Toyota will finally offer full EVs this year – a major step for the undisputed king of hybrid cars

• Toyota said it will build three new electrified cars for the US market this year.
• Two will be battery-electric and one will be a plug-in hybrid.
• The unknown BEVs will be the first mass-produced BEVs from Toyota.
• Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

Toyota is the undisputed king of hybrid cars. And now, years after prioritizing hybrid cars, the automaker says it will launch three new electrified cars for the US market this year: two battery-electric vehicles and one plug-in hybrid.

Not many other details were shared in Toyota’s Wednesday announcement, although the automaker added that it is building a dedicated modular battery-electric platform – called the e-TNGA – which will underpin future EVs. It’s an idea that’s similar to Volkswagen’s MEB platform.

It’s unclear what the new, US-bound Toyota EVs will be or how much they’ll cost, but Toyota said last December that it would build an all-electric midsize SUV on the e-TNGA platform for its European market.

The new BEVs will mark the first mass-market EVs from the automaker, but they won’t be the first EVs Toyota has ever made. That title goes to the Toyota RAV4 EV in the US, which was produced in two generations between 1997 and 2003 and 2012 and 2014.

Getting your hands on those cars wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, according to Autotrader. For one, Toyota leased the original RAV4 EV mostly to local governments and businesses. It sold very few to private buyers.

The second-gen RAV4 EV was slightly more accessible because it was open to public purchase in major cities - though both were only ever available in California. As a result, not many were sold.

Though Toyota can certainly take credit for introducing hybrid cars to the public mind - to this day, the Prius remains one of the most popular hybrids ever - it's dragged its feet when it comes to introducing mass-market battery-electric vehicles. It's currently lagging behind Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, Chevrolet, and Volkswagen in offering an EV.

Even so, Wednesday's announcement makes clear that Toyota isn't ready to give up on hybrid cars just yet.

At the bottom of the release, Toyota mentions it did its own internal research and found that: EVs and plug-in hybrids have equal greenhouse gas-emissions when you factor in pollution produced by the energy grid to charge purely electric cars; building plug-in hybrids results in less greenhouse gas because they use a "smaller, lighter-weight battery"; and plug-in hybrids are cheaper to buy and own when you don't factor in tax incentives. 

Sean O'Kane at The Verge called Toyota's arguments against building a BEV thus far "flimsy."

"It's a debatable idea taken at face value, but this argument crucially ignores that all-electric vehicles only get cleaner as renewable energy makes up more of the grid," he wrote.

"Still, it's a popular line of thinking at Toyota; the company's own billionaire CEO, Akio Toyoda, said in December that he believes electric vehicles are overhyped in part because of power plant emissions - a statement that must have been music to the oil industry's ears since it's been one of its favorite pieces of misinformation."

Toyota's resistance to building BEVs makes sense because hybrids are good for the Japanese automaker's business. In April 2020, Toyota reported that it had sold more than 15 million hybrid cars globally. 

And until EVs come down in price and charging infrastructure becomes far more widespread plug-in hybrids are the current solution. With good battery-only range, they can provide consumers with emissions-free driving while also removing range anxiety because you can easily fill up at a gas station when the battery is depleted. They get people used to the idea of charging at home.

But as more and more governments move to crack down on gas-powered cars, legacy automakers see the writing on the wall. The all-electric revolution is coming whether they like it or not, and plug-in hybrids are merely a stop-gap: a solution to a problem that won't exist for that much longer.

We'll all learn that sooner or later - even Toyota.