​BY BRYAN PRESTON MAR 19, 2021 12:50 PM ET - Story supplied by club member Rodger Anderson
​
Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States; in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.
When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before.

​That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”
Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.
 
Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring price tags down.
The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.
 
Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternative current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signaling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

Now that we have been confined to our own little island for the foreseeable future, Cindy and I decided that we needed to start touring the country instead of the normal cruising holidays that we have done for the past 10 years since retiring. We saw an advertisement in the paper offering three train journeys, along with some sightseeing in between, with a company called Endeavour New Zealand run by Pete Salvesen out of Christchurch. The trains were the Northern Explorer Auckland to Wellington, the Coastal Pacific Picton to Christchurch, and the Trans Alpine Christchurch to Greymouth.

After our meet and greet in Auckland City on a Sunday evening, Monday morning we arrived early and very excited to start our journey but appalled at the awful makeshift office made out of a shipping container that is Auckland Railway Station. This trip was greatly anticipated as we hadn't been on a long train journey before, and our hosts Pete, John and Dianna warmly welcomed us, and babysat us throughout the whole week, making the experience very easy.
  
Not knowing what to expect, we thought  the Auckland to Wellington leg was a bit long, at 11 hours 20 minutes, but there was a great dining car which helped along the way, and saw some stunning vistas including the Raurimu Spiral and the Mangaweka Gorge. We had two stops where we could get off the train for five minutes and take a walk on the platform only, but definitely not leave it as dictated by the conductor.

We had one and a half days in Wellington, during which we had a guided ethnic food tasting tour and sightseeing for a morning, a visit to Te Papa to see the Gallipoli exhibition on our own, and the next morning a hastily organized guided tour of Parliament by ourselves, which was really enjoyed. The afternoon was spent on the Inter-islander on a glassy smooth Cook Strait, and the night in Blenheim. The next day a Marlborough Sounds cruise to visit a mussle farm, and taste fresh mussles. UGH!!!! but Cindy really enjoyed them and rated them the best she has had. The afternoon train trip down to ChristChurch was amazing, with totally different scenery, and only lasted around 6 hours. The Kaikoura section of this trip was spectacular running right along the coast, along with the unexpected sight of Lake Grassmere with it's salt ponds and hills.

The next day in Christchurch consisted of a  tour of the Botanical Gardens, and an afternoon free to wander around with the supplied hop on-hop off tram tickets to view the Cardboard Cathedral, the Riverside Markets, and the beautiful Avon River running through the city. The evening was spent at dinner with our grandson who is at tech college down there.

Our last day was the train trip over to Greymouth through Arthur's Pass, and a mini bus trip back, which enabled us to see a different set of scenery from the train, before being dropped off at Christchurch airport for the trip home. Although it was only 6 days, we certainly saw a lot of the countryside we normally wouldn't see, and was one of the best value trips we have done. 

We would highly recommend Endeavour New Zealand for their friendliness and professional approach to touring, and if you wanted to see what else they offer check out their website below.                           Ciao4now, regards Russell             

https://www.endeavournzitineraryspecialists.co.nz/

Club member Bill Hohepa features cars at Muscle Car Madness Rangiora, held on January 23-24, 2021

​After attending the Orewa Rodders' Beach Festival for the last few years we decided to go down to the Cruize Martinborough  in the Wairarapa for a change of scenery. It was 3½ days of pure car fun, although over 9 hours driving down in 35 degrees with no A/C or a working temp gauge was a challenge, so we stopped at the Tui factory to cool down!

Thursday; the cruise was to Lake Ferry on flat straight roads - bliss.. along with afternoon wine tasting (not on the official agenda) as there are over a dozen wineries within easy distance from town.

Friday; a cruise to Masterton and a car show at lunch time, then in the afternoon a short drive to the Motoplex for a ‘Drive’ on the drag strip.  No times were taken as it was not an official drag outing but plenty of pedal to the metal as there was a flag drop to test how quick you can go, before heading back to Martinborough for an evening cruise to Greytown for drinks and dinner at the “Swan”.

Saturday; a car show in Martinborough town square, followed by a cruise and a car show/park up at the Tauherenikau Race course, which doubled up by holding the South Wairarapa country music festival. While a small number listened to the music, the majority watched the grasskana where some of the old cars had a blast in the farmer's paddock next to the parking. After a short interjection from a local, it was confirmed as an approved event and we continued to see a great selection of cars spinning around kicking up grass.

Sunday was the breakfast and prize giving which we missed as we left early. In total there were about 300 cars, so smallish compared to Beach Hop, Americana, and Orewa, but nice flat roads, along with meeting new people and seeing different cars was a plus.

Weather was cooler on the cruise days than the drive down, but it certainly didn't stop anything happening. The drive home was again hot and long and we stopped in Taupo to let the engine cool a little (new temp gauge in a container somewhere that was supposed to be installed before the trip). There was some powerboat racing on the lake, which was a bonus to see.

All in all we had a great time seeing different parts of this great country we have not been to before - I will not mention the low house prices compared to Auckland.                                                                               Regards, Chris & Barb Baker

A stunning blue sky morning saw five club members turn up at the BP Service Centre Papakura for a run down to Thames – Peter & June (1975 Oldsmobile Delta) Fred & Diana (1962 Oldsmobile Starfire) Mark & Margaret (1966 Ford Thunderbird) Greg (1969 Buick Electra) Russell & Cindy (1957 Pontiac Star Chief). Just missing out on the departure time was Kerry (1962 Thunderbird) who put pedal to the metal and turned up shortly after our arrival at Thames Airfield.

Luckily Fred had bought along a gazebo, which was most welcome as the blazing sun was relentless, although there was a nice light southerly throughout the day. The tremendous variety of cars in the display area was surely overshadowed by the range and type of aeroplanes, some of which were truly spectacular. A NZ Navy Sea Sprite helicopter flew down from Whenuapai for the day, and this was constantly surrounded by fans young and old throughout the day.

The highlight of the day though was the air displays, which were truly spectacular and varied. These ranged from mock airfights between Red Baron/Snoopy type bi and tri planes, to formation and aerobatic flights, and the Warbirds aircraft. The displays just kept coming throughout the day as per the programme, and provided spectacular viewing against the deep blue skies.

It was certainly different to the normal car focussed shows we usually frequent, and was a joy to both car and aircraft aficionados alike. Well worth the lovely drive down to the Coromandel, and one that I would highly recommend for next year.                                                                                                                                                   Ciao4now, regards Russell

We had a great day yesterday at the “All USA DAY” annual event at the ‘Classic Fliers Museum’ in Tauranga. There were approximately 300 cars on show and it was well supported by the public. So busy taking pics of some of the most stunning machines that I forgot to take one of mine. Did pick up the trophy for the ‘Best Survivor’ though. LOL.
 
I thought that perhaps you might like to share some of these photos with the Club Members and see if there is any interest to attend this event next year. It would be great to see you all down this way some time.                                                                                                   Cheers Dave & Tania.