While Toyota has seen success far and wide as an early pioneer of hybrid cars, it’s had much less luck with another technology it has invested heavily in: hydrogen-powered fuel cell EVs.
While the rest of the electric car market is going heavily battery-powered, Toyota is still banking on hydrogen power in many ways—even as competitors like Honda and BMW have seemingly dialed down their hydrogen ambitions. Now we know that Toyota’s conservative battery EV strategy and its big bet on hydrogen are closely related issues.
A recent report from the New York Times shows that the company’s hydrogen play has become further reaching than just internal development; it has also become political.
According to the report, a Toyota executive has been traveling to Washington on behalf of the automaker and has taken steps to slow the entire industry’s adoption of electric vehicles. Chris Reynolds, a high-ranking senior executive for Toyota, reportedly has held closed-door meetings with congressional staff members.
At least four people familiar with the matter told the New York Times that Reynolds argued against an aggressive rollout of fully electric vehicles, instead urging for a focus on hybrids (like the Prius) and other alternatively-fueled vehicles, like hydrogen-powered fuel-cell EVs.
This all comes at a time when multiple automakers are planning to go fully or mostly battery electric in the years to come, often driven by tightening emissions rules in China and Europe. Toyota, on the other hand, feels incredibly late to the EV game.
Despite Toyota’s recent ambitious plans to launch 15 fully electric cars by 2025, it has only shown the world a concept of its upcoming bZ4X while other manufacturers like Audi, Ford, Hyundai, Jaguar, Porsche, Volvo, and Volkswagen all have at least one BEV for sale today.
So if Toyota can persuade lawmakers of the importance of hybrids over EVs and successfully stymie funding for EV-related infrastructure and incentives, it could give the automaker more time to separate from its crutch on hybrids and catch up to other manufacturers.
The potential impact of lobbying against BEVs can be seen in the recently proposed infrastructure spending bill, which cuts the government funding for expanding the EV charging infrastructure in half of what was anticipated by President Joe Biden’s staffers to deploy 500,000 EV charging stations nationwide.
In addition to doing a potential disservice to American EV adopters, these actions could potentially impede the already full-speed efforts by other automakers pushing towards aggressive EV rollouts.
It is worth noting, Reynolds was recently named board chair for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. The alliance is a lobbying organization that represents the interests of many automakers and OEM suppliers, many of which aren’t as heavily invested in hydrogen power or hybrids as Toyota.
Genesis Nanotechnologyo and l o 
You must be logged in to post a comment.