In late 2019 I bought a Toyota Yaris Hybrid. I needed a car, couldn't afford an EV at the time, and so I went for what I felt was the least bad option. At the time I wrote a post about how much I liked it. How times change.
The Yaris has gone, replaced by a Renault Zoe.
There were four fundamental problems with my Yaris. It was slow. It actually felt much slower than it really was. When it did run on electric power only it was great... quiet, smooth, but you could only do that at no more than 30mph with the lightest throttle and only for maybe as much as a mile but probably not that far. It wasn't actually all that fuel efficient. A real world 62mpg seems pretty good, but my old fiesta diesel bettered that. Then there's the biggie: my wife hated it. Specifically she hated the hybrid system and refused to drive it.
Recently it seems Toyota have been making a lot of noise about how rubbish EVs are and how hybrid tech has a future for at least the next 5000 years or something.
Toyota are in big, big trouble and they know it.
The company's fixation on hybrid tech being the answer means they've continued to invest in building petrol engines.
Toyota also have the Mirai, one of the only hydrogen fuel cell car on the market and they keep saying hydrogen is the future, supported by hybrids.
Here are the facts as I see them. Toyota put all their energy transition eggs into a hydrogen fuel cell basket and it's becoming very clear hydrogen is not going to be the future for transport.
The hybrid drive train pioneered in the Prius seemed futuristic and advanced 20 years ago, now it just feels like a dated tech cul-de-sac with no future.
Perhaps most betraying what Toyota themselves know to be true, that EVs are what they need to be building, they talk about how they've got amazing battery tech just around the corner with their "solid state batteries" which, so far, well... they don't appear to exist outside of the lab - but the inevitable world domination of Toyota's non-existent battery tech is still a line fed to customers by dealerships.
Toyota have proved they can build a really good EV because that's precisely what the Mirai is - an electric vehicle that gets its electricity from the fuel cell rather than having a large battery.
As a result of all this it appears Toyota have been lobbying to try and hold back any legislation that puts a stop to selling new hybrids. They're also actively lobbying for pro-hydrogen policies and I've commented before how problematic hydrogen is as a fuel.
I understand this from a business perspective. Toyota were mocked for the Prius with it's tree-hugging, fuel sipping, weirdness but they persevered. Now the tech is mainstream it's very much out of favour, and for good reason, but that hardly seems fair on the company that worked hard on cleaner cars.
But nothing stands still and Toyota's single minded focus on hydrogen & hybrid has left them heading down two different technological dead-ends.
Whilst none of the car manufacturers have pivoted entirely to EVs Toyota are now well behind. They're not alone in this, Honda have made the same mistake, but they're still ahead of Toyota in dealing with this having brought at least one EV to market and ending production of their fuel cell powered Clarity.
Toyota don't get my ire for making mistakes about their technology direction, but to lobby against the energy transition that's oh so desperately needed is pretty vile. I'd much rather they put their energy into fixing the problem.
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