“Customers — not regulations or politics — should make that decision" to buy an electric vehicle, according to the latest report on Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda. Despite generous government subsidies for the manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles, Toyota has concentrated its research and development on other alternative power trains, like hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells.
“I have continued to say what I see as reality… if regulations are created based on ideals,” Toyoda said in a similar statement last year. "It is regular users who are the ones who suffer,” like the billion Earthlings who live without electricity, as Toyoda said this week.
Despite his opposition to EV mandates, lefties and other would-be world-savers ought to love Mr. Toyoda, who sounds like a committed panicmonger when he says that "the enemy is CO2." But then, much to the left's chagrin, he also says he favors a "multi-pathway approach" to reducing reliance on gas and diesel.
But there's too much private grift and government graft dependent on our "necessary transition" to EVs to allow for Toyoda's multi-pathway approach. He was forced out as Toyota CEO last year for similar statements and for the company's lackluster enthusiasm for EVs.
Toyota manufactures and sells more cars and trucks than any other country on Earth and Toyoda — former CEO and grandson of the company's founder — might know a thing or two about automobile production.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have never owned a Toyota, have no plans to buy a Toyota, own no shares in Toyota, and stubbornly continue to believe that the Tesla Cybertruck is really cool looking.
Critics might accuse Toyoda of self-dealing when it comes to EVs and after today's news almost certainly will. His company is already accused of being "behind" the competition in developing electric cars and trucks — even though Toyota was a pioneer in hybrid vehicles like the oft-maligned Prius.
So it's a fair question: Why would Toyoda want governments to force people to buy cars his company doesn't make "enough" of?
But the fact is that consumers are already getting their fill of EVs. Toyoda looked right on the money this week when he predicted that EVs will top out at maybe 30% of all vehicle sales. The remaining 70% of new car sales will be fuel cell EVs, hybrids, hydrogen cars, and — of course — gas and diesel burners.
While Ford is cutting back hard on the electric version of its top-selling F-150 pickup and scrambling to shift production back to gas-powered cars. Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford, told the New York Times in October, “Some of the red states say this is just like the vaccine, and it’s being shoved down our throat by the government, and we don’t want it.”
Those 700 laid-off workers at Ford's electric truck plant in Dearborn might wish that weren't true, but the company can't continue to produce thousands of trucks dealers can't sell.
Toyota, on the other hand, continues to enjoy robust sales. The company manufactured a record 9.2 million vehicles as of November of last year — and is expected to hit 10 million or more for all of 2023 once the final figures are released.
No mandates were required for Toyota to achieve those spectacular sales.
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