[Martinjlm]

Originally Posted by 90503

Maybe Toyota has the right approach after all by not going "All in" on EV like gm...

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...ts-feet-on-evs

Toyoda’s lack of the requisite near-religious EV enthusiasm has produced the expected results among the chattering classes: Several petitions have been produced with the goal of forcing Toyota to go “all-in” on electric, one of which had 110,000 signatures when it was delivered to the company, with much fanfare, by SumOfUs, a nongovernmental organization that accepts anonymous donations to “empower change.” This flurry of petitions is, in and of itself, quite telling. One rarely needs to petition a corporation to do anything that is genuinely in its best interests. That’s what shareholders are for.

One suspects this is a classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” situation. If every automaker goes “all-in” on EVs, they will collectively be too big to fail when the EV bubble bursts due to a lack of raw materials, poor vehicle performance, or simple consumer disgust. At that point, they can expect healthy compensation from the governments that forced them into this strategy. If everyone but Toyota buys in, however, then come 2035, Toyota will have a complete line of newly engineered gasoline and diesel vehicles in its showrooms while its competitors have their 2025 lineups, minus the tooling and production facilities they had to destroy and/or repurpose over the course of the previous decade. It will not have escaped their memories that Toyota, not Honda (the FWD innovator) or GM (the enthusiastic FWD follower), makes the top two bestselling passenger cars in the U.S. Think of what the company could do if it had no effective competition.

Speaking of bestselling cars, just four of the top 10 bestselling vehicles in this country are front-wheel drive. Fifty years after the feeding frenzy, FWD turned out to be neither a curiosity nor a compulsory feature. Instead, it’s simply one potential answer to the automotive question and not always the best one. Chances are the EV will eventually assume a similar place in the market. Right now, there’s just one automaker with the intelligence to understand this and the courage to plan accordingly. Time will tell if Toyota was right — but history suggests you’d be a fool to bet against it.

Here are two things the article you quote ignores. There are more, but we’ll stick with two:

1. Toyota recently announced that they too are jumping on the EV train. They will continue to develop and produce ICE and Hybrid vehicles until they can get caught up with other automakers. But then, so are all the other automakers. It’s a transition to get to 2035, not flipping a switch and one day being 100% EV. But make no mistake, Toyota is definitely now on board with the trend towards EV. https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyo...s-akio-toyoda/
2. Yes, Toyota does have the two best selling passenger cars. But the sales of those passenger cars are eclipsed by the sales of Ford F-150 and GM Silverado/Sierra.

Toyota has slow-walked the transition to electric because why would you give up a lead in hybrids, right? And because electric doesn’t make as much sense in Japan as it does in China, EU, and North America, the three largest markets.