TOKYO, Sept. 30, 2022—Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda, his company having dethroned General Motors in U.S. car sales in 2021, Sept. 29 in effect represented the Japanese auto industry’s stance on electric vehicles, saying his company is finding it ‘difficult’ to California’s requirements to discontinue all gas-powered vehicle sales by 2035.
Toyoda said in a Las Vegas interview with reporters that he expected to sell about 3.5 million EVs by the end of this decade, or about one-third of all Toyota car sales in the United States, Reuters quoted him as saying in the interview.
Since Toyoda is the chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Associations, the industry lobby that represents all Japanese automakers, his voice speaks volumes of the industry’s conditions. He cannot speak about Toyota alone. He’s morally obligated to represent the whole industry when he speaks, including Honda that defied all Japanese and U.S. automakers in meeting what then was known as the 1970 Muskie Act that demanded noxious tailpipe emissions reductions to one-tenth of the previous levels.
Honda Motor Corp. had long been known as a lone wolf when its founder Soichiro Honda was around. It was a small motorcycle-turned minicar maker in the 1970s, an irritating presence for Toyota. Now, however, Honda is no longer a company that stir the stability of the Japanese auto industry. It has joined the friendly, amicable club organized around Toyota. Honda has given up the hope of developing proprietary battery technologies and instead opted to join the GM EV development alliance and cooperate with Korea’s LG Electric – while Toyota continues to struggle for EV technologies and batteries that look years behind European, Korean and Chinese automakers.
So, what Akio Toyoda had to describe as ‘difficult’ Toyota’s EV technology means other Japanese automakers are even further behind Toyota in trailing foreign competitors.
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