What's going on with all that Crushing sound?
July 6th, 2005

UPDATE :: NOV 20'05
Nickel-Metal Hydride Pelican Brief

UPDATE :: JULY 31 '05

RemyC scratches his head!
(ET webed)

This good Toyota, bad Toyota stuff is getting a little weird, more so for ET, since our major sponsor is Toyota. Somebody needs to take a serious look at Toyota so we can discuss this sudden two-faced marketing agenda.

With GM it was clear cut... there were 1000 EV1s out there turned into pulp. But why is Toyota suddenly rubbing the wrong way the same customer base that makes the Prius such a commercial success?  What's Toyota's motive? How many RAV4 EVs are we talking about? Where's the story here?

Comments from Paul Scott:
(www.dontcrush.com)

According to Bill Reinert, there were "about 1400 RAV4 EVs made." There were 238 retail leases and 101 retail sales. These 339 RAVs in private hands will stay that way unless one of the lessees decides to turn the car in to Toyota rather than buy it out at the end of the lease, or sell it on the open market. We have been told by Toyota (Matt Carrillo) that only one such leased RAV has been turned in.

The balance of the vehicles supposedly are fleet leases and cannot be
bought. These are the cars we are trying to protect. Of those, it is assumed several hundred have been destroyed, but we don't know how many. From what we've been able to document, there are at least 300-400 still in use. This number could increase as we find more of them around the state.

The fleet leases have to be turned in. Some of the fleet leases are being given two year extensions, but then they have to be turned in. Toyota is claiming that they are taking the very best of these returns and providing them to parks and universities for temporary use, but even those eventually will have to go back for crushing. ALL of the fleet leased RAVs are being destroyed well before their useful life is over.

Comments from Bruce Meland
(ET publisher)

I am sure the decision on the RAV4 EV was made in Japan Headquarters. Perhaps the chief reason is the technical support. One RAV owner said to me some of the RAV4 EV owners are getting nervous about the battery life of the Panasonic NiMH batteries. They might try to unload them at 50,000 miles. Even though a lot of Southern California Edison meter readers using RAV4 EV's are getting over 100,000 miles per battery pack. Where are they going to get new NiMH batteries? Panasonic does sell them in the US any more. The option to use Li Ion is a possibility but expensive and a lot of owners are not hands on or have contacts to get replacement batteries. The Valence guys could be a possibility of taking on the replacement Li Ion battery project.

I think the future in safe propulsion batteries are going to be Li-Ion
batteries which Valence and Electrovaya in the US and many Chinese
companies like Thunder Sky, seem to be developing for propulsion use, and of course made in China. Unless the oil companies buy out this technology there is some ray of hope.

Comments from Josh Landess
(frequent ET contributor)

So far as I know, no one has sat down to try to write out the role that
Chevron-Texaco "may have played" in bringing about the present situation, which is that there do not seem to be any replacement NiMH batteries, nor NiMH batteries for much (if any) new manufacturing of BEVs or PHEVs.

I sometimes wonder what Toyota would have to say, given that Chevron- Texaco, via the Cobasys lawsuit, more or less seems to have "shut them up good" with respect to the terms under which they could make NiMH batteries.

A considerable portion of Toyota's future is now bet on having access to
legally-made NiMH for their hybrids, and so I doubt they would again risk
violating the terms of their agreements with Chevron-Texaco by, say,
manufacturing the somewhat-different NiMH for any new RAV4 EVs. I am, of course, speculating, and very much in the dark.

We do know though that even just in the last few months we have seen continued Press Releases (from Energy Conversion Devices of course) announcing further seemingly restrictive NiMH manufacturing licensing agreements, this time with at least two major Chinese battery manufacturers. The restriction, identified in the press releases, is that the licensing agreements only apply to non-propulsion batteries. Here is an example:

http://www.ovonic.com/news_events/5_2_press_releases/20050601.htm

Doubtless there is some seemingly-harmless rationale for this distinction that is being made between NiMH for propulsion purposes and NiMH for non-propulsion purposes. It may seem harmless, but in the meantime, it would appear that several Chinese manufacturers are not licensed to make NiMH for propulsion, and that we (in the U.S.) are acting mystified that Chinese demand for Oil is becoming so huge that they are trying to buy an American Oil company. Perhaps their demand for Oil would be somewhat abated if our American Oil Company Chevron-Texaco made an effort to cut them licensing terms for BEV and HEV battery manufacturing that were less restrictive?

