Akio Toyoda stepped down from his role as CEO of Toyota earlier this year, in the wake of questions over his leadership resulting from the company’s slow adoption of EVs. Now the company’s chairman, he says that slowing sales vindicate his resistance to EVs, and that “people are finally seeing reality” about the technology.
The CEO pointed to slowing growth in the U.S. as proof that his company’s reticence towards EVs was correct. “There are many ways to climb the mountain that is achieving carbon neutrality,” he told reporters at the Japan Mobility Show this week.
Although EV sales growth has slowed, the market is still growing. The Wall Street Journal reports that global sales of electric vehicles grew by 63 percent in 2022, and have slowed to 49 percent in 2023. That slowdown has affected the American market in particular, where automakers GM and Ford are considering slowing production of electric pickups.
Toyoda claimed that this is proof that “if regulations are created based on ideals, it is regular users who are the ones who suffer.” During his tenure as CEO, Toyota was ranked as the third most obstructive company towards government efforts to curb climate change, behind just ExxonMobil and Chevron. The World Health Organization reports that 3.6 billion people already live in areas susceptible to climate change and that the phenomenon will cause 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050.
Read: Toyota Named Third Most Obstructive Company Towards Climate Improvement Efforts
However, it’s not just regulators who are pushing for electric vehicles, investors increasingly see the technology as the future, following the success of Tesla. Toyoda’s successor as CEO, Koji Sato, has made developing affordable EVs a priority and, at the Japan Mobility Show, the automaker showed a pair of upcoming all-electric concepts.
Toyoda said that concepts were the result of the automaker taking its time, though. He said that the company worked with battery makers, and thought hard about what was possible. He claimed that the Japanese automotive industry’s strength in the EV era will come from its decades of experience, and its past “experiences of failure.”
Toyota doesn’t have to look too far back to see an experience of failure in the EV space. The bZ4X was a first attempt for the brand that has fallen flat due to its disappointing battery range and specs. Fortunately, the automaker has been able to lean on its hybrid vehicles as a bridge into the electric era, which it claims is also the greenest way forward.
With Toyota’s head of North American sales saying that demand for hybrid vehicles is “smoking hot,” the company is now trying to produce as many as possible. Whether that’s a sign of the limits of the appeal of all-electric vehicles, a signal that buyers are reckoning with record-breaking vehicle prices, or something else remains to be seen.
