Bill Reinert from Toyota confronted at conference by plug-in battery advocates who do not like hearing the truth

(Note: To learn more about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and their potential to solve the oil crisis, please read the series of articles titled “Twelve Hydrogen Facts” which is part of the Hydrogen Manhattan Project.)

Bill Reinert from Toyota said in a recent Los Angeles Times article that “Battery cars have real limitations” and “Hydrogen technology is getting much better.”

And a little over a week ago, I wrote about him giving plug-in battery technology another reality check at a plug-in conference in Washington D.C.

I started out that blog post by saying “Poor Bill Reinert.”  The following excerpt from an earth2tech blog entry titled “Who Killed the Electric Car? Debate Rages On” shows where I was coming from when I said that:

“At last week’s conference on plug-in electric vehicles and government policy in Washington, D.C., all of the stars from the documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?’ were out.  There was the feisty protagonist Chelsea Sexton, celebrity EV1 owners like Peter Horton and unexpected plug-in allies like former CIA director Jim Woolsey on hand.  Also present was Toyota’s national manager of its advanced technology group, Bill Reinert, a strange ‘villain’ of the movie.  Within minutes of the exhibition hall’s opening Reinert was surrounded by members of Sexton’s advocacy group, Plug in America, rehashing the same discussion from the 2006 documentary.

GM suffered the brunt of the film’s ire for crushing the EV1 program, but the Plug In America reps took Reinert to task for the similar way Toyota went about disassembling its RAV4 EV program.  Standing next to a converted plug-in Prius (Reinert is in the brown jacket), rough language and impassioned rhetoric was exchanged, with neither side conceding anything.  Much of the argument boiled down to the perceived demand for fully electric vehicles: Reinert and Toyota contend that there isn’t a viable market; Plug In America says quite the opposite.”

For more information about the problems with plug-in battery technology, you can check out Hydrogen Fact #9.