Beyond the Drive: How Toyota Is Turning EVs into Power Sources

Our car spends most of its life parked.  Why, then, do we treat it like it only matters when it’s moving?  On this episode, we sit down with Norman Lu, Senior Program Manager at Toyota North America, to talk about how to turn EV charging from a source of anxiety into a source of value for car owners. 🚗 

Norman joins us to discuss what has changed in battery-electric vehicles over time, why the range is sufficient for most drivers today, and the biggest barriers to EV adoption.  He explains how electric vehicles can act as energy storage systems for the grid and how the battery in a single electric vehicle can provide enough power to keep a home running during an outage.  Additionally, he shares his thoughts on vehicle-to-grid programs and the problems with the electrical grid today. ⚡️ 

Norman also shares his thoughts on wireless EV charging, vehicle-to-grid programs, solar on vehicles, and the importance of connectivity for the cars of the future.  He also shares with us the challenges of innovation within a giant company like Toyota, and his thoughts on the company’s different approaches to electric vehicles. 📶

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What does the future of driving look like? Wireless charging, smarter energy use, and more personalized vehicles. 🚗📶 Norman Lu, Senior Program Manager at Toyota North America, gives a look into what’s coming next.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of tomorrow's world today. And today I have a special guest. His name is Norris Liu, and he is the senior program manager at Toyota North America. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Well, I think this is going to be very interesting because you guys are on the cutting edge of so many different things today.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

It's a big company. We're doing a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Yeah. Can you talk to us a little bit about what is happening at Toyota that's that would capture the curiosity of our audience?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Well, the big news in auto industry is electrification, connectivity, autonomous. So we're working on all of that. And I'm specifically working in the electrification part of the company.

What Electrification Means At Toyota

SPEAKER_02 1:05

So let's talk about electrification and what you do exactly so that people can understand what you do and how that's going to help to improve what's going on right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Yeah, great. So I'm in a group called Business Development, in the sense of it's more of an internal startup. So we're taking a lot of the technologies and innovation that a company's developing, how to put those into products to enhance the product value and maybe create new value and use that aren't available today.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

That's interesting. So if I heard you correctly, what you're saying is you're you're like the catalyst that there's RD going on, and then you get to have the fun of figuring out how to put that and plug that into all the different vehicles. That's about it, yeah. That's great. That's great. Oh, I think I might like that job. It's a fun job. I love it. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about electrification, right? I mean, there's a big future in that space. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing going on there over the next few years? Like look into the world of tomorrow a little and give us a taste.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Sure. Yeah. I mean, getting us to this point today has mostly been about the battery, so that we can store enough energy on the vehicle that you can drive a meaningful distance. And I think we're there. You know, most cars today can get around 300 miles on a single charge, and that's plenty for most people's everyday drives. There's a constant strive for more efficiency, so you get more miles out of the electrons that you store. And then next step is really affordability and market penetration. So, how can we get more people to drive electric, understand the charging, and you know, realize that it probably fits in their lifestyle better than they think it would.

Making Charging Feel Like Value

SPEAKER_02 2:57

So EVs have become a lot more popular in the last few years. And I mean you're hitting on all the different topics that I think every buyer who's thinking about getting an EV is it's going through their mind, right? So these improvements that you're working on, you mentioned, you know, when you scale up and you you mentioned price and long, you know, length of time you can drive, distance and things like that. And then you have to bring the story of that, whatever that improvement is, to your audience, right? So we have an audience today, and if I was going to talk to my audience today and say, hey, this is the advantage that you've discovered and that you've built into that situation right now, if you could talk to them directly, what would you say is like a strong reason why the Toyota direction is going in the right direction? Because if I have, and by the way, I have three of your cars, so I'm a big fan. So but I think from a general audience perspective, we know you make a quality product, and I think there's always a mystery as to you know how you how you guys figure out how to make such a good quality item. I think it's half the battle is communication. And how does an audience come to understand the difference between one brand and another? So if you're leading that space in EV, and yeah, price is important, everybody's worried about price. I think the hassle of getting charged could be a real topic point that isn't that's kind of sticking in people's minds. So could you speak about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Absolutely. So what I'm working on, I hope, is gonna bring the topic of charging from a hassle, an unknown, a risk, into a value for the customer. You know, the starting point is cars are expensive and they're really tied to mobility. There's a lot of emotion with that. And so everything about cars today is tied to driving. But the reality is most cars are parked 90, 95% of the day, and they're not being utilized. So charging, even though it is the biggest behavioral change for customers, because of that connection to your home and the electric grid, EVs can actually provide value back to the customer while it's just sitting there in their driveway, in their garage, at their workplace. So I think there's a lot of, you know, we talked about price, the concerns for charging, but shifting that storyline a bit to see, hey, there's this new value and usefulness that maybe most people haven't thought about before. And really messaging that. And uh I think every individual customer situation is different, but they can find a way that this fits into their lifestyle and can benefit.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

