Toyota, the world’s number-one maker of motor vehicles and the first to produce batteries to provide vehicle mobility when it introduced the Prius hybrid 20 years ago, continues to oppose attempts to mandate fully-electric vehicles by 2030, 2035 or any other date. Its executives, from CEO Akio Toyoda on down, continue to describe such mandates as impossible with regard either to the vehicles or the electric power to charge them.
Toyota’s North America chief Chris Reynolds met with Congressional leaders in late July, according to the Forbes July 29, and gave them uncomfortable truths. Toyota’s maximum capacity for battery production can support producing 1.6 million hybrid vehicles annually, but only 28,000 fully electric vehicles per year, a huge gap. Secondly, the carbon emissions from producing those 28,000 fully electric vehicles would be greater than the emissions from producing 1.6 million hybrids, Reynolds told them. His main point reportedly was that the battery capacity isn’t there and won’t be there, and that other auxiliary production requirements will be prohibitive. For example, not the 8,000 charging stations which is the current U.S. target, but several hundred thousand charging stations and much more electric generating capacity would be necessary for half of all vehicles to be electric by 2030.
