Toyota Motor Corp. said in a new report that by 2020 there may be 1.5 billion vehicles on global highways, 600 million more than there are today, a situation the automaker warned “increases both the possibility of supply shortages and resource exhaustion.”

The report, Toyota’s Sustainability Report for 2008, echoes a July warning from Toyota’s coordinator for alternately fueled vehicles, Bill Reinert, that the world could hit what he reportedly called a “liquid peak” within a decade. Reinert’s warning, made in Portland, Ore., at a conference on sustainable cities that Toyota sponsored, was first reported on the website Green Car Congress, which noted that Toyota thinks a liquid peak could occur even if all available liquid fuels are produced at maximum capacity without concern for the impact on the environment.

The phrase “liquid peak” would appear to be a more dire warning of the potential for motor fuel shortages than the warnings encompassed in the term “peak oil.” While peak oil refers specifically to oil production reaching a physical limit insufficient to satisfy demand, the term liquid peak suggests that not just oil but also biofuel and nonconventional fossil fuel production could reach maximum output and there would still not be enough liquid transportation fuel for some 1.5 billion cars and trucks.

Toyota makes it clear in its report that reducing the number of cars and trucks on the road isn’t an option in its opinion. At the same time, Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe says in the report’s introduction that, “We at Toyota are keenly aware that without focusing on energy and global warming countermeasures there can be no future for motor vehicles.”

Having backed itself into a corner, Toyota in its report hails the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) as the answer to how the world can increase the number of vehicles on the road without seriously increasing the environmental damage those additional vehicles would cause if they ran on gasoline and diesel. Plug-in vehicles “are the best option for reducing CO2 emissions because of their optimal utilization of electrical energy,” the report states.

The report further notes, “The battery in a plug-in hybrid vehicle can be charged using household electricity. . . . Electric vehicle operation (running on the motor alone) offers a possible cruising distance of 13km, and assuming a driving distance of 25 km per day, the CO2 emissions of the plug-in hybrid vehicle will be about 13% lower than those of the Prius, which already emits 40% to 50% less CO2 than ordinary gasoline-powered vehicles.”

While the report states that by 2010 Toyota expects to be selling to fleet customers plug-ins with long-lasting lithium ion batteries, their introduction may come quicker than that, as we’ll examine in Part 2 of this Special Report, which will highlight Toyota’s apparent growing fear of General Motors and other plug-in car developers.

Visit my Blog...