Toyota will finally launch its first mass-market electric vehicles later this year, the world’s leading carmaker announced on Wednesday, although it does not offer further details on vehicle type or prices.
Toyota had earlier said it was developing an electric sports utility vehicle on a new flexible platform that could power multiple motor vehicles, following in the footsteps of Volkswagen, General Motors and others. The two new cars will be announced along with an indefinite Toyota hybrid.
“We are still leaders in the electrification that began with our groundbreaking launch of the Prius nearly 25 years ago,” Bob Carter, Toyota North America’s executive vice president of sales, said in a statement. “Toyota’s new electrified product offering gives customers several choices of power stations that best suit their needs.”
Toyota has helped track and popularize groundbreaking vehicles, which rely on electric motors to reduce emissions and increase fuel consumption. But unlike most other major automakers, it has resisted investing in fully electric vehicles outside of China. There is only one fully electric vehicle sold in the US yet: the Rav4 EV. It came in a few different forms, though Toyota made and sold only a few thousand of them.
In its announcement, Toyota cites the success of its hybrid models, but it once again relies on a thin argument as to why it resists all electric vehicles. The company says it has conducted internal research that found that total greenhouse gas emissions from electric and hybrid vehicles “are about the same … as pollutants created by electricity generation are taken up for the average U.S. energy grid used to to charge batteries. ”
This is a debatable idea that is considered on the surface, but this argument ignores the important fact that electric vehicles only get cleaner, as renewable energy consists more of the network.
Yet it is a popular school of thought at Toyota; Akio Toyoda, a billionaire CEO of the company, said in December that he believed electric vehicles were partly too high due to the emission of power stations – a statement that must have been the music in the oil industry’s ears, as it was one of his favorite pieces of misinformation.