In 2003 there were no viable or mass market electric cars at all. What a made up narrative.
Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.
Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!
Musk was very effective in pushing the narrative that there was nothing before Tesla.
FYI, it wasn't a hybrid.
And your statement is a bit misleading. 1400 sales sounds pathetic, until you realize that means they completely sold out. 1400 was all they ever made.
1400 sales over 6 years is worse than pathetic. They didn't run out of materials to produce them. Good lord, this is Toyota we're talking about, they've manufactured hundreds of millions of vehicles. It was an utter flop.
You keep criticizing the sales, yet it was the supply that was the limiting factor. You can't sell more than you make, so of course tiny production runs are going to be "worse than pathetic" for sales!
Almost like they didn't really want it to succeed...
The fact that an EV failed without that kind of publicly funded support is only evidence that furthers the point GP was making
There were no fun EVs prior to the Roadster. And the Roadster was a small production precursor to Model S, which transitioned from boutique-ish to mass production, and which led to the Model 3, and then the Model Y, the number one selling car in the world.
Until the past five years or so almost every other EV was still an oddball whose design language seemed aimed at screaming "EV" over anything else. Look at the i3 or the Nissan Leaf. Until Cybertruck all Teslas retained a fairly conventional appearance.
That means that everyone who is buying a gas guzzler is helping fund Tesla. Tesla was one of the first to have an EV-only lineup which means they could sell 100% of their carbon credits. Every company that wants to sell a gas guzzler has to pay Tesla for carbon credits in order to do so
Also the massive government bailouts and subsidies helped ofc https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
https://archive.nytimes.com/wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040717233048/http://www.ovonic...
Nevertheless, Toyota sold less than 1400 of the plug-in hybrid RAV4s (they were NOT all-electric) over 6 years, so they ceased the model's run.
It still holds that NiMH batteries were not practical for EVs. They had terrible range, memory problems and needed replacement after just 2 years. Anyone who used a cell phone or laptop from the 90s or early 00s understands this: batteries didn't last, that's why they were often engineered so that you could replace the batteries easily. Compared to today's electronics like iPhones and Macbooks that have internal lithium ion batteries embedded on device. This is because they work for years and years and lose very little maximum charge over that tme.
It never existed in consumer applications of NiCd batteries, especially as late as 1996.
It could be mitigated by fully discharging a battery before recharging, and I'm certain that in applications such as satellites , they engineered the charging cycles to mitigate this. However, consumers powering phones and laptops can't be expected to maintain such discipline. Certainly people driving cars over variable distances can't be expected to uphold such requirements either, out of absolute necessity to travel a fixed distance between charges.
Lithium ion ultimately won because it solved these problems altogether. Modern NiMH has caught up a little bit, but Lithium has meanwhile improved as well.
If I needed a big electric truck, I'd be after an https://www.edisonmotors.ca/
1997 (Gen I): 660 units 1999 (Gen II): 457 units
GM only produced 660 units and 457 units. They never tried to actually mass produce the car and seeing how current electric vehicles are I really understand why; why cannibalize your higher margin ICE vehicles?
This is basically the same argument people make about a cure for cancer. Since there's a ton of money in treating cancer you can't develop a cure and kill your cash cow. It however, completely misses that somebody that isn't currently treating cancer can come in and develop a cure (i.e. Tesla) without tanking their treatment margins.
The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.
As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.
So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.
Battery technology still sucked in the early 00s and it wasn't obvious yet that lithium ion batteries would lead to the first truly viable mass market all-electric cars. Easy to say in hindsight, but there were still many possible futures and the path that had the most research behind it at that point was hydrogen.
I have a very hard time believing that in 2003 nobody inside the car industry was thinking that lithium ion-powered cars were a more viable solution than hydrogen.