Raising Hell: Issue 69: The Toyota Way
"The journalist can bring you up in the world nicely. Or the journalist can destroy you," Idi "Big Daddy" Amin, Ugandan dictator in last interview before his death in 2003.
As the taxi idled at the Gate 4 security checkpoint, the driver and I shot each other a knowing glance. The security guard had been friendly when we first arrived but once he learned I was a reporter, his tone noticeably changed. Pulling up to the checkpoint, the driver said it wouldn’t be a problem to drop me off in the industrial neighbourhood and the company usually let him a little way inside so the visitor doesn’t need to walk.
Not this time; the man of about 25 who worked the security both took one look at me through the driver’s side window and immediately grew suspicious. There was some confusion as he informed us he’d have to check with management before he let me in and advised us to head back over to the main administration building, which was the opposite side of the facility and the opposite of the instructions I had been given.
I had been told to turn up at 11am Monday morning at Gate 4 of Toyota’s Altona plant to take a tour of the company’s Hydrogen Centre. I had contacted Toyota for a tour of the facility, and to its credit the company’s media reps had obliged under short notice. So it was with some wrangling and negotiation at security, I was allowed to demount the taxi in an adjacent carpark and wait for the company minder to fetch me.
“How much are you paying that guy?” I asked the company minder on the way through the turnstile. She shot me a confused look.
“You guys should really pay him more,” I said. “You guys have really excellent security here. The second we pulled in, he was just so on it. Felt like I was about to be crash tackled, hand cuffed and dragged away.”
As we walked towards the warehouse, I realised this may have been something of a faux pas. The Hydrogen Centre, a non-descript facility at the far end of the complex, would make an ideal corporate black site.
Jokes aside, the centre served as a working demonstration Toyota Australia had put together to help sell hydrogen cars to Australian policy makers. The marketing exercise consisted of a staged presentation through a series of wall displays, culminating with a demonstration of how the electrolyser and specialised hydrogen fuel pump worked. No less than two company minders accompanied me on the tour which, I was told, had been given to over a hundred dignitaries since the centre first opened. Prime ministers, premiers, titans of industry all had passed through this hallowed warehouse facility — and now me.
I had come because I wanted to get the pitch in person. I had written one of the earliest articles about hydrogen as a potential new alternative fuel in 2019 — after which I was immediately deluged with emails from gas companies, research institutes and the German embassy asking if I’d be interested in writing more about hydrogen (I was not). At the time I had also been writing more about electric vehicles, the politics of the car industry and Toyota’s attempt to save the combustion engine with hydrogen. Talking to someone over the phone was one thing, but I thought it useful to hear what Toyota had been telling policymakers for the last two years in person.
As far as industry presentations go, it wasn’t half bad. The department head leading the tour was well-practiced and brisk. We moved through each panel laying out the deep Toyota lore, explaining why the company had sunk so much cash into hydrogen. Around the bend, a display in the center of the walkway had been tactically positioned to immediately answer any questions people had about gas leaks or the risks of a car crash. Atop a pedestal sat a 700 bar hydrogen fuel tank that had been carved away to show off its engineering. The tank — which may sit under the passenger seat of a vehicle, or in the roof of a bus — consists of a plastic inner lining coated in resin, wrapped into a carbon-fiber/plastic middle section, which is in turn encased in a carbon-fiber and fiberglass shell.
“You could hit the thing with a baseball bat and it’d would make a dent,” the department head said.
I suggested they should build this activity into the tour.
It didn’t get much of a laugh.
But it wasn’t until the next room where we stood, looking into the guts of a hydrogen car, that it clicked. Like the tank, the car body had a cutaway revealing its internal engineering. As our guide talked through the build, my eyes traced the specialised gas piping through to the futuristic hydrogen fuel cells with their highly engineered membranes and then to the two fuel tanks — same as we had seen in the previous room — built in cradles beneath the passenger seats. These tanks would have to be filled from specialised gas bowsers that clamped onto the car nozzle and were carefully controlled to prevent overheating. These were fed hydrogen made by the working electrolysers and stored in a special refrigeration system that looked like a giant white box. It made a loud, constant industrial whir.
