This is the big story of the day. While many manufacturers rush their version of an electric vehicle to market, Toyota sits on the sidelines twiddling their thumbs. GM is doing the same thing as the Volt is a plug-in and not a true EV.
Toyota is the most baffling company of all. The only company to offer a pure EV to the public for sale is now reticent to repeat their success. Why? The Toyota RAV 4 EV may be one of the greatest EV's ever built. Hundreds of them are still on the road and going strong, yet Toyota claims the batteries aren't ready, the technology is not there, blah, blah, blah. Hogwash. They could restart the RAV 4 EV production line again with little effort and get right back into the mix. Instead, Mitsubishi, BMW, Nissan, Ford and Chrysler are leaving them in the dust.
From the Nytimes.com website:
Despite Toyota's image as the world’s greenest automaker, the company that brought us the Prius — totem of the environmentally conscious — has fallen behind in the race for the all-electric car.
Mitsubishi Motors started leasing its all-electric vehicle, the i-MiEV, in June. Next year, Nissan Motor is set to release its electric car, the Leaf. But Toyota does not plan to introduce an all-electric car until 2012. Instead, later this year, it plans to introduce a plug-in electric-gasoline hybrid, and only a few hundred initially.
“Why is Toyota waiting on electric cars?” asked Tadashi Tateuchi, a former race car designer turned electric-car evangelist.
Electric technology could help determine winners and losers in the auto industry of the future, but Toyota has been highly skeptical of electrical vehicles.
“The time is not here,” Masatami Takimoto, Toyota’s executive vice president, said during a factory tour this year.
Electric cars “face many challenges,” he said, adding that “to commercialize pure E.V.’s, we need a battery that far exceeds the current technology.”
If Toyota is right, its competitors will have spent billions on a technology that will be slow to take off.
But if electric cars win drivers over, Toyota’s rivals could take the lead.
“In a world where vehicles run on electrons rather than hydrocarbons, the automakers will have to reinvent their businesses,” Russell Hensley, an analyst at the consulting company McKinsey, told clients in a recent report.
But that world is not here yet. And Toyota, which started developing hybrids in the early 1990s, did not make a profit on the cars until 2001, said Takeshi Uchiyamada, the chief engineer of the first-generation Prius.
Toyota would like to profit all it can from the current technology before shifting to a new one, analysts say, especially because the company is facing a second down year after a loss last year of about $4.4 billion.
“At first, electric cars will all be small, making profit margins small also,” said Maho Inoue, an automobile analyst at the Daiwa Institute of Research, a research group in Tokyo.
Toyota executives rattle off reasons to be skeptical of electric cars: They do not travel far enough on a charge; their batteries are expensive and not reliable; the electrical infrastructure is not in place to recharge them.
Executives also say that Toyota’s reputation for reliability could be tarnished if the company forged ahead with an unproven technology.
It remains unclear how soon there will be a mass market for expensive cars with limited range, Toyota says.
Even when electric cars are sold widely, the company says, they will be suitable only for short trips and serve a decidedly niche market.
Toyota is instead building on its hybrid technology, bringing out a plug-in, gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle later this year that runs a short distance on batteries before the hybrid system kicks in.
But electric-car enthusiasts say Toyota is being unnecessarily cautious, ignoring technological breakthroughs that would allow it to develop electric cars more quickly. Advances in batteries, as well as in the strong magnets needed for drive motors, have made electric vehicles viable, automotive analysts say. Technology is also being developed that will drastically cut down charging times.
“There’s a potential for electric cars to be easier and cheaper to make than conventional cars, because their structure is simpler and they use fewer parts,” said Hiroshi Shimizu, a professor of environment and information studies at Keio University in Tokyo.
Moreover, he said, battery production technology is no more complicated than that of semiconductors, which are already mass produced.
“Toyota could launch an electric car tomorrow if it wanted to,” Mr. Tateuchi, the former race car engineer, said. Regretting his gas-guzzling creations, he founded the Japan E.V. Club 15 years ago to urge automakers to produce zero-emission cars.
“Toyota tells people the age of electric cars is not yet here,” he said. “That’s not true.”
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