It's no secret that Toyota isn't betting heavily on electric mobility like many of its competitors: for a long time now the company's ex-CEO, Akio Toyoda, has released public statements criticizing the decision to focus solely on electric mobility as an alternative to fossil fuels and despite the change at the top it seems that the Japanese company has no intention of changing course.
And that's not all, because in support of its decision Toyota has presented very on the occasion of the World Economic Forum , held in Davos between 16 and 20 January: Gill Pratt , Chief Scientist of Toyota, took to the forum stage and tried to explain why Toyota does not believe a future is possible in which everyone we will drive an electric car.
The initial assumption of the speech is that the stocks of rare earths (particularly lithium) necessary for the production of batteries are extremely low imitate – an irrefutable fact, unless huge deposits are discovered in the future. Given this shortcoming, Toyota uses as an example a fleet made up of 100 cars with average CO2 emissions of 250 g/km: assuming we have enough lithium available to produce batteries for a total of 100 kWh, nowadays we could produce a , perhaps 2 electric cars, with the result that fleet emissions would drop by just 1.5 g/km because the remaining 99 cars would be forced to continue using only fossil fuels.
If instead it were decided to use the same amount of lithium to give life to hybrid engines supported by a lithium battery, it would be possible to create 90 1.1 kWh batteries for as many hybrid cars, sufficient to reduce the average emissions at 205 g/km , a drastically lower figure than the initial 250, although in this scenario 10 cars still remain without a battery.
The idea is that to reduce CO2 emissions in a more uniform manner it would be more functional to have a large fleet of hybrid cars rather than a small number of electric cars while the the rest continues to consume only fossil fuels.
Despite this clear position, Toyota cannot avoid the development of new electric cars such as the future C-HR also envisaged in a 100% electric version, but undoubtedly in the next years the Japanese company will continue to invest its resources in the development of hybrid engines.