How Did Toyota End Up So Far Behind on Electric Vehicles?

For years, I defended Toyota’s reluctance to sell an electric vehicle. It was just a conservative company waiting until there was more demand for EVs. And it’s not like it wasn’t doing anything with batteries and electric motors. Toyota sold both conventional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. Making an EV when the time was right would be like flipping a switch for Toyota. Except here we are in 2023, and it feels like Toyota legitimately does not want to sell EVs.

The company’s first mass-market battery-electric vehicle, the bZ4X, feels like a half-hearted attempt at entering the EV market, and sales last year reflected that. In 2022, only 1,220 people in the U.S. wanted a Bz4X enough to actually buy one. Granted, it went on sale partway through the year and got off to a bit of a rough start due to the wheels falling off. But still, you’d think Toyota out of all the automakers would do a better job launching its first EV.

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So what’s going on here? Slate recently published a deep dive into the Toyota EV story that digs into that exact question. And there’s definitely something going on. After all, it was only a couple of months ago that news broke that Toyota had stopped development on many of its future EV projects and planned to reboot its entire EV strategy.