Unlike their pure battery-electric cousins, the hydrogen car needed so much more kit. From an engineering perspective, it was all very cool — like watching a crazed Russian engineer build a hydrogen-powered Iron Man suit in his basement, it was hard not to respect the skill, care and dedication that went into a designing a system that could be easily replicated in passenger cars and buses. But then there was also the sense, the hydrogen passenger car was a beast that would never make it to mass production.
The reason was all that extra kit. Generally speaking, business tends to follow the path of least resistance and a pure battery-electric vehicle needed so much less. Beyond specialised industrial applications in agricultural, international aviation and long-haul road transport, the idea hydrogen-powered passenger cars would be cruising Australia streets in any numbers seemed a stretch.
It was this insight that made clear why Toyota had been working so hard to save the combustion engine. To car nerds the deep history would be familiar: after an initial flirtation with electric vehicles in the early aughts, Toyota President Akio Toyoda grew gun-shy about electric cars and steadily began attacking them in public, along with those who pushed too hard for a rapid embrace of EVs. Toyoda would typically couch his criticisms in libertarian-sounding rhetoric about “personal choice” and how the “enemy is not the combustion engine but CO2”. From the lofty heights of a corporate office building in Aichi, Japan, these talking points would trickle down and be repeated by policymakers like former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former Labor senator Kim Carr alike.
But in amongst this nonsense, Toyoda would also talk about how an embrace of battery electric vehicles also necessitated massive layoffs to the company’s workforce. Here Toyoda is in September 2021 saying the end of the internal combustion engine would mean the end of 5.5m jobs:
Japan is an export-reliant country. Thus, carbon neutrality is tantamount to an issue of employment for Japan. Some politicians are saying that we need to turn all cars into EVs or that the manufacturing industry is an outmoded one but I don’t think that is the case. To protect the jobs and lives of Japanese people, I think it is necessary to bring our future in line with our efforts so far.
Over the last deecade, Toyoda has made enough of these sorts of one-liners that it earned his company a naming and shaming by UK thinktank InfluenceMap as one of the firms actively working to stall climate action. Whatever the truth of this claim, I have always been bothered by a more philosophical question. Call me a cynic, but it was hard for me to believe the head of a multinational corporation would be overly concerned with the wellbeing of his workforce beyond their capacity to produce. So: what the hell?
Now I had an answer. Back when I wrote The Death of Holden, it was often said the end of manufacturing at Altona marked the first time Toyota had closed a plant anywhere in the world. It was something of a point of pride for the 100-year-old company whose global head, Toyoda, was the heir to a family dynasty. This status gave the man serious clout, as did is position on various industry body’s. Toyoda is currently chair of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, a group similar to the Australian Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, which gives it heft any time the company ways in on policy questions. If we take at face value the claim the company would be forced to slash a chunk of its workforce, the result would not just be financially costly. Toyoda’s concern is for the lost of political capital. Were his company to shrink in size, the less those in charge are going to care about what he thinks on any particular issue.
It’s unclear whether this position remains untenable. Toyoda has since stepped down as head of the company and Toyota has been bumped by Volkswagen as the world’s biggest car maker, suggesting the company has made a bad bet on hydrogen. Where BYD and Tesla have been investing heavily in learning to make better batteries — which is where the real value lies in electric cars — Toyota attempted to stay in the game by releasing its own Battery-Electric Vehicle to maintain access to the $500bn Chinese car market. Unfortunately, it hit a snag when its engineers failed to account for the increased power from an electric engine. When let out onto the road, the wheels fell off, forcing an embarrassing recall.
It’s this context that’s important when talking about climate change and the transition to a zero carbon economy. There’s Big Ideologies, and little ideologies, but also very pragmatic, self-serving decisions being made by people who want to control the direction of change. Toyota, so far, has bet big on an emerging technology that will be needed in the future, just not on the scale they had hoped. Unfortunately for Toyota, the pure battery-electric vehicle looks increasingly looks like a structural certainty as more manufacturers convert their factories and phase out the internal combustion engine. Whether Toyota pays a price for the extent to which it has been willing to die on this particular hill remains to be seen, but the trade off is the resulting delay in moving towards zero emissions vehicles means that the rest of us will be paying a price for the anxieties of powerful men.
