Hybrid Innovator Toyota Holds Back in Electric Race

Leaf EV - Not a Toyota

Washington DC August 21, 2009; The AIADA newsletter reported that despite Toyota's image as the world's greenest automaker, the company that brought us the Prius — totem of the environmentally conscious — has held back 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 according to the New York Times Wheels Blog, 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.

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. Toyota would like to profit all it can from the current technology before shifting to a new one.