In the meantime, is anyone licensed to make NiMH for propulsion purposes? Anywhere?..., outside of those under other restrictions, such as those imposed in confidential the Toyota/Cobasys settlement? I don't think we've been able to find any real mass-produced genuinely-affordable genuinely-available possibilities for a project that I am on.... where the specs are pretty restrictive.

Could Sanyo (not sued under that dispute), if they wanted, make NiMH for propulsion purposes? Would there be hard-to-describe restrictions on their process? These aren't rhetorical questions from me... obviously Sanyo can make some NiMH for propulsion (as we find in the Ford Hybrid) but in our experience of discussing NiMH over the years, I think we have seen that the conversations and the licensing agreements and the technical-possibilities can get frustratingly complex.

We also know that the terms of the lawsuit settlement between the defendants (Toyota, Matsushita, and Honda I think?) in the Japanese suit and the plaintiffs (Cobasys or their reps) were confidential, but that they seemed to dictate that Toyota was not allowed to make NiMH for their Hybrids in North America until 2010 or something. At least I think that's what I've heard.

I am not trying to suggest that I "know" that these NiMH legalities are a huge factor in delaying (not completely stymieing... perhaps that would not be subtle enough for Chevron-Texaco?).... only that it would be a story worth exploring, among many, if the right authors could be found.

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In response to the idea that Lithium-Ion is increasingly held up as a future solution for PHEVs and BEVs, a solution that renders the NiMH questions moot.

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When I interviewed Valence for EVWorld.com in November 2003, the specific motive I had was not that their chemistry is Lithium-Ion based, but that their batteries have a reputation for having solved the significant Lithium-Ion safety issue (the concern about runaway fire).

To my knowledge, there aren't that many other Lithium-Ion manufacturers out there who are making credible claims that they have solved this problem, although probably there are a few who are making claims. Off hand, I think I could only name one where they claimed they'd completely solved the problem (Hitachi?), and that claim seems to have been a couple of years ago and hasn't come up much since then. To be sure, the other significant Li-Ion BEV efforts do seem to be progressing forward, belying my concerns, so there must be a lot here that I don't appreciate. I am thinking, for example, of the Avestor Lithium Metal Polymer battery ... surely we'd have heard if it had prohibitive safety issues?

As an example of fire in a promising Li-Ion battery, I was told about an
Electrovaya fire that had some oomph to it, though they are said to have learned a good deal from that experience.

I do agree that Lithium-Ion efforts in general show a lot of promise, and that there are probably some out there which are safe enough so that I am somewhat overstating the safety issue, but I also think it's something to keep in mind, going forward. Even to this day, I was just reading about a similar safety-related-issue recall for some Lithium-Ion batteries in Apple's I-Pods (I think), made by a very respectable manufacturer, LG (same manufacturer, though not the same model, as for the Lithium-Ion in AC Propulsion's tzero).

The ongoing question marks I have in my mind about Lithium-Ion safety when used in motor vehicles cause me to try to not-take-for-granted that Lithium-Ion will work out. At that point, I remind myself to look into making sure that we haven't entirely written off other reasonable competing technologies, even if they do appear superceded by Lithium-Ion's wonderful superior capabilities.

Also, the experience we all had in covering the Veronica Webb EV fire in 2002 teaches us that this is, if nothing else, a serious issue where we must dot our i's and cross our t's. We cannot prevent any and all disasters when dealing with devices which hold so much energy, .... there is no such thing (at least not that I'm aware of) as 100% perfect safety when dealing with today's technology ... but I think we can make sure to carry our concerns as far as possible, and not provide a "criticism point" that could be used by the American Petroleum Institute, Western States Petroleum Association, et. al. (even if they do not show appropriate concern at times for the dangers and fatalities resulting from use of their own products).

In summary, I agree that it looks like Lithium-Ion is the future, particularly if Valence and a couple of others continue to make progress, but I am a little more wary than others of the safety issues, and I don't want to write off NiMH, particularly since it is really proving its mettle as an HEV product. Without NiMH, all those dozens of thousands of Hybrids wouldn't be out there functioning in consumer hands, and so I tend to keep an eye on whether it will still play a role in PHEV and BEV efforts that require larger batteries than are presently in the Non-Plug-In Hybrids already sold to consumers.

Stay tuned for more mayhem...