So let's explore that a little more. Okay, so my vehicle's sitting there a lot a long time of the day, and there's a benefit that it's gonna have as it's sitting there. Can you talk about the benefit as the way I I think I'm starting to understand it is it it can feed energy back into my home? Or it can power appliances, or it can can it push power back into the grid and it can lower my bill one day? I mean how can you talk about how that energy is moving and how it could benefit me as the owner of a vehicle?

Vehicle To Home Backup Power

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Absolutely. I think many people don't realize just the size of an EV battery. It takes a lot of energy to move a car down the road, 80 miles an hour. And so we start with, like you said, powering the home. Power outages are starting to grow more common, unfortunately. And uh year over year they're affecting more parts of the country, and outages are lasting longer and longer. Instead of a generator, an EV can be a very quiet, clean, and durable power source for the home. A typical U.S. home uses about 30 kilowatt hours of energy a day. Most EVs today have a 70 or 80 kilowatt hour battery. That's two days worth of normal energy use. So it's very powerful. And it'll get you through a power outage. But even beyond that, you talked about pushing energy back to the grid. And that's the amazing part that I'm still learning through this job, is just the grid is almost a real-time system. Anytime we flip on a light switch, turn on the AC, we expect there to be power, and that has to be delivered somewhere. And so it's this massive juggling act of constantly finding the supply of power to meet people's demand. But at a large scale, there's almost no storage on our grid. So there's no buffer. And because of that, a lot of times now, as temperatures are increasing and people are using more electricity, we sometimes start getting brownouts and the grid can't supply the power it needs. What it really needs is storage. But storage at a large scale is expensive and it still doesn't solve the problem for everyone. And that's where EVs really come in, and because they are at the end of the distribution line in everybody's homes where people are using the power. And so to have that EV battery be able to store the energy you need and feed it right back to when you're demanding it, it is balancing the grid on a very granular level, and it's probably the best energy storage solution for the grid, especially you know, at mass scale.

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Right. I mean as I sit here and think about it, you know, inside the factory here at Invention Land, we have two massive generators outside so that we don't go down in times where we're manufacturing a lot of a lot of our because it's all a lot of electricity that we're consuming. And then, but there's a little gap between when the generator gets up and running. So we have to have batteries that are innocent to capture just one minute for the generators to get up to speed so that all of our machines don't shut down and we lose all those bills. So we've been struggling with that for years. And you never know, it's sometimes the a generator may not turn on, and the next thing you know, you're down anyway. So you lost your general power from the community, and then a generator goes down. And then I have the same problem at my house. I have a large generator there, and you know, it goes through a normal maintenance cycle. But I'm thinking, we really don't consume that much energy when there's a power outage at my home. Exactly. So it's a real I think it's a real value add because I don't have to worry so much about my uh my natural gas powered generator outside. If I could just plug in and get enough power to keep my refrigerator going and maybe want to work a little bit, turn a light or two on. So I think this is very interesting, these these new developments that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Yeah. And I have a portable generator at home that I used to wheel out and plug in. Takes time to set up. It's always loud, and invariably it always runs out of gas at two in the morning when it's raining outside. So getting rid of all those problems.

