Why the world’s smartest car company is dragging its feet on EVs
Jack Baruth
Forty-two years ago, the automotive world was in the grip of an utterly insane obsession. Within a space of 18 months, America’s “Big Three” introduced more than a dozen new models ranging from the dirt-cheap Ford Escort and the Plymouth Reliant K to the upscale Cadillac Cimarron, with family-sized cars from Buick, Mercury, Oldsmobile, and others in-between. They had just one thing in common, and it was an important thing: the combination of a transverse (sideways) mounted engine and front-wheel drive introduced by the British Motor Corporation Mini in 1959 and popularized by the Honda Civic in 1973.
This fusillade of “FWD” was universally lauded by the media and various government functionaries, who had lambasted domestic manufacturers for being slow to join Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, and other foreign competitors in the glorious and completely mandatory front-drive future. These criticisms initially seemed well-founded — the only thing keeping Chevrolet from selling a million of its front-drive Citation hatchbacks in 1980 was General Motors’s inability to find a fourth shift in a three-shift day.
Yet this apparently dilatory transition to FWD was too hasty by half. The Citation and its corporate siblings turned out to be hiding serious build quality and safety problems that eventually forced the federal government to get involved. Chrysler’s K-cars and Ford’s Escort/Lynx twins, though not prone to deadly brake failure, alienated customers with low performance, troubles with reliability, and fuel economy that rarely matched the promises made in the advertising. Those buyers abandoned the Big Three in droves and headed to their local Toyota dealership for the front-wheel-drive car they should have bought in the first place…
…only to find that it didn’t exist. Prior to 1982, Toyota sold just one FWD car: the remarkably ugly Corolla Tercel. Just under 13 feet long and saddled in most models with an unfashionable four-speed manual transmission, the Tercel didn’t even have the modern-as-tomorrow transverse layout of a Civic or Citation. Instead, the engine was placed in a conventional front-to-back orientation and turned the front wheels through a bevel gear system, just like a late-60s Oldsmobile Toronado.
And that name! It wasn’t even a Corolla — it was a Corolla Tercel. There was a reason for that. Having spent decades of effort establishing a reputation for reliable vehicles, Toyota saw no reason to risk its precious Corolla nameplate on what it considered to be unproven technology. So its first FWD car had “Tercel” appended as a sort of nomenclatural caution, and Toyota watched it carefully as the company worked on building a transverse FWD powertrain that would meet the company’s standards for quality and longevity. The first Corolla to use that powertrain appeared, along with a similar but slightly larger sedan badged “Camry,” almost four years after the Detroit FWD craze began.
This is not to say that Toyota is unwilling to embrace new technology or even to create it — witness the Prius sedan, now in its fifth generation. But the company has always seen technology as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and it has always expected that tech to meet real-world customer needs. Example: The Prius has proven to be more reliable than conventional gasoline-powered cars, particularly in taxi service, while hybrid cars from competitors have often proven to be maintenance nightmares even in sympathetic private hands.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Toyota is not exactly leading the vanguard of electric-vehicle cheerleaders. Quite the contrary, in fact. Akio Toyoda, the CEO of the firm bearing his name, recently told reporters that he was part of a “silent majority” among automakers who were skeptical about the EV future. Silent, that is, except for Toyoda himself, whose reputation is stout enough for him to make public comments like that.
His skepticism is well-founded. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the industry cannot source enough raw materials to match its present-day gasoline-vehicle output, even with transaction prices that are close to double those of similar conventional cars. The media response to these disclosures has been depressingly predictable: A recent Wired article suggests that today’s EVs, which are already incapable of matching gasoline cars for range, could and should reduce their battery capacities by as much as 80%. “In the United States,” the magazine huffs, “fewer than 5 percent of trips are longer than 30 miles.” In Manhattan, perhaps.
Vice, in turn, complained that the new electric trucks from Rivian and Ford used more batteries than the average European commuter car. Companies will market “every electric vehicle as a kind of no compromise machine, with all the convenience — or more — of a gas car but without the environmental costs. This is a flawed message for all EVs — which are better for the environment than gas cars, but not good for it.”
The reader will be forgiven if he or she briefly feels like the proverbial horse dragging a cart with a carrot always just out of reach ahead. It was crucial for the environment that you get rid of your gasoline-powered car — but if you bought anything bigger than a Nissan Leaf, you’re actually still a bad person, and you need to reduce your consumption pronto! Once you grit your teeth and buy that Nissan Leaf, you’ll likely hear how it’s not feasible to replace the 81 million vehicles being built every year with Leafs and that you should buy an electric scooter. At that point, someone will patiently explain to you how there are not enough resources on the planet to put 8 billion people on electric scooters. Citizen, have you considered walking to your grandmother’s house this holiday season? Better yet, stay at home and watch Netflix — the Obamas have produced a new show for you!
Toyoda’s lack of the requisite near-religious EV enthusiasm has produced the expected results among the chattering classes: Several petitions have been produced with the goal of forcing Toyota to go “all-in” on electric, one of which had 110,000 signatures when it was delivered to the company, with much fanfare, by SumOfUs, a nongovernmental organization that accepts anonymous donations to “empower change.” This flurry of petitions is, in and of itself, quite telling. One rarely needs to petition a corporation to do anything that is genuinely in its best interests. That’s what shareholders are for.
One suspects this is a classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” situation. If every automaker goes “all-in” on EVs, they will collectively be too big to fail when the EV bubble bursts due to a lack of raw materials, poor vehicle performance, or simple consumer disgust. At that point, they can expect healthy compensation from the governments that forced them into this strategy. If everyone but Toyota buys in, however, then come 2035, Toyota will have a complete line of newly engineered gasoline and diesel vehicles in its showrooms while its competitors have their 2025 lineups, minus the tooling and production facilities they had to destroy and/or repurpose over the course of the previous decade. It will not have escaped their memories that Toyota, not Honda (the FWD innovator) or GM (the enthusiastic FWD follower), makes the top two bestselling passenger cars in the U.S. Think of what the company could do if it had no effective competition.
Speaking of bestselling cars, just four of the top 10 bestselling vehicles in this country are front-wheel drive. Fifty years after the feeding frenzy, FWD turned out to be neither a curiosity nor a compulsory feature. Instead, it’s simply one potential answer to the automotive question and not always the best one. Chances are the EV will eventually assume a similar place in the market. Right now, there’s just one automaker with the intelligence to understand this and the courage to plan accordingly. Time will tell if Toyota was right — but history suggests you’d be a fool to bet against it.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.