Electric Toyota. Toyota’s electrified vehicle strategy between 2020-2030 has hotted up, with the announcement by Akio Toyoda, President and CEO of Toyota, stating the development and launch plans of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), battery electric vehicles (BEVs), and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs).
Toyoda said, “Around 2030, out of the total sales of our vehicles, approximately 50% would be sales coming from electrified vehicles. Electrified vehicles means, electric vehicles (EV), fuel cell vehicles (FCV), hybrids (HEV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV). Then, in terms of the breakdown, electric vehicle and fuel cell vehicle would total 1m. Battery and plug-in hybrid vehicle about 4.5m, so in total about 5.5m electrified vehicles,” Following Toyota’s plans, luxury brand Lexus has stated that by around 2025, every Lexus model will be available either as a dedicated electrified model, or have an electrified option.
The significance of the statement means that the number of models developed without an electrified version will be zero.
Around 40% of Toyota’s global total sales are hybrid, which the firm believes to be the right technology for today and will only increase as government’s move towards reducing CO2 in towns and cities, such as London where new cars sold in Britain must be zeroemission capable from 2040.
Today, most of Toyota’s models are available with hybrid power and the company sells the Prius Plug-in Hybrid and Toyota Mirai hydrogen FCEV.
However, despite small scale trials of battery electric vehicles, Toyota has been slow to come up with a market-ready model. In the UK, Toyota has dropped the sale of the Auris diesel in favour of hybrid, following a lack of demand.
Continuing its partnership with Panasonic, Toyota hopes to bring solid-state battery technology to the masses, although it does not think this technology will be ready for the mass market until around 2030. Key benefits include longer range and battery stability as well as a 15-20% improvement on today’s lithium-ion batteries in terms of specific energy.
The world’s largest carmaker also has plans to build a 2.35MW Tri-Gen renewable power station at the Port of Long Beach, California, that will be capable of producing water, electricity and hydrogen using bio-waste as a fuel. The idea is to encourage a societal change towards hydrogen as a fuel, whereas today more than 90% of hydrogen is derived from fossil fuel. Doug Murtha, Toyota group vice president of strategic planning said, “Tri-Gen is a major step forward for sustainable mobility and a key accomplishment of our 2050 Environmental Challenge to achieve net zero CO2 emissions from our operations.”