Like investigations? Love politics? Walter Marsh, friend of Raising Hell, has a new book about on the early days of Rupert Murdoch through Scribe. Walter delved into the archives to find out when the future media baron broke bad. Pre-order now.
For the Fortnight: February 1 to February 14
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
Again, no recent publications — my sole focus right now is book research, but I did have a chance to participate in a writers room for a documentary that’s being developed.
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
Preach, Brother
It’s such a grind, you know? You wake up in the morning, say goodbye to your family. You clock in at 8am, spend your day staring into a computer screen, carrying out the same dull, repetitive tasks you performed yesterday. You look at the clock but your 4pm knock off feels like an eternity. It used to be you could go where you want, do what you want — be your own master, you know? Sometimes, in your weakest moments, you start to wonder whether you’ve made a terrible mistake. Was it even worth fighting a successful 20-year insurgency for this bullshit desk job. Or at least that’s the vibe from former Taliban fighters who were recently surveyed to see how they’re doing following the fall of Kabul. Turns out the young men who were once romantic freedom fighters driving out the Americans are struggling with an unanticipated new enemy: late-era capitalism. As one former fighter complained to his interviewer: “the Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” “Life’s become so wearisome,” he said. “You do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.”
Grim Tidings
It’s February in this year of our lord, 2023, baby and we’re already getting grim. Over in the UK, a totally normal, functioning state that is not having any problems whatsoever, some have suggested women considered brain-dead may be kept alive so their uterus can be used as surrogate mothers. Their cousins over in the State’s aren’t faring much better with a bill proposed that would allow prisoners in Massachusetts to donate their organs in order to receive a shorter prison sentence. At least Australians can rest easy that the value of a human life hasn’t declined. Not unlike the housing market, the Office of Best Practice Regulation has set the statistical value of a human life in the millions — $5.8m, to be exact.
With Friends Like These…
Faced with this bleak hellscape, what kind of guidance can our political leaders offer? Well, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has re-emerged after imploding like a neutron star and sucking her country into an economic black hole thanks to the unfettered embrace of neoliberal policies to blame — get this — the “left wing economic establishment” for bringing her down when it point of fact it was the very markets she adores. Here in Australia, meanwhile Treasurer Jim Chalmers has come in for a shellacking after having written an essay for The Monthly in which he described his effort to reimagine “capitalism after the crises” where he has embraced a “values-based capitalism”. The essay immediately triggered a backlash from the right who were enraged by the break from the pure neoliberalism of Paul Keating — arguably the Coalition’s best Prime Minister — who are instead stuck with a guy like Peter Dutton, who has been trying to position his bunch as the party of the working class.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
Wherever you are, please now stand to congratulation Macquarie CEO Nicholas Moore on his latest appointment by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to write Australia’s strategy for more "cross-regional engagement" with South East Asia. We here at Raising Hell were surprised by the appointment — though we shouldn’t have been — given Moore currently serves as chair of the Centre for Independent Studies, a right wing, free market thinktank that denies climate change. Whatever the result, the recommendations of this process will be simple: double down on gas exports to South East Asia, even if the International Energy Agency says the last thing the world needs is more fossil fuels. Really, though, this is just an extension of the 1997 white paper, drafted with help from an advisory committee that included a billionaire climate denier and a director of asbestos manufacturer James Hardie that used to work for the NSW Environmental Protection Agency and the NSW Coal Association, that hard-wired coal and gas exports into Australia’s export
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
Trevor Aaronson writing in The Intercept has a story about how an FBI informant infiltrated Black Lives Matters protesters in Denver and tried to convince them to engage in open war against the police to justify a crackdown.
Martin McKenzie-Murray had this great summary of events surrounding Adani in The Saturday Paper, as did Robert Drewe also had this fun speedrun of Western Australia’s casual relationship to danger and radiation.
Paris Marx at Disconnect has a good run-through on how Elon Musk tanked his first company X.com, and may be attempting to use Twitter to fight an old war on banks.
As David Austin Walsh points out, sometimes unhinged far-right weirdos say the quiet part out loud.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!