Vehicle To Grid And Storage

SPEAKER_02 10:18

Right, right. It is it would be raining at that moment. That's funny. All right, so let's talk a little bit more about the EV industry in general. Maybe we should chat about, you know, back in the early days, you know, about a hundred uh maybe even a little more than a hundred years ago, the first electric car was out there. And of course, it didn't last, you know, very long because it because somebody invented the hand crank, and next thing you know, fuel was now the preferred method. But here we are, we're back into the realm of electrified uh vehicles. So can you talk a little bit about you know, that transition, the pace of innovation over the last hundred years? I mean, do you expect to see, like, what would you expect from the movement of what we had a hundred years ago to where we are today? And what would you expect that you would see if you were just using your imagination and said, well, in a perfect world, we haven't invented these things yet. But what would be some really interesting things? Do you have any thoughts about things that would be interesting to invent in the future that would really, really take this to the next level?

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Yeah, we we think about that all the time and think like, you know, barriers aside, what could be? You know, I think battery technology has been one of the main propellants for making EVs become practical today. And so that'll continue. Safety of batteries is a major concern. So safer, more energy-dense batteries, so you can get more space from the rest of the car. But also with the power. I mean, we talked about sharing the power back from the vehicle to the grid, but scaling that to a massive scale where EVs are really integrated with the grid on a daily basis on a large scale, that's an exciting thought. Wireless charging so that you don't even have to do the work of plugging in and plugging out. And actually, advancements in wireless power transfer have made that very practical and viable. And then moving on a little bit more, you know, now we have all of these vehicles that can be connected to the grid, solar panels on vehicles. So not only are they a distributed storage, energy storage, but they're generating a bit of power on their own as they're parked. And again, it's the scale. We have 280 million vehicles on the road in the U.S. today. All of those making a few hundred watts from solar, that's a massive amount of power back to the grid.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

It really is. You know, the the idea of getting all that solar power in one of your vehicles, I imagine that would be a challenge in the when you scale up in a factory. You know, we're not moving metal now, we're moving something that's a little more fragile. Is that something that you would struggle with in the in the development process at Toyota?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Toyota's actually been doing a lot of development in solar cell technology. And in the Japan market, we actually have solar panels on the Prius, the roof of the Prius. And it generates a little bit of power, you know, limited by the size of the roof, but it's enough to keep the uh air conditioning going while you're parked. So at least, you know, when you go back to your car, you're not just baking inside. Well, that's nice.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

So wait, so so I'm in there working, I come out of the sun, bake my car all day long, and then I get in and it's nice and cool. Yes. I like that feature. You know how many times I leave you know invention land and then my car is uh, you know, 95 degrees. Oh yeah. And I'm in Texas. Oh, so you really get to go.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

I'm waiting for that.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

I bet you are. Uh yeah. All right. So can we talk about one of your core pillars about integrating the vehicle into the grid? And what does that actually translate to as an advantage for the general consumer?

SPEAKER_01 14:13

So there's a lot of talk today about energy, the lack of it, all the AI data centers that are powering up. But the amount of energy that can be produced is actually the lesser challenge. It's when that energy is delivered. So again, back to the real-time system of anytime we flip on a switch, there needs to be power. So it's really balancing that supply and demand on the electric grid at any given point of the day, especially periods of the day where people are using energy the most. And so integrating vehicles to the grid, the battery is a huge enabler. Of course, we need the physical connection through a charging plug and a wire to connect that. But another huge enabler is connectivity. It just happens to be this coincidence that almost all cars today now are connected through telematics with data. And we can really coordinate vehicles on a massive scale to be synchronized with the grid through that connectivity and sending power back and forth at the right time.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

So as time goes on, we'll have to think less about how to get our vehicle powered. Is that so the you're looking at convenience, right? So it's you we have to have that on demand. I'm just trying to think about it from the consumer's perspective, right? They really don't care about all this stuff. You you it's part of your responsibility, and you guys are all thinking about how do we make it more convenient for the consumer and how power flows and when you can get more power because people are asleep, or however you want to think about that. But from the end user perspective, you know, they're probably thinking, I don't want to plug in all the time. And I don't want to think about any of these things, right? I think it's the way a lot of technology moves. And then we just ask for more and more and more, and things get better and better. So, you know, do you think that we're gonna see a day where, you know, because we see a lot of technology here at Adventure Land. And wouldn't it be nice to just drive your car into your into your home and it just the energy moves through the air into the battery, and you're never really having to physically do something, right?

