Toyota´s activities on power electronics for future mobility

Summary form only given. Recently, the automobile industry has focused on increasingly severe environmental issues. Both the reduction of CO2 and the promotion of alternative energy sources have become of immediate importance, and thereby, demands for next-generation vehicles have been growing. Toyota has introduced several hybrid vehicles (HVs) since 1997, and has recently been developing plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHVs), electric vehicles (EVs) and fuel cell vehicles (FCVs). Toyota has been conducting a large scale demonstration of future mobility technology around the world (Europe, U.S. and Japan) with 600 PHV units in order to verify PHV practicality in real-life conditions. For example, approximately 80 PHV units were allocated to Strasbourg in France, and this project is Toyota´s largest experimentation field in the world. This talk presents experimental data and describes issues from this demonstration. Additionally, this talk introduces technology trends for power electronics. Power electronics represent the core technology in HV, PHV, EV and FCV. The Power Control Units (PCU) is one of the most important components in HV system, and it is necessary not only to reduce cost, size and weight of PCU but also to improve efficiency. The Si IGBT has been adopted in the current system; however, its performance is approaching theoretical limits. In the future, Toyota is looking forward to using wide band gap semiconductors. SiC devices have excellent material characteristics which enable high efficiency, high temperature operation and size reduction of components of HV. Thus, Toyota has been developing SiC devices and expects to apply them to various HV systems.