Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda has been one of the most prominent executive voices pushing back against all-electric mandates, and his latest comments on California’s 2035 combustion ban are among his clearest statements on why he thinks the approach is flawed.
Toyota’s position is not that EVs are a bad technology — the company sells the Bz4X and has EV development programs across multiple platforms. The argument is about pace and consumer readiness. Toyoda has consistently maintained that a diversified approach — hybrids, plug-in hybrids, hydrogen fuel cells, and battery EVs — will reach more buyers faster and with less infrastructure strain than a mandate that forces a single technology path by a specific date.
The critique carries weight partly because of where Toyota sits in the market. The company is the world’s largest automaker by volume, selling vehicles at price points and in markets that Tesla and most EV-forward brands don’t effectively serve. When Toyoda says a 2035 all-electric mandate isn’t feasible for the full range of buyers who need reliable, affordable transportation, he’s speaking from a position of having to actually solve that problem at scale — not just in premium urban markets.
Toyota also has deep institutional knowledge of hybridization from more than two decades of Prius production. Its argument that hybrids — particularly plug-in hybrids — can deliver significant emissions reductions at lower cost and with far less infrastructure dependence than full EVs is backed by real-world data. Whether regulators find that argument compelling is a separate question from whether it’s analytically sound.
The California ban and Toyota’s response to it represent a genuine disagreement about the right path to decarbonizing transportation — not a simple opposition between progress and backwardness. How that disagreement gets resolved in regulatory and legislative processes over the next several years will shape the global auto market in ways that affect every buyer.