“Top Toyota Scientist Warns Against Moving too Quickly to Electric Cars: Bloomberg”

Toyota Motor Corp.’s chief scientist. warned that moving too quickly to electric vehicles could lead drivers to keep old gas-guzzling cars and called ahead of the G7 summit in Japan for less stringent rules on hybrid cars, writes Bloomberg.

Subsidies and restrictions on fuel-burning cars will make electric vehicles attractive to customers who can afford them, but gasoline-powered electric vehicles remain more suitable for other consumers, Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief research officer, said in Hiroshima on Thursday. and executive director of the Toyota Research Institute.

It’s an oft-repeated argument from the world’s No. 1 automaker: the transition to all-electric vehicles will take longer than people expect, and that a multi-pronged approach that includes hybrids and other alternatives will more quickly reduce emissions in the meantime.

Environmental groups have criticized Toyota for taking too long to switch to all-electric vehicles and letting Elon Musk’s Tesla and China’s BYD take the lead in electric vehicles.

“Eventually, resource limitations will end, but for many years we will not have enough battery material and renewable recharging resources for a purely battery-electric car solution,” said Pratt.

“Battery materials and renewable recharging infrastructure will eventually be abundant,” he said. “But it will take decades for battery material mines, renewable energy generation facilities, transmission lines and seasonal energy storage facilities to expand.”

While Toyota and other Japanese automakers have pioneered hybrid technology, they have lagged behind Tesla, BYD and others in ramping up production of electric vehicles. Several have promised to rapidly expand production in the coming years.

Battery electric vehicles “are an extremely important option,” Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota and the Japan Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said during a briefing Thursday.

During his 14-year tenure as Toyota’s chief executive, which ended in April, the grandson of the company’s founder was both praised and criticized for his belief in an approach that involved selling hybrids, battery-powered vehicles combustion and other alternatives alongside battery electric cars.

Critics, including Greenpeace, have questioned whether Toyoda’s strategy fits with the automaker’s goal of halving emissions by 2035 and becoming carbon neutral by mid-century, a claim that he rejected it.

“The goal is to do something about global warming,” Toyoda said. “The common enemy is carbon dioxide”.

Koji Sato, Toyota’s new CEO, who took over in April, said Toyota will sell 1.5 million battery-electric cars annually by 2026 and launch 10 new all-electric models. The world’s biggest vehicle maker sold 38,000 battery-electric cars in the fiscal year that ended in March and is targeting 200,000 for the current fiscal year.

In April, G7 environment and energy ministers pledged to cut vehicle emissions by 2035, but announced no deadline or interim target after a meeting in Hokkaido, Japan.