It was just over a year ago that Toyota appeared to acknowledge it had dropped the ball on electric vehicles. Its CEO, Akio Toyoda, stepped down from his post, painting himself as “an old-fashioned” man unfit to take the world’s biggest carmaker through the electric revolution.
But since then, the Japanese company has done little to embrace a fully electric future, instead sticking firmly to its wildly popular hybrid cars, even though they typically emit more planet-heating pollution than EVs.
Auto experts say the company’s foot dragging on EVs was no fumble, rather, a calculated strategy to give consumers what they want — although EV sales are rising, problems like affordability, battery range and sparse charging stations are dampening growth in demand.
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