Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda told British outlet Carwow this week that the industry-wide move to battery-electric vehicles is the single thing he fears most about the future of the car, and that his public defense of combustion engines has left him feeling isolated at the top of the world’s largest automaker.

The interview, conducted by Carwow’s Mat Watson and published on June 8, 2026, lands at a strange moment for that claim. Toyota just closed its sixth consecutive year as the world’s best-selling automaker, and the hybrid-first strategy Toyoda championed for years now looks prescient in the post-subsidy American market, a thread EVXL has tracked since Toyota’s $13.9 billion North Carolina battery plant opened in November 2025.

The 70-year-old executive, who stepped down as CEO in April 2023 but remains chairman of the board, made no attempt to soften his position. Engines, in his telling, are not a liability to be managed. They are the reason he shows up to work.

Toyoda Frames His Engine Loyalty as a Lonely Crusade

Akