Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp is beefing up its electric vehicle (EV) lineup, offering 30 new fully electric models by 2030, company president Akio Toyoda said yesterday.
Toyota plans to sell 3.5 million electric vehicles globally in 2030, he said, up from its earlier plan to sell 2 million zero-emission hydrogen and battery electric vehicles a year worldwide by 2030.
Toyota now sells about 10 million vehicles globally a year.
Photo: Bloomberg
Toyoda promised a full lineup of electric models called the “bz series” — short for “beyond zero” — coming in the years ahead, including sport-utility vehicles of all sizes, pickup trucks and sportscars.
“We can leave a beautiful planet and bring about many smiles for the future generation,” Toyoda told reporters at a Tokyo showroom, standing on stage with more than a dozen EV models promised for the future.
His comments underscore the company’s determination to reverse its reputation as a laggard in the industry’s shift toward electric vehicles.
Toyota prides itself on its role as a pioneer in hybrid technology and more recently in hydrogen fuel cells for vehicles.
The maker of the Prius hybrid, Lexus luxury models and Mirai fuel cell car wants to offer various options, Toyoda said, adding that the company must respond to global fears about climate change and carbon emissions.
The company’s Lexus luxury brand would become fully electric by 2035 globally, Toyoda said.
It aims to achieve that aim by 2030 for the US, European and Chinese markets.
The company yesterday also increased to ￥2 trillion (US$17.6 billion) its investment in battery research and development from the ￥1.5 trillion announced earlier this year.
When including other green technologies, such as hybrids, Toyota is investing ￥8 trillion by 2030, the company said.
Earlier this month, Toyota announced plans to build a US$1.3 billion EV battery plant near Greensboro, North Carolina, that would employ at least 1,750 people and start manufacturing in 2025.
Toyota’s fully electric sport utility vehicle called “bZ4X” is set to go on sale next year globally.
Toyota is building a futuristic city near Mount Fuji, designed to try out and showcase automated driving, sustainable energy and robotics for housing.
GlobaData automotive editor David Leggett said that Toyota was trying to prepare for the dramatic technological and societal changes that are coming.
“Businesses have to think about how demand will look in 10, 20, 30 years’ time, and the pathways that come back to their business plans over a foreseeable time horizon,” Leggett said.
Toyoda, an avid racing driver and the grandson of the company’s founder, acknowledged he had not been that interested in EVs in the past, viewing them as “commodities.”
However, he said he is excited about the vehicles Toyota is developing.
“They are safer, faster and more fun to drive. I can say that as a driver,” he said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS