range you don’t care you don’t know because your gasoline engine’s going to kick in and it’s going to turn into a hybrid when I go on a road trip I can have a full battery guess what after 35 miles I’m going to drive back on 400
Miles of gasoline and then I’m going to fill it up in in five minutes and get back on the road I don’t have to worry about the the technology part uh the technology for technology sake interfering with the actual usability of the product it works like we’ve always
Expected a modern vehicle to work that is until technology becomes an innovation in the battery space when we no longer have to have this discussion about trade-offs of charging or am I going to make it these hybrids do that already they do that today and that’s
Why they’re popular and they do it at a price point and a usability and reliability point that normal families can hope to afford without any gimmicks and that’s why this has been so successful I’m going to take this for a drive and I’m going to walk through the
Pros and cons of this system and the way that it works to drive and why you might consider it or why you wouldn’t So the hybrid and plug-in hybrid formula it’s no doubt that people are adopting these more and more for the benefits of the fuel efficiency when fuel prices are high you instantly regret and you wish you had one and now that the plugins have become more popularized one of the
Reasons is you can get full EV range for a normal commute and all the statistics say you know most people don’t drive more than like 20 or 30 mil a day so if you’re looking at a vehicle like this when the sweet about about 40 m of EV
Range you could potentially never use the gasoline motor but you could the obvious things that it does besides fuel efficiency if you don’t even care about that is it elevates the refinement of most of these plug-in vehicles or hybrid vehicles because they’re quieter you don’t have the rattly ass four cylinder
Running all the time and it namely creeping into the house at night or or rolling around you don’t have the the the sound of a four cylinder or a three cylinder so it it can feel more like a luxury car and the fact that most of these vehicles are a lot quieter than
They used to be which many people don’t think about um every every year a new car comes out one of the first things they’re trying to do is make them more refined more quiet and you add an EV drivetrain or at least a Hybrid drivetrain and it makes a huge
Difference so you have the fuel economy you have lower emissions sometimes and of course you have the EV part where you can just drive it on pure electric so at least in the Toyota sense that’s what we’re talking about here that’s what I’m trying to make the point is their hybrid
System has become so seamless between gasoline and electric their ecv is it essentially doesn’t sound like a horrible belt driven CVT it feels more like a regular transmission and that transition between Gas and Electric is almost unnoticeable when you command power it gets the gasoline motor spun up
To high RPM and you have the torque fill from the electric motors and it makes it feel a lot faster than what this thing specs out to be you essentially have an eco four cylinder propelled by the EV drivetrain part of this and it feels really fast and you’re always going to
Have that torque part that it’s delivering and that to me is the best part about these systems now the negative Parts about the plug-in hybrids and the hybrids is they’re not designed for performance even though it improves the performance there is something uh to be said about the fact that these are
Very disconnected feeling cars when you look at the Prius Prime for example when you look at the outside of this thing you’re like you know it looks like it would be really fun to drive but you know the Hybrid drivetrain has that just I mean there’s the immediacy from the
Electric motors but again it’s all layered in software and all layered through the programming of all these systems so it is a very dead feeling car it is it can be quick but it doesn’t particularly handle well and this is the thing with most Toyota’s Modern Toyota
Hybrids is this is one thing they’re not putting a ton of design in and the Prius Prime is front-wheel drive only so when you get the torque to come in it’s spinning the front tires it’s front-wheel drive problems if you get the E all-wheel drive which is all the
Hybrids are going to now there’s no mechanical system in the back it always feels very electronic controlled and that’s the one thing that I will say is if you do if you favor the driving experience and you’re not just turning off your brain when you’re driving um they’re not
The most engaging cars to drive and that’s something that the Toyota hybrid systems have always struggled with um and I think it’s going to become more and more an issue as more cars and more vehicles and more products go to plug in hybrids and hybrids are EVS even that
They’re going to have to find a way to bring back a little bit of the driving connection without it feeling so synthetic but for the most people that are driving this if you’re buying it as a family car for example one of the biggest benefits is that that just
Blends in the background and works uh from brake by wire feeling natural the steering is you know direct but it’s you know it’s a little dead but it still feels like something’s going on there a little bit they have all these systems tuned very well to meet the requirements of the
Common person and that’s where older vehicles that were doing this felt uh like experiments they no longer feel like experiments and I think when you get in here as a normal person that’s buying that family vehicle you’re going to appreciate how you don’t think about
It and that goes to that says a lot to their engineering that they’ve really sorted this out and figured it out for mainstream products and I hope that you get a chance to drive one of these modern interpretations or modern iterations of the Toyota hybrid systems
Namely in the Lexus where it’s just got a little bit more juice going to it uh they are very very good to drive and it makes sense why they’re selling a gajillion of them but we’re going to cover more of this stuff in the future thanks for watching I’ll see you next Video
We take a quick look at the history of the Toyota Hybrid to understand why they have become so popular and how the concept has finally reached mainstream acceptance. We discuss the pros, cons, and philosophy behind innovation and technology and why cutting-edge is often short-lived. There are many brands in the EV and Hybrid space. Which do you consider a leader, Hyundai, Tesla, Lucid, Rivian, Ford, Chevy, or Toyota?
#cars #engineering #technology
Index:
00:00 Intro
00:38 The History of Honda and Toyota Hybrids
1:42 Why Toyota Won the Hybrid Battle
2:21 Technology is Not Innovation
6:31 Driving Discussion
