Toyota has been way, way behind on electrification. I suspect they’ve been Innovator’s Dilemma’d are are in a death spiral that they haven’t even noticed yet
Actually, we should also realize that they've been super wildly successful at getting people to move towards clean energy vehicles.
Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree.
It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars. It becomes obvious when we look at the total emissions generated by that pool of 100k cars.
If there's anyone to blame, I'd look at the luxury division - Mercedes, Audi and BMW (and also Genesis/Acura) - all late to the party, and still haven't been successful at meaningfully replacing the vehicles they would sell to their customers yet.
Up until recently (~2022/23) Toyota had cumulatively sold more hybrids than all EVs sold by all manufacturers combined, globally. They arguably have the best hybrid drivetrain on the market, and it's gotten to the point where even the Camry (2025 onwards) are exclusively offered as hybrids now.
There isn’t a non hybrid version of the Prius with all its weight and aerodynamic features.
But there’s ~45 MPG all gas cars that have been built. Currently the best option is 39MPG combined, but that car’s aerodynamics aren’t great because hybrids can push that a little further for people who really want maximum MPG.
Hybrids are a dead end. There’s already EV’s doing 1MW charging. That’s practically gas pump speeds while also being able to charge at home, and the underlying technology keeps improving.
8% of new cars in the US, 14% in the EU, and 27% in China are EV’s. Toyota’s EV sales are anemic by comparison.
Hybrids are the only choice for the vast majority of the country that doesn't have the needed infrastructure to support EVs. If you never leave your urban enclave, then sure, EVs are great. But hybrids are perfect for _right now_, even if EVs are the future.
The Toyota hybrid engine is also rock solid and has been for more than a decade. They don't have a reason to abandon that right now when the industry is highly unstable and government funding for infrastructure that isn't Tesla's is being cut left and right.
I live in rural VT, 600 person town in national forest. Tons of us have EVs because you don’t have to drive down the mountain for gas and they drive great in the snow and mud.
Toyota does not want to sell a lot of EVs, because that could mean investing heavily to scale up the manufacturing of a dead-end technology that ends up losing out. Meanwhile they've been iterating on their hybrid tech and are selling 50 MPG vehicles by the millions. When the dust settles, a lot of EV companies will be out of business and their products will be e-waste with 0 spares anywhere. Toyota on the other hand generally uses the same technology for decades to build very predictable appliance-like vehicles. This is why a 3 year old EVs have 40% residuals while used Toyotas are 60%.
Toyota has invested very heavily in hydrogen cars, which is an actual "dead-end technology that ends up losing out".
Sure, numerous EV startups will bite the dust, but the actual tech of putting a battery on wheels and spinning the wheels with motors isn't going anywhere.
Toyota invested heavily into the R&D which is distinct from tooling up to produce 70kwh battery packs by the millions. They've sold maybe 20k hydrogen cars, globally over the course of a decade as a pilot. They also sold 4k RAV4 EVs, are working on EVs with BYD and CATL, which means that they're keeping their finger on the pulse of the industry while also staying out of the lithium/neodymium pissing contest which they simply cannot win. The reason Chinese EVs are such a good deal is because all of the hard-to-source stuff is under the same roof because China doesn't really have a fossil fuel story. Their hope with EVs is that the current approach to making them is simply not sustainable on a global scale and that the emergence of less resource-intensive technologies will saddle all earlier entrants (that aren't subsidized by nations) with debt.
>It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars.
It seems like hybrid sales are pretty comparable to EV sales in the U.S., at least according to this source anyway.
These metrics are most likely skewed - California has a significant number of EVs in a sample of every 100 cars, but in other states EVs are almost nowhere to be found.
Not everyone wants an EV, especially in America. Unless EV’s can jump to 500 mile range and ubiquitous five minute charging, a lot of people are just gonna want a hybrid.
Just yesterday in the coffee shop the person next to me was having a conversation about his buyer's remorse over recently purchasing a full EV instead of a hybrid or plug-in hybrid. It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips. Something about having to carefully plan around the locations of fast charge stations, and it really being a drag when you're just trying to get out of the city for a weekend.
My sense is that plug-in hybrids really are the sweet spot for a lot of people in North America. The shorter full EV range is still well within most people's needs for a typical day's worth of driving, but you can still travel to and through rural areas without so much stress about whether you'll get stuck killing time for an hour or two at a slow charge station.
Superchargers aren’t available everywhere, and even in your scenario that’s still twice as long as it takes me to fill a gas tank, and you have to do it twice as often (at least).
>It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips.
A few years ago this was true, but now that Tesla has opened up their network of chargers, your destination probably has to be >100 miles away from most interstate highways before road trip charging becomes much of an issue.
