Toyota Still Believes Electric Cars Will Never Catch On—Completely

With every passing week there is news of the next best EV offering from some manufacture or another but what the reports are not telling us is that there has been a massive slowdown in the public demand for these vehicles. 

The breaks went on towards the end of 2023 which has resulted in numerous car manufacturers scaling down their once overly optimistic projections for sales and expansion. 

Notable recent causalities have been over at GM and Honda who were to cooperate on a joint project to produce a cheap EV to satisfy the rank-and-file driver. These plans have now been shelved as Honda believe that it is almost impossible to create a cheap electric vehicle.

Despite having parking lots full of EVs awaiting a new home—regardless of the tax breaks and other incentives—less and less motorists are choosing the self-declared green option of Electric Vehicles. 

In the US, EV inventories have increased by 506% but sit on car lots for an average of 82 days versus the 64 days for an internal combustion engine car.

There are a number of reasons for this lack of infrastructure, low residuals and range anxiety are amongst those reasons but number one on the list is price. 

They are just too damned expensive even after the tax incentives and price discounts offered by manufacturers. As reported last week, there is also the cost of running them which Hertz car rental now says is just too high compared with the cost of an ICE powered vehicle.

Akido Toyoda, the Chairman over at Toyota is doubling down on his comments he made in 2022 and is now claiming that consumers have at long last seen reality.  He argues that “The enemy is CO2, no matter how much progress EVs make, I think they will only command a 30% share of the market, the rest will be taken up by hybrid EVs (those that have an ICE engine as well) and Hydrogen Fuel cell powered cars.”

Throughout the forced transition to EVs Toyota has been the one major manufacturer that has not been convinced that EVs should be the mandated future of personal transportation, often to the disappointment of major shareholders.

With the recent slump in EV sales growth, it would appear that perhaps they had a point. In the US, EV sales have slowed despite record sales of them in 2023. 

China has its own set of problems with massive over capacity factories now being forced to dump their products onto unsuspecting international markets. This is of course going to attract a backlash from European governments keen to protect jobs at home.

Despite all of this doom and gloom, most analysts expect EV sales in 2024 to outstrip 2023. Toyota though, are still planning to continue with their multi-pathway approach and hoping that it will pay dividends in the future.