When you look at the names selling EVs, there’s Tesla outselling everyone else, and then there are companies that you have never heard of.
But something is missing.
One company revolutionized fuel economy 20 years ago and became the icon of green passenger cars. Prius was a huge hit. The missing piece is Toyota. Toyota has no meaningful presence in the EV market. They made a bet on hydrogen cell technology. It seems this strategy is not working as planned. There’s just no infrastructure for the hydrogen car.
Toyota is still sticking to its guns, building hybrid ICE cars. The argument seems to be that there is no infrastructure for EVs in many places worldwide. Granted, there may be a lot of places in the world that won’t get EV charging stations in the next 20 years, but neither will they get the stations to refill your hydrogen fuel cell car.
Now Toyota has come out with their EV. It’s called… never mind, nobody knows what it’s called (cough bZ4X cough). They say they have a 38-billion-dollar EV strategy. But sources say they have halted the development of some of the models in that strategy.
There could be a fight inside Toyota between EV, Hybrid, and H2 people. It doesn’t matter who wins. The loser is already Toyota
Toyota will have a huge branding problem when people who want to buy a standard family EV at a reasonable price will no longer have Toyota as an option. They may have had two or three Toyotas in a row, but now they have no option but to go to some other brand.
This other brand could most likely be VW. VW is Toyota’s closest competitor. When people switch from Toyota to other brands, they could do this once and return to Toyota when more models are available. However, some of them will never go back to Toyota.
In October 2022, Germany had more than 35 thousand new EV registrations. Of those… 29… twenty-nine were Toyotas. That’s 0.08%.