Wireless Charging And Solar Roofs

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Would that be a potential reality? Absolutely. Wireless charging, just like we'd have today with our phones, that is actually already a reality today. There are a couple of systems that's available in parts of the world where you park over a pad on the uh the ground and power is transmitted right through the the air and received by the car. And that same system can reverse the power too. So sending the power back from the car's battery to your home is all done just wirelessly. The the key is scale and being able to make that more affordable. Yes. But absolutely there's a near future where you drive, park, walk away, and the car and the grid are just talking and doing their thing.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Right. Yeah, it it's always the same way, isn't it? You you have a few and it's outrageously expensive. And then everybody has to work really hard to figure out a way to get the pricing down for the general market, right? Absolutely. Well, that's that can be a good journey too, though, figuring all those things out.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Yeah, and that's what that's what we do really good at uh at Toyota is just continuously improving, improving, and cutting costs, increasing quality, and just making things uh masculine.

SPEAKER_02 17:53

Maybe we could chat about that a little bit. Our audience would probably like to know a little more about how does the the art of innovation happen, like brainstorming and is it team related, or are there specific engineers that are tasked with a certain objective and it's just a one-man show or one-woman show? Uh, or is it more team-oriented? And you know, if you could talk a little bit about what you've seen as how you increase the pace of innovation at Toyota, I think people would like to understand that a little more.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think it's really dedicated or you know, an assignment set to any individual. And especially in the culture that we have is consistent, constant improvement. So people have ideas all the time. The difficult part is translating that idea into a final product or an improvement at implementing it. And there needs to be a system to be able to help do that. And that's where you talked about teamwork. That's absolutely the most critical part. Nobody is an expert at everything. And so to take an idea, figure out what it takes to make that real, how to spread that idea, adopt it into various areas where it can be useful, that takes a team. And so I think the the key points about really bringing innovation to life, especially inside a big company, is communication. Taking the idea that's in your head and being able to verbalize that and share it with someone else and really share that vision, the purpose, but then be able for them to take it on their own, add their expertise and experience to it and make it better, grow it bigger, and bring it to life.

SPEAKER_02 19:41

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, it really does because we we refer to that as storytelling, communication, storytelling, and you know so many inventions and innovations. Just if if you don't understand the art of storytelling, you can't get others motivated to maybe they have they can pull the lever of finance, right? Or maybe they can pull the lever of, okay, that's going to go down the assembly line now. You know, if you can't get that resonating story out and into their mind to get involved and want to participate, your innovation's going nowhere, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Getting funding. That's that's the biggest part and the most critical storytelling.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Right, right. It really is. And I think a lot of folks just don't realize that it's that important. That that storytelling and getting the funding going, that is can that you have to get over the hump. So inventing it is one thing, you know, and figuring all the engineering out. But then the big work comes in convincing the uh the levers of uh finance to put the capital there.

How Innovation Becomes A Product

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Absolutely. And the storytelling aspect is something that you know, con constantly learning about. And I find that it's more than just your story about the idea, but also really understanding the other person's perspective, how they see the problem and the solution, and being able to tell it from their lens so that they've got no answer other than, yeah, let's do it.

SPEAKER_02 21:05

Right, right. So projecting out what the benefit is for them. That's right. So understanding your audience and knowing how it would benefit them is a critical piece of the piece of the equation. We we actually teach this that part part of that in into the schools at K through 12. We're trying to get younger people to understand the value of if you can't convey your message from your audience's perspective and show them a benefit, they just tune out. And now you're not you're not getting anywhere. Yeah, it's nice to know that you know, in Toyota, and I think most major corporations, it's a real it's a real science of how to communicate to others to get those ideas across so that progress can be made at your company. Yeah. Yeah? All right, well, let's let's kind of let's kind of play along a little further, okay? Sure. You know, are we reaching a point where you know the car Is we can convey it as uh something a lot more than just a means of transportation. You know, I see a lot of activity with younger people. It's almost like the car is becoming their mobile home in a way. Do you do you ever look at vehicles from that perspective? So you've got a younger audience, a middle-aged audience, an elderly audience. What are you seeing in that market today?

