What's Wrong With This Picture: Toyota's EV Insurance Edition
As Bertel reported this morning, the debut of Toyota’s first potential mass-market pure EV has not been an occasion for the Japanese automaker to trumpet battery-electric technology as a world-beater. In fact, given the kind of rhetoric that usually accompanies concepts like this Tesla-developed electric RAV4, Toyota is still treating electric vehicles as a limited, and relatively short-term trend that poses little threat to the gas-based core of its business. And there’s strong evidence that this is the right approach. Hybrids are the mass-market face of green motoring in the here-and-now, and a wave of hydrogen vehicles scheduled for 2015 could take considerable wind out of the EV bandwagon’s sales long-term. No wonder Toyota shoved development of the RAV4 EV to its idealistic “investment,” Tesla. This car is not the future… it’s an insurance policy.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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Hydrogen vehicles may be the future but not until electrics have had a good run. Here's the drving log of a physicisian out in Jersey after nine days with his Chevy Volt that GM gave him. He is part of an advisory board. 176 MPG so far, let's see you do that with your Prius or TDI VW! http://gm-volt.com/chevrolet-volt-driving-log/