Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
Even if there’s no data to back it, isn’t 30% a lot?? I know plenty of markets where if you tell one of the leaders they could capture 30% of they’d be more than happy to spend billions in R&D. So just at face value the man is smoking some copium hard.
There’s no way one company would be able to capture the entirety of that market, at best it would be like 20 brands splitting the 30% and that’s not an appealing prospect.
Really though the Toyota clan is saying this because they spent a shit ton on hydrogen vehicle tech that they want to catch on rather than electric battery tech that they neglected