VIDEO: Every Car Will be a Hybrid by Jim Press

"Within the next three or four generations
every Chrysler product will have a hybrid platform"

Chrysler President Sees Green

Jim Press is the ex-president of Toyota America
and worked his way up to a seat on the board
as the highest ranking position for a non-Japanese
for the world's number one automaker.

He now leads the challenge at Chrysler
after heading up the Prius Phenomenal
rise to ubiquity through the Hybrid!!!

Why are the different types (full, mid, and light) and brands (Toyota, Ford, General Motors, and Honda) so important and what contributes to that?

Your question is a great technical question

that people tend to get very emotional about.

So again, the future depends on who and what

regular people buy.

Kind of like brands of clothes regardless if they are made from

organic cotton or chemicals,
brands and stores and prices usually mean more.

HOW DIGITAL IS YOUR HYBRID?

So now that you understand that our world's future

is becoming more digital and that we've powered

the industrial revolution with chemical power such

as coal, oil and gas, it's easy to see the difference

between the types of hybrids and brands.

The level of digitization depends on Research & Development

in the largest business in the world for the most amount.

For example, Toyota spends 10 times Apple on R&D,

but according to a recent survey in Tokyo among 20 years olds,

most don't want a car because they want iPods and digital things.

From light to full, there are R&D costs and technologies that

depend on patents. So if Toyota has 650 patents for the Prius

mostly on the transmission, tranaxle, generator, braker, powerplant

called the Hybrid Synergy Drive, it means that Ford for example

has to make a different hybrid OR pay Toyota for licensing.

Another example, is that oil companies have the R&D patents

on some high voltage digital batteries for cars so car companies

are rumored to have to pay oil companies when people buy hybrids.

Unfortunately, how digital (light, mild or full) depends on

- costs (R&D, patents, licensing, legal)

- what and how many patents you control

- who is working for you in terms of engineers

SUMMARY

The Hybrid Synergy Drive is VERY IMPORTANT to Toyota

because they paid billions to R&D it before everyone else,

so guess what, Toyota has the most FULL hybrids on the road.

Toyota had to build a $1,000,000,000.00 factory just to make

the computer that controls the electricity in the hybrid which

is about the same amount of R&D money that GM spent

on making and killing the now million dollar EV-1 digital car.

The emotional part of R&D is pride!

Honda engineers are never allowed to work for another automaker,

so if Toyota comes up with a full hybrid, Honda will try to pursue

another idea in R&D.

WHO PAYS FOR THE RACE?

Think of types of hybrids and brands like a race

where everybody wants to wear a different color

and drive a different type of technology.

Unfortunately, the consumer has to pay

for all these different choices, failures,

and dirty secrets that costs billions.

Why or why not?

From the same student below: Why or why not?

This part of the question has to do with

how the global variables will change over time.

FUTURE ENERGY

An extreme case would be oil running out.

Many people are working on this problem

because many experts believe that oil will

be gone in cheap large amounts in a century.

So some companies are making synthetic oil,

oil from plants, oil from gases and other things.

HYBRID FLEXIBILITY

The interesting thing about hybrids is that they

are compatible with any kind of chemical fuel:

- biodiesel hybrids (buses and semi trucks)

- diesel eletric hybrids (many trains)

- gasoline electric hybrids (most cars)

- air electric hybrids (trains and cars)

- hydrogen electric hybrids (e.g. Honda clarity)

- natural gas electric hybrids (buildings, houses, washing machines)

- nuclear electric hybrids (most advanced submarines)

- natural gas steam (water) hybrids (most power generation)

and I could go on and on because hybrids can
DIGITIZE any chemical technology and make
it BETTER, FASTER and/or MORE EFFICIENT!

CHEMICAL OR DIGITAL SOCIETY

So if oil runs out and we maintain a chemical society

and do not convert to a purely digital society powered

by futuristic technologies like crystals and string theory,

hybrids will always be more efficient than chemical engines.

HYBRID CONS

The down side is additional costs, although those costs

are going down everyday, while the chemical (gas-powered)

costs of building an engine have dropped about as far as

they can go for now. So hybrids will continue to threaten
chemical technologies if consumers pay the small extra.