Even if there are charging stations every ten miles along the exact route you were already planning to take, it’s just straightforwardly true that it’s more annoying to charge vs. get gas.
I can fill my tank and be back on the road in <5 minutes in most cases, and I only have to do that once every 350 miles.
With an EV, I would be stopping anywhere from 10-30minutes (depending on the kinds of chargers available) (assuming I don’t have to wait for one to open up), and I’d be doing it twice as often.
It adds a very meaningful amount of time to long car trips.
Yes it's straightforwardly true that road trip charging is less convenient than with gas cars.
But charging for regular use is dramatically better. Anytime you're not on a road trip, you spend essentially no time fueling. Just plug in at night like you do with other electronics.
So I'll take saving 15 mins every week avoiding the gas station, in exchange for the couple times a year I have to wait an extra 15 mins charging.
Note that if your hybrid is a plug-in hybrid then you might get the best of both worlds.
On long road trips you get the fast re-energizing of a gas car.
For regular use if your plug in every night there is a good chance you can do most of your driving in EV mode. Current plug-in hybrids often have EV mode ranges of 40+ miles.
This is what someone I know with a RAV4 Prime reports. They plug in at night and it seems to mostly use the battery. It does sometime use the ICE but it is infrequently enough that they have only had to put more gas in every few months.
But you don’t really. You get a weak drive train as many moving parts as an ICE plus a non-trivial size battery that is expensive to replace. Your maintenance costs potential are as a bad as an ICE plus an EV. EVs are way more elegant solutions, simpler, better performance. Also, EVs are improving rapidly, charging speed and range keep getting better.
Hybrids done well actually have fewer moving parts than ICEs. They eliminate some systems (alternator and starter motor for example) and greatly simplify others (transmission).
I have a RAV4 Prime (decided to get that instead of a Tesla) and I absolutely love it. It's the best of all worlds for my use case (mostly <40mi daily commute entirely on battery, occasional longer drives that use gas). I often go months+ without refilling the gas tank, and it charges overnight from empty. And, it's clearly Toyota quality in terms of implementation.
He was having buyer's remorse for choosing a BEV over a PHEV. The PHEV is better on road trips and just as good at commuting. It loses on maintenance but probably still comes out ahead on TCO.
I think this is overstated. My Ford EV gets ~300 miles. If I leave my home with a full charge, I can get ~500 miles with ~30 minutes of charging. If a ~30 minute break in the middle of an ~8 hour drive is a problem for you, you probably aren't a safe driver. There is a reason that truckers have mandatory breaks. A person shouldn't be driving all day nonstop.
Really? Maybe my knowledge of EV ranges is way out of wack. I was assuming avg ranges look much more like ~200mi on a full battery in real-world conditions, and that a 30-min charge usually only gets you 80%. Sounds like I’m at least somewhat misinformed.
I tend to get better range than that, I'd like to claim it is my driving style, but more realistically it is because I live in Southern California so the battery is generally at ideal temperature, I often don't need heat/AC, and probably most importantly I'm not sure if I have ever driven 70+ mph for 300 consecutive miles without hitting traffic.
Also when I do road trips, I'll tend to do multiple shorter stops which according to that link means I'm closer to the "optimum charging area" than going 10%-80% in one sitting, so that might have caused me to overshoot that estimate a little.
So beyond that slight amendment of switching that one ~30 minute charging stop to two ~15 minute stops, the answer to ketzo's question is "yes, really", but as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
The problem with EVs and roadtrips is simply charging infrastructure. If there were L3 chargers wherever there were gas stations, it really wouldn’t be a problem even in eastern Oregon (really want to take my i4 to John Day, but alas…not quite yet, even if you drive a Tesla).
I want a range extended EV with a easily removable power pack. Unfortunately the EPA doesn't consider it an EV so no one will make one because there's no tax credit.
In the US the BMW i3 range extender gas tank is software limited so the gas range is shorter than the ev range. That's the only way they could get it to qualify as an ev.
In the US a plug-in hybrid seems like the best of both worlds. Once the charging infrastructure gets fully flushed out pure EVs will look a lot better.
PHEVs (hybrids with large battery packs) are the worst of both worlds -- weight penalty of a big EV pack, but the complexity/maintenance of an ICE engine. Additionally, rarely used gas can go bad sitting in the tank. Just get a regular hybrid if you're concerned about EV range or don't like the current limited offerings.
It's not as easy as more components = more expensive.
The battery pack is much smaller. A Prius PHEV is almost 500 lbs lighter than a Model 3 and only 100 lbs heavier than a normal hybrid Prius, which also has a battery pack. The MSRP is lower by almost $10k, which can cover a lot of maintenance before you resell it with less depreciation.
