Automakers against stampede to BEV dominance
When the president of the world’s biggest carmaker talks, people listen.
So, when Toyota President Akio Toyoda said, in September of last year, that bans on ICE cars within 10 to 15 years will be “rather difficult to achieve” because EVs “are just going to take longer than the media would like us to believe,” it made waves.
Toyoda doubled down on his statement and his company’s strategy two months later, in Thailand, when he said, first in a press release: “I believe we need to be realistic about when society will be able to fully adopt Battery Electric Vehicles and when our infrastructure can support them at scale.… and frankly, BEVs are not the only way to achieve the world’s carbon neutrality goals.” Then he told journalists that a “silent majority [in the auto industry] is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend, so they can’t speak out loudly”.
If Toyoda was the only auto executive to question the imposed time frame for the adoption of BEVs and the banning of ICEs, which varies from 2025 (Norway) to 2050 (Indonesia), he could be written off as an outlier. However, in January 2022 in remarks that went largely unnoticed at the time, Stellantis CEO Carlos Taveras had told several European newspapers that the European Commission’s strategy to phase out combustion engines in favor of EVs carries environmental and social risks.
After declaring that EV technology was imposed on the industry by politicians, Taveras noted, “Given the current European energy mix, an electric car needs to drive 70,000 kilometers to compensate for the carbon footprint of manufacturing the battery and to start catching up with a light hybrid vehicle, which costs half as much as an EV.” He also said the need to quickly transform plants and supply chains to meet the BEV time frame “creates social risk”.
Toyoda and Taveras were expressing their frustration with both the all-electric or nothing approach of governments and the slow take-up of BEVs, owing primarily to stubbornly high prices. Now it seems that more industry players are slowly coming around to their way of thinking.
KPMG’s 23rd Annual Global Automotive Executive Survey found that in 2022 industry leaders were more pessimistic about the prospects of BEV adoption than they had been the previous year. For example, respondents estimated that EVs would make up 10% to 40% of new car sales sold globally by 2030, compared to 20% to 70% in 2021. In the US, the median percentage expected for EV sales in 2030 was 35% of all new car sales, down from 65% the previous year.
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