To me it makes sense, but I had similar thoughts independently before reading this article. The only assumption is that battery manufacturing will remain challenging for the near future.
It does not matter either way, in the EU selling anything but full electric will be illegal as of 2035. If Toyota wants to get out of that lucrative market, it can go ahead.
Imagine if the EU and others had taken a reasonable stance 15 years ago, and said "every car sold after 2015 must be an EV or a series hybrid with more than 50 km realistic range on pure electric". The transition towards zero carbon emissions from the road sector would have gone exponentially faster.
I mean, even if you look at the countries with the highest rate of EV adoption, like Norway with 65% of the vehicles sold in 2021 being pure EVs, it's still only making a tiny dent in the amount of gasoline and diesel sold - around 5% decrease when you compare Q4 2021 to Q4 2019, and then it's still a bit unclear how much of that drop is attributed to WFH and covid.
This is basically what they did. Generally laws try to avoid specifying the technology these days, to prevent locking things in, but the EU and other sensibly governed places have been putting tighter emission standards in place for decades. People were free to meet these goals with whatever tech they came up with, better aero, lighter materials and so on.
If PHEVs were the answer, we'd have more of them, but pretty much everyone realised that going straight to BEV made sense as soon as the oil/battery price passed a certain ratio, and that it was only going in one direction in future.
Here's a 2011 (11 years ago), McKinsey slide: https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mck...
This is also where the $100 per KWh target people talked about a lot comes from, if batteries get sufficiently cheap, BEVs win, and they did.
We have achieved only emissions reductions on paper, when we could have been mandating PHEVs and actually solving problems.
If you look back at when California was actually able to do something about their smog problem, it was through mandating specific technologies - first it was positive crankcase ventilation, then catalytic converters.
Of course no one really wants a PHEV anymore!
That is not accurate. It will not be possible to buy a new non-zero emission car.
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/...
An average family generates 5kg of waste per day. A 400kg battery every 15 years is not going to make a dent in that waste, especially when the 400kg can be profitably recycled.
Why spend money on basic infrastructure for human living conditions, lets give everyone air conditioning and an electric car.
The link between temperature and human productivity is well established, air conditioning is one of those things that seems frivolous but pays for itself.
And of course transportation of food and other goods is also basic infrastructure for human living conditions. So maybe not electric cars, but electric trains definitely.
It's like the opposite of 'appeal to authority' :)
PHEVs are better than HEVs and both are better than ICE, hydrogen is a non-starter (technically better than ICE but there's no infrastructure so it'll be niche) so the future is BEV for wheeled transport.
In depth numbers:
https://theicct.org/publication/a-global-comparison-of-the-l...
https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-m...
They're probably starting this campaign to try to prevent the phase out being brought forward again, and/or spreading to other countries as it's been going so well.