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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. .... |
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