Unless Toyota Europe is confident that electricity supplies will be decarbonized in the future, the Japanese automaker would consider leaving the electric vehicle market.
Truth be told, Toyota isn’t keen at the idea of fully-electric vehicles, which is evident in its continuation to support hybrid technologies. But if electricity providers don’t have a clean solution not sourced from renewables, Toyota would “prefer to take a step back.”
The words come from Didier Stevens, Toyota Europe’s head of government affairs and environmental issues in an interview with Responding to Climate Change (RTCC). Toyota plans to introduce an electric vehicle to the European market by 2015, but the U.K. parliament recently failed to add a decarbonization target to its new energy bill.
“We are looking with some concern at the German plan of having [one million] electric vehicles on the road by 2020. If more and more of their electricity is going to come from coal, then this does not solve the problem. It just shifts the emissions to another area,” said Stevens. “This is not how it should be.”
[Source: RTCC]
Discuss this story at PriusForum.com