America is massive. And has a huge portion of “wild” country. As much as I want to go EV. All my free time is in the mountains on logging roads and in sub zero temps in winter. The charging networks are not yet embedded in the small mountain towns I frequent and I can’t take that chance.
You are just describing the chicken-and-egg problem. Without enough EVs there aren't incentives to build more chargers; without enough chargers EVs aren't sold in enough numbers. That's why the EV adoption curve in the United States is still in the early adopter phase. And clearly you aren't enthusiastic about being an early adopter.
Hydrogen fuel cell is more about diversification, and it is fully backed by the Japan gov so ROI would be through the roof even if it doesn't "win".
Also many countries aren't producing enough electricity (cough Japan and Germanycough) so EVs getting popular _at scale_ isn't going to happen tomorrow either.
Having a nuclear disaster only decade ago with a flurry of other plants that couldn't pass the safety test when re-checked creates a pretty tough situation.
Right now there's a plant that is stopped by the gov from getting back into production for safety issues, with the elec company trying to appeal for the nth time, and it sure doesn't help the overall image.
"This time it will be fine" is kinda hard to stomach for the impacted public to be honest.
Japanese engineering at it's core is grit and resilience (”fall down seven times, stand up eight”）. Japan's architecture prowess comes from waves and waves of catastrophes they've overcome and rebuilt upon.
For Japan to be that good at nuclear, there first needs to be a way to gracefully fail and retry, instead of making whole regions unhabitable for a century. We're clearly not there yet.
TBF Geothermal sounds a lot more complex on the economical side than other renewable sources.
Japan probably has the technology to deal with many of the downsides (additional sysmic risk, pollution, volcanic activity straight destroying the installation etc.) but it might not have the initial money nor a decent enough ROI to maintain the system.
I suspect it's that they build excellent ICE vehicles, and were quick to go to hybrids but missed the rise of EVs. Everything we're seeing is a rearguard action to protect their ICE business.
Even if that is true now, it seems like the days of that continuing to be true are numbered. Toyota is going to have to accept the inevitable eventually. And, as someone who likes Toyota, I hope they don't wait until it's too late to catch up.
The Hydrogen/fuel-cells were not mass-marketable for some reason, and also beyond that they have been hard to manufacture and sustain, especially when it came to setting up that network of fueling stations and adoptability for customers.
Not noticed, because they're printing money with their hybrids that all have year-long waitlists in the US. Gas stations are alive and well, and until the housing crisis is fixed (not happening in our lifetime), people will be reliant on gas vehicles because you can't charge at most apartment complexes.
Isn't that Japan in general, and for national security reasons? AFAIK they're wholly dependent on China for crucial mineral components in EVs, and 'burning the boats' by abandoning internal combustion manufacturing would effectively turn them into China's vassal.
Yes, 'rare earths aren't rare,' and I hear that, and then I also hear that everyone is screwed if China won't sell theirs.
It can't be both. The key reasons I've heard for China owning this market are a) they have large deposits, b) they heavily invested for decades, and c) they aggressively dump and undercut in an anticompetitive fashion to ensure they keep the market cornered.
Seems like the only way out of this is to stop being religiously opposed to state subsidies in an industry of clear national security importance, combined with maybe a Herbert Dow-style jiu-jitsu move of countering any dumping by stockpiling and then re-selling the below-market product.
They have some of the best hybrids on the market and EVs in general are not ready for prime time yet. Their plug-in hybrids are in the current sweet spot and are very popular. They have plenty of time to catch up once infrastructure and power density are there for EVs. This is with a US context.
Aren't now the european manufacturers pulling back from full electrification and into hybridization? Hopefully we'll get hydrogen powered cars at some point.
I went to a Subaru dealer here in Calgary and asked about the Solterra with a friend present.
The salesman bluntly told me to get a Tesla and half heartedly tried to get me to look at a hybrid. I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't there with a friend.
In retrospect, I am happier with my used Model 3 than an electric car from a company with no intent on winning the market.
Anyone have a source for how many pounds of batteries each car manufacturer has shipped over the years? It would be nice to see how BYD is doing compared to Toyota, Tesla, VW, and General Motors, etc.
I suspect you don't actually own an ev. Otherwise you might mention a specific here. I own an ev and they're marvelous. The ability to leave with a full tank of gas every morning and never have to worry about filling up is fantastic. No maintenance other than tire rotations ever 10k miles, and electricity is way cheaper than gas. And EVs are just fun to drive. The instant torque is fantastic and everyone I show it off to loves it.
