Present Status and Future Prospects for Electronics in EVs/HEVs and Expectations for Wide Bandgap Semiconductor Devices

We humans have achieved great cultural developments over the past thousand or more years. Along with the scientific and technological progress that has supported those developments, our impact on the environment has also grown. Research on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the past thousand years indicates that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased rapidly since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries (Fig.1). Since then, the average temperature of the Earth has risen in conjunction with the expanded consumption of fossil energy, leading to the various large-scale climate changes that have occurred in recent years. CO2 is representative of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Approximately one-fourth of current CO2 emissions is known to come from the transport sector. In order to create a society that will continue to enjoy the convenience that automobiles bring, in other words, to achieve sustainable mobility, we automobile makers must work to reduce automotive CO2 emissions even further. Toyota is pursuing the development of the Ultimate Eco-Vehicle as a way to achieve sustainable mobility. In addition to further improving the environmental performance of gasoline vehicles and diesel vehicles, we are developing vehicles that run on electricity and that utilize new energy sources such as bio-fuels and hydrogen. We think that by combining hybrid technology with all types of energy sources, we can create the Ultimate Eco-Vehicle( Fig.2).