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. //

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.

Transmission temperature monitoring with OBD2

"All right guys. Been using it for a while now, got it from 4Runner Club Kazakhstan. You need a bluetooth ELM327 adapter (Ebay) and Torque application installed on your Android-based phone. In Torque, you should create the following two custom PIDs:

PID: 21d9
Long name: Transmission fluid temp 1
Short name: TFT1
Unit type: C
Max/Min: 220.0/-40.0
Equation: (((E256)+F)/256)-40

PID: 21d9
Long name: Transmission fluid temp 2
Short name: TFT2
Unit type: C
Max/Min: 220.0/-40.0
Equation: (((G256)+H)/256)-40

These work fine on my 2006 T4R V6, and should work with any 750 transmission (V6 2005 to 2013, V8 2003 to 2009). I don't know if it will work with 340 transmission which they installed on 2003 and 2004 v6, but there's a chance it will - someone has to test it.

There are two temp sensors, one in the transmission, another one next to the radiator, the latter's readings are higher - it shows temperature of a liquid yet to be cooled down in the radiator.

I checked accuracy of these PIDs in Torque using another diagnostic tool (MVCI cable) and Toyota Technstream software - it showed diffrenece between Torque and TIS Techstream of around 1 degree Celcius - which I think was due to time it took me to switch between the two tools.

Now, the idea itself and PIDs were originally borrowed from one of Tacoma forums (Tacomaworld I guess), but when we checked their PIDs we found out they showed temperature about 20 degrees higher than the real one. That;s why we had to ask some programmers and Toyota fans from Russia to help us and now we all can use their correct PIDs shown above.

I hope it'll save you some time and money.

P.S. Just don't forget it's all in Celcius.

((((E256)+F)/256)-40)1.8+32
((((G256)+H)/256)-40)1.8+32
Those will give you outputs in deg F. "