Toyota's Bill Reinert lets loose on ethanol, li-ion batteries, plug-in vehicles

Toyota's Bill Reinert should be better known. With so many quotable statements coming from GM's Bob Lutz and Tesla Motors' Elon Musk, perhaps Reinert, Toyota Motor Sales' national manager for the advanced technology group, is just overshadowed in the OMG series. But, during a recent conference sponsored by Fortune in Orange County, Reinert made a play to get his dramatic words out there. How dramatic? Follow the jump to read on and see exactly what he said to Automobile Magazine.

That's the first law of Disney at work--wishing will make it so. Using ethanol for fuel is like electing the dumbest kid in school as class president. As for plug-in electrics, they're just not plausible right now. Lithium-ion batteries are too expensive by at least an order of magnitude. They're not energy-dense enough. And we generate a lot of our electricity from coal. I don't think Shai [Agassi, of Better Place] is being disingenuous. I think he really believes what he's saying. I see it all the time from those Palo Alto types. They think the whole world is like a computer company, and they're always trying to recreate the dot-com economy. You see exactly the same mind-set with Tesla. It's all going to work out. It worked out with eBay. It worked out with SAP. But transportation is a different world. I mean, Shai's bragging about driving an electric RAV4 with a seventy-mile range. How many of your friends are going to buy that car?

That, friends, is just good stuff. Whaddya think? We also have audio of Reinert speaking at length on the state of the green car industry.

[Source: Automobile Magazine]