SPEAKER_01 22:26

My kids judge a car by the size of the screen and what they can do on it. So I I absolutely hear what you're saying. I think there's so much emotion and personal personalization attached to cars. People find all sorts of ways to use it. But yeah, and you know, technology, especially in the form of connectivity, infotainment, that's been probably the area where I've seen the most of that personalization. Really being able to be flexible and to help you along your daily task, not just of driving, you know, directing where to go, but becoming your personal assistant, your personalized entertainment, kick back and uh watch a movie while you charge your EV. So there's a lot of exciting things happening.

SPEAKER_02 23:17

Infotainment in your EV, big screen for the kids. What would you say would be a for an over 50 person, male, female, you know, what what do you what are some of the things that they really like about the vehicles?

SPEAKER_01 23:31

I think simplicity. You know, as there's more tech, things are getting more complex. And one of the major directions in infotainment and tech development now is how to make it simpler so that you can access all that capability, but you know, you don't have to sit through a YouTube video and follow step by step and you know, ten different screens to do so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

That's funny. Because I remember back in college, you know, I have a minor in computer science. And uh, you know, we'd be punching these cards and going through this awful process. And it was so complex. And you know, all that they the entire old IBM mainframe. And then when Apple came along and made it so, so simple that it just took off. And I think that's a really good point you're bringing up. Simplicity is critical for earlier adoption of technology. And it's hard to make things simple, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Absolutely.

Simpler Tech And The Multi Pathway Future

SPEAKER_02 24:33

Yeah. I mean that we talk about that here in Adventure. It's like, you know, what the way we say it is any common idiot could make something complex, complex. But it takes a genius to take something complex and make it simple. And so we really struggle with how to work on building a system that's so easy, it's just it's just a human being would naturally hit that button. Intuitive. Intuitive, yeah. So yeah, it's unliking the fact that you are that you're conscious of that and working toward that objective, that means a lot. And that fits with what I think about your brand already, you know, because it's a quality product, but things tend to be in the right place as the driver. I've noticed that it's not a very difficult vehicle to figure out. So it's it's well thought out and it's simplified.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Yeah, there's a lot of effort spent on layout, ergonomics, the the human interface, things that you use most often, things that you need in an emergency quick reacting situation versus things that, you know, maybe you have more time and uh brain capacity to kind of fiddle around with, all of that is really thought out and laid out, and there's a lot of consideration that goes into.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

So we've covered some of this already, but I'm gonna ask you again, maybe from a slightly different angle, because this is tomorrow's world today, and I'd like to project for our audience, you know, let's look out there 10 years, 20 years, what are we gonna see from Toyota?

SPEAKER_01 26:09

You know, 10, 20 years in the cycle of automotive really isn't that long because it takes time to design and build vehicles. And so what we're really looking at today is, and again, I'm in the electrification field, so that's what I'll talk about is how can we bring the benefits of electrification to as broad of an audience as possible. And so the strategy that we're taking right now is called multi-pathway. Again, with that customer-first mindset, you know, we recognize everyone's unique. Their needs for a vehicle are different. And for example, a battery EV is not going to be the solution for everyone. And so, but the benefits of driving electric, it's it's smooth, it's quiet, more efficient. If you're able to charge, then it's much cheaper than gasoline. So we're trying to bring that across the board with plug-in hybrids or gasoline hybrids and even fuel cells. So I think next 10, 20 years, we're gonna still continue to push on that, make these cars much more intuitive so that you're not really thinking about that difference in powertraying or even the act of charging that it's intuitive. And it's just whatever car and the you know specifications that fits your needs the best.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Norman, thank you for sharing some of your insights today. Great. Thanks for having me. You bet. Well, everybody, that's another edition of Tomorrow's World Today. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Thank you for listening to this episode of Tomorrow's World Today Podcast.