Toyota is getting its bearings in the U.S. electric car market. And is gaining in a former General Motors stronghold, the plug-in hybrid.
Remember the Chevy Volt? That groundbreaking plug-in hybrid announced in 2010? It was a remarkable car, demonstrating that buried inside of GM’s torpid bureaucracy was genius. I got one in 2013 and had it for five years.
GM essentially invented the plug-in hybrid mass market with the Volt but, in a fit cowardice, discontinued the Volt in 2019. (Ditto on the EV1, the first mass-produced electric vehicle.)
Now, the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is back in force with the 2024 Prius Prime and RAV 4 Prime. Both boast over 40 miles of battery-only range. (Jeep is also selling a ton of PHEV Wranglers, signaling market momentum.)
As we approach 2024, Toyota will do what GM should have done: market the hell out of the RAV4 Prime and Prius Prime, build a franchise of plug-in hybrids, and sell them by the boatload. Especially in California, one of the largest electric car markets in the world.
Plug-in hybrids meet a need (which GM, ironically, figured out way back in 2010). Not everyone interested in car electrification is a Tesla battery-head. Many car buyers don’t need a pure electric vehicle with a giant 300-mile-range battery if they only drive about 40 miles a day. They only need a car with a small, cheap battery that allows pure EV driving on a daily basis and a gasoline engine for long trips.
The gasoline engine also eliminates the need to seek out public charging stations, which can be few and far between in some areas and not completely reliable even if you find one.
Not everyone agrees with this strategy, though. Public Citizen has been very vocal in its opposition to Toyota.
“While the company promotes its ‘electrified’ vehicles with only one electric vehicle on the market, Toyota’s fleet is based on burning fossil fuels–and the company has no plans to change that anytime soon,” said East Peterson-Trujillo, senior clean vehicles campaigner with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, in November at the opening of the LA Auto Show.
Public Citizen has a point but what Americans often forget is that Toyota is a Japanese company first and it is based in Asia. That’s where the decisions are made. And that part of the world has different priorities. Plus the fact that Toyota is truly a global player and many of those markets are not ready for EVs.
But it’s not all good news for Toyota. Like GM, it suffers from its own kind of myopia. Despite inventing and leading the green car revolution with the Prius for over a decade, it ceded that market — without even putting up a fight — to Tesla, which now sells more $42,000-and-up Model Y cars in California than Toyota sells $25,000 Camrys.
And Tesla will only get bigger and may eventually overtake Toyota in global car output. But in the interim Toyota will sell a lot of RAV 4 Primes and Prius Primes and keep a toehold in the electrified vehicle market in the U.S.
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