By Michael Penn
SNA (Tokyo) — Toyota Motor Corporation, the world’s largest automaker by production volume, is under fire from environmentalists and others who contend that it now possesses the very worst record among its global peers on responding to the climate crisis.
At the beginning of this month, Greenpeace East Asia analyzed the world’s top ten automakers’ decarbonization efforts and declared Toyota dead last in terms of its performance.
Toyota’s fall to the bottom is not its accustomed position. The Japanese firm is universally praised for the leading role it played in the previous generation of light-duty vehicles by popularizing hybrid technology. This began in 1997 with the release of its first mass-produced gasoline-powered hybrid car, the Prius.
However, as the leading edge of industry has been moving toward zero carbon emissions over the past few decades, all-electric vehicles (EVs), Toyota has not adequately responded.
Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda has been outspoken about his EV skepticism, as have senior executives employed by his firm.
When the Yoshihide Suga administration began discussing a ban on the sales of internal combustion vehicles in Japan by the mid-2030s, Toyoda’s was the loudest voice in opposition to the proposal.
“Some politicians are saying that we need to turn all cars into EVs or that the manufacturing industry is an outmoded one,” Toyoda complained at a recent meeting of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA), “but I don’t think that is the case. To protect the jobs and lives of Japanese people, I think it is necessary to bring our future in line with our efforts to date.”
He continued, “This means that production of more than 8 million units would be lost, and the automotive industry could risk losing the majority of its 5.5 million jobs. If they say internal combustion engines are the enemy, we would not be able to produce almost any vehicles.”
Toyoda concluded, “In achieving carbon neutrality, the enemy is carbon dioxide, not internal combustion. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it is necessary to have practical and sustainable initiatives which are in line with different situations in various countries and regions.”
The Toyota boss argued that since it had reached the top of the industry through the production of hybrid vehicles, it is now necessary to slam the brakes on the next technological evolution in order to preserve Japan’s economic position for decades into the future.
Toyoda is correct that a full shift to EVs would cost jobs in Japan, at least in the short term. EVs require fewer components and are much less complex than internal combustion engine vehicles, Many of the small and medium firms that form Toyota’s supply chain would not be able to survive the transition.
In the longer run, however, being at the forefront of technological change would probably be in Toyota’s own best economic interests.
While the Japanese automaker is belatedly offering its own first mass-produced EV with the unveiling of the bZ4X, the main thrust of its efforts continues to be preserving hybrids or else to offer alternative fuels.
This past weekend, Toyota announced an initiative to explore the viability of alternative fuels for internal combustion engine cars, including hydrogen and synthetic fuels derived from biomass.
Hydrogen fuel in particular has been a controversial option that Toyota has aggressively promoted as an alternative to EVs.
As research advances, hydrogen may indeed become a crucial fuel for large trucks, buses, ships, and some other forms of transport, but it does not appear to be an effective solution for light-duty vehicles in comparison to EVs.
Also, most hydrogen fuel is currently produced through carbon emission heavy methods. A Sierra Club white paper issued in August specified that “the majority of hydrogen today is produced from fracked gas (76%) and coal (23%) globally.”
As a result, “hydrogen-powered vehicles on the road have a higher carbon footprint than fossil fuel cars due to the energy intensity required to create hydrogen fuel.”
So even if the hydrogen vehicles themselves emit only water, they would not help in combatting the climate crisis until they can be powered by green hydrogen—a prospect that appears at least a decade away in most cases.
EVs are not without similar sustainability challenges.
For example, the electricity used to recharge EVs comes mainly from national and regional grids which themselves often employ coal, oil, and gas to produce power. Like hydrogen vehicles, therefore, they cannot be said to be truly emissions-free at the current juncture until the entire supply chain relies exclusively upon renewable energy sources.
Nevertheless, EVs do appear to be a significant step forward.
According to Daniel Read, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Japan, “most of the research that has been done shows that an EV that is charged on a fossil fuel heavy electricity grid still has lower lifecycle emissions than a hybrid.”
When we reached out to Toyota to elicit their response, they refused to offer an interview with a spokesperson, but did provide a short statement that read, “As the global leader in electrification with a firm commitment to carbon reduction, we will let our actions and future commitments—including the Toyota Environmental Challenge 2050—speak for itself.”
Toyota’s contention that it is “the global leader in electrification” appears to be a reference to its achievement in advancing hybrid technology.
Many environmentalists denounce this as an instance of greenwashing. Read notes that “Greenpeace and most other organizations and researchers don’t accept that as a definition of electrification because hybrids fundamentally run on fossil fuels.”
Anti-EV Lobbying Beyond Japan
Toyota has not confined its anti-EV political lobbying to Japan, but is using its accumulated money and influence to try to slow down the shift to EVs on a global scale.
InfluenceMap, an organization which tracks corporate lobbying in the United States, summarizes Toyota as possessing “positive top-line messaging on climate,” but, when digging a little deeper, “Toyota has at times been highly negative on policy mandating the electrification of the automotive sector, appearing to promote an extended role for hybrid vehicles and opposing the long-term phase out of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.”
Akio Toyoda’s efforts to decelerate the adoption of EV technology in Japan is also the focus of its lobbying efforts in the United States and beyond.
Katherine Garcia, acting director for the Clean Transportation for All Campaign at the Sierra Club, contends that “Toyota really sided with Donald Trump” when the Republican president came to power in 2017 and began to aggressively roll back environmental regulations.
Later, when Joe Biden came to office at the beginning of this year with a mandate to restore pro-environment policies in Washington, Garcia states, “instead of righting its course, Toyota continued to double-down on this rejection of EVs… Toyota just completely refuses to get onboard the EV transition.”
One of the battlegrounds has been in California. Toyota joined a lawsuit in October 2019 aiming to block this US state from setting its own stricter-than-federal emission standards. However, the Japanese automaker quietly withdrew from the lawsuit after Biden was elected president.
Toyota lobbyists are going directly to members of the federal government and the US Congress to try to dissuade them from passing legislation that mandates or incentivizes the adoption of EVs as a climate crisis countermeasure.
This lobbying appears to be paying off.
Last week, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin met with Toyota Motor North America CEO Ted Ogawa at an event announcing Toyota’s US$240 million investment in a West Virginia auto components plant. Manchin used the occasion to denounce as being both “wrong” and “not American” a planned legislative provision to grant a US$4,500 federal tax credit for union-made EVs.
Since Manchin holds the balance in an evenly divided US Senate, his opposition could quite possibly kill the provision.
InfluenceMap notes that Toyota’s anti-EV lobbying efforts have also been observed in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
“Toyota in 2018-21 appears to have consistently supported a long-term role for hybrid vehicles in the transport sector over fully electric vehicles at a global level,” it concluded.
Toyota has been virtually alone in this global campaign to cast doubts on the climate benefits of a rapid shift to EVs. Even among Japanese automakers, they stand out.
Honda, for example, recently pledged that all vehicle models it introduces in China after 2030 will be EVs, and it will forsake all internal combustion engine vehicles globally by 2040.
Garcia judges that Toyota was once a major force driving fuel economy and protecting the environment, but those days have now passed. After more than two decades of leaning on the once game-changing hybrid engine technology, the company is now clinging to its fading environmental achievements.
“They are not a leader in sustainability,” she concludes.
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