What’s Going On Here?Toyota said on Tuesday that it’s finally planning to invest billions into battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs). About time too. What Does This Mean?Toyota was one of the very first carmakers to roll out hybrids, but it’s been left way behind its competitors as far as battery-only EVs go. Clearly the company thinks now’s the time to change all that: it announced plans to build a new line of 30 battery-powered EVs by 2030, and sell 3.5 million of them a year by then too. That number’s particularly ambitious given that it represents roughly a third of everything the carmaker sells today, but Toyota’s got the money to make it happen: it’s planning to invest $35 billion into the space by the end of the decade. Why Should I Care?The bigger picture: Toyota tries to have cake, eat it too.
Toyota’s not putting all its eggs in one basket, mind you: it wants to plough another $35 billion into other types of EVs, including those powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The carmaker says it wants to keep its options open in case the market ever shifts away from battery EVs, which might also be why it didn’t join other carmakers in pledging to phase out fossil fuel-powered cars at COP26. Still, the last thing it wants to do is antagonize an increasingly green investor: it’s aiming to make its manufacturing plants carbon-neutral by 2035 instead.
Zooming out: Everyone wants a piece of EVs.
There’s a simple reason Toyota is going big: the EV market grew last year even as the wider car market shrank, suggesting there’s a lot more potential in the new technology than there is in the old. The company can’t have missed the moment Tesla’s market value hit $1 trillion in October either – more than the value of Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, and General Motors combined. | 