SUMMARY
The hybrid is compatible with every gas-powered technology,

costs a bit more, and is in between the chemical and digital world.

If we choose a digital future, hybrids could overtake gas-powered

and then electrics overtake hybrids as our chemicals run out.

If we choose a chemical future, we'll continue to have wars

over natural resources and we may just end civilization

before we can burn up all the things we dig up.

Hybrids are compatible with
BOTH
a chemical and/or digital society!

Do you think that hybrid car levels will ever meet or exceed the number of gas-powered ones?

Kids are getting smarter and doing research reports earlier and earlier.
From the 7th grade, I received the following question about hybrids:

Q) Do you think that hybrid car levels will ever meet or exceed the number of gas-powered ones?

First of all, let's discuss the UNITED STATES market for NEW automobiles.

U.S. COMPARED TO WORLDWIDE

Globally, NEW car and light truck sales usually run about 60 million units,

with 16 to 20 in the U.S. with the rest almost equally divided between

Asia and Europe. Because U.S. consumers (customers) are the most

high profile in the world, the U.S. market is the world's most important.

U.S. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

There are many things that have changed the U.S. consumer recently.

2008 is forecasted to be one of the worst years in a long time due to

several factors including problems on Wall St, gasoline prices and

of course, a looming recession. These are huge factors that have

nothing to do with the kind of automotive technologies avail,

and according to February data, almost every automaker except

Honda had a drop in sales. Almost all large vehicles were down,

and only the sub-compacts like the Honda Fit spiked upward.

WHAT DRIVES SALES?

There is one variable that appears to be more correlated with

hybrid sales than the others: gasoline prices. Now remember

that the rest of the world uses liters and we use gallons.

So MPG is the consumer side of the equation and U.S. hybrids tend

to look very strong compared to miles per liter or liters per 100km.

HYBRID SALES

Toyota dominates hybrid sales and over the past 10 years

hybrids have followed the typical bell curve upwards.

From 1999 to 2007 hybrids sales grew from 17 to about 350,000.

In my 174 page master's thesis researched from 2004 to 2007,

I identified 100s of hybrids being prepared for showrooms

and forecasted the hybrid market. Experts ranged from

20% to 80% of the overal NEW car market by 2012 to 2020.

FORECAST

My forecast was based on plotting the first several years of U.S. hybrid sales

against Geoffrey Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle in Crossing the Chasm.

It's a bell curve and what really drives a technology from something new to

the mainstream is the average buyers. Those that may not understand the

details of how hybrids work and just want a car that gets better mileage.

Under the assumption that the first nine years made up 16% of the area under

Moore's curve, I forecasted that there was 84% of the curve left for Prius and

current generation hybrids. Simple math resulted in a 2.5 million unit market

and at $20,000 per car, it's a $50 billion or $50,000,000,000.00 opportunity.

SUMMARY

To forecast "car levels" we need to look at more than just new car sales

and the current generation of hybrids. How do we count electric cars,

plug-in hybrids, alternative fuel vehicles, etc? If you define "gas-powered ones"

as all the cars like diesel, biodiesel, E85, gasoline-hybrids, flex-hybrids, hydrogen hybrids,

then I would say that hybrids cannot exceed the number of "gas-powered ones."

There are millions of older cars on the road and when and how they are recycled

is up to other factors, usually smog laws driven by politics that has nothing to

do with hybrids being 90% cleaner than most cars.

What I can say for sure is that digital car levels

WILL exceed gas-powered cars in the longer term future.

In the short-term, fuel efficient cars will increase the most

and in the mid-term, hybrids, plug-ins and alternatives

and in the long-term vehicle that have powertrains

controlled by computers. Gas-powered cars have

computer controlled engines, but not

digital transmissions for hybrids, plug-ins and electrics.

CLOSING

The future will converge towards digital just like

the LP became the digital CD that died for the iPod

the tube became the digital transistor that enabled personal computers and flat screens, etc.

According to Jim Press who ran Toyota America to the top,

the automobile industry is the world's biggest and buys

more computers than the computer industry.