On November 14, Akio Toyoda announced a new pure electric strategy at mega WEB automotive theme park, for this strategy, Toyota gave a huge investment and ambitious goals, Toyota said that in the next 10 years will invest 4 trillion yen, launch 30 pure electric vehicles, 2030 pure electric vehicle sales reached 3.5 million.
In the past two years, Akio Toyoda has repeatedly attacked electric vehicles. For this electrification strategy, many people interpret it as Toyota's compromise, but I am afraid that this is not the case, and Toyota's development of the electric vehicle business is actually a complement to its carbon neutrality strategy.
Toyota will not all in
At present, carbon neutrality has become a new development topic for the entire human society. Of course, human beings have been busy for decades in order to reduce carbon, as a major emitter, the automobile industry generally believes that no oil burning, zero emission electric vehicles are effective ways to reduce carbon. But the truth is not so simple, because the zero emissions of electric vehicles are limited to the service life cycle, and the front-end research and development, manufacturing, and power generation supply of thermal power plants are still emitting a lot of carbon. From the perspective of tracing back to the source, electric vehicles are not really zero-emission vehicles. Therefore, in the carbon neutral concept, the carbon emissions of the product are calculated based on the entire life cycle.
Compared with other Volkswagen, GM these All in electric vehicle car companies. Toyota has always believed that pure electric vehicles alone cannot meet the major issue of "decarbonization". In the process of electrification of cars, it is carbon dioxide that humans want to eliminate, not the internal combustion engine. Based on this attitude, Akio Toyoda proposed two new concepts at the beginning of this conference:
Carbon-reducing vehicles: If the energy that drives the car is not green, then no matter what kind of electric vehicle can not make CO2 to zero, Toyota calls it a "carbon reduction vehicle".
Carbon-neutral vehicles: If the energy used is pure green energy, then even with the internal combustion engine, the vehicle can achieve "carbon neutrality", which can be called carbon neutral vehicles, and Toyota will work on developing such models.
Obviously, even if this is an electric vehicle strategy conference, Akio Toyoda made it clear at the beginning that he would not completely turn to electric vehicles. From the perspective of specific investment actions, Toyota has also adopted a way of going hand in hand with multiple power routes.
Toyota said it will invest 8 trillion yen (about $70 billion) in electrification technology development and equipment by 2030, of which 4 trillion yen, or 50%, will be invested in pure electric vehicles. The other half of the 4 trillion yen will be used to develop hybrid, hydrogen fuel cells and green energy technologies.
"At present, the energy situation varies from region to region, and it is not we who decide which carbon neutral solutions to choose, but the local market and our customers," said Akio Toyoda. As for why we're keeping so many options, when it comes to business management, we think the future is uncertain and that adapting quickly to future changes is more important than trying to predict the future. ”
Conservative and worrisome
When it comes to electrification strategy, Toyota's 4 trillion yen (about $35 billion) investment is actually not much. The Volkswagen Group announced at the beginning of this year that it has allocated 73 billion euros (about $82.4 billion) for future technologies from 2021 to 2025. General Motors, which is smaller than Toyota, will invest $35 billion in electrification and autonomous driving in the next five years, while Daimler, which focuses on the high-end market, announced that it will invest 70 billion euros (about $79 billion) in electrification by 2025.
In terms of electric vehicle sales targets, Toyota has not shown strong ambitions. Toyota plans to achieve annual sales of 3.5 million pure electric vehicles worldwide by 2030, and all series of pure electric models are available for consumers to choose from. At the same time, Lexus will turn to pure electric power in 2030, achieve 100% pure electric sales in the three core markets, global electric vehicle sales reach 1 million vehicles, and achieve global 100% pure electric sales in 2035.
What is the concept of 3.5 million vehicles? In 2019, Toyota's global sales were 10.724 million units, and assuming this level in 2030, pure electric vehicles will account for 32.6% of Toyota's global sales. This figure is well below Volkswagen's 50% target for the same period. This also means that by 2030, Toyota will sell 2 million fewer electric vehicles than Volkswagen. For comparison, Toyota sold 1.62 million vehicles in the Chinese market in 2019.
At the press conference, Toyota brought 16 new cars, except for the BZ4X, the remaining 15 models are the first, such a huge lineup of new cars should be the first time in the history of the car. These models, which include toyota (9 models) and Lexus (4 models), will be mass-produced over the next five years. Specifically, these new cars cover a variety of types such as cars, SUVs, sports cars, pickups, and off-road vehicles, many of which are pure electric alternatives to the current models, such as pure electric FJ Cruiser, pure electric pickup trucks with hilarks, RZ pure electric SUVs with RX, and Electrified Sport, which inherits the mantle of LFA. Toyota also said that by 2030, Toyota will launch 30 pure electric vehicles.
Although the lineup of the conference is huge, the layout of the 30 new cars still does not see toyota's intention of competing for the pure electric championship. You know, GM will launch 30 pure electric vehicles in the next 5 years, and the global annual sales will reach 1 million.
Of course, given Toyota's attitude toward electric vehicles, such a goal is not surprising. But what is worrying is that now intelligence has been deeply tied up with electric vehicles, and Toyota's action in this regard has been very slow, and this conference is not even mentioned.
In contrast, Volkswagen, GM, and even two other Japanese car companies, Honda and Nissan, have indicated in their latest electrification strategies that they will vigorously develop intelligent technologies.
Volkswagen and GM's layout in terms of intelligence is particularly fast, and the Volkswagen MEB platform has begun to use centralized electrical and electronic architecture, which is the basic technology of smart cars. China is leading the automotive intelligent revolution, and Volkswagen will recruit 1,000 software engineers from China to work for CARIAD, Volkswagen's software company, and there will be a total of 10,000 software engineers worldwide.
GM's centralized electrical and electronic architecture, the VIP architecture, was also mass-produced last year, and GM has a world-leading technological advantage in the field of autonomous driving. The Aotonynon platform, which combines these new technologies, has even attracted Honda. At the beginning of this year, Honda announced that in addition to its self-research, it will also cooperate with GM to develop electric vehicles, and plans to launch the first Aoteneng platform electric vehicle in 2024. Another Japanese car company, Nissan, also mentioned in the 2030 strategy that it is working with the alliance to develop a centralized electrical and electronic architecture.
Compared with these competitors, Toyota does have more hole cards on the power route that can achieve carbon neutrality. But the automobile electrification revolution is not only the switching of power modes, the intelligent revolution is also in full swing. As Akio Toyoda said, the future is really difficult to predict. So, will the neglect of intelligence make Toyota's fate difficult to predict?
AUTHOR RushB
"Don't leverage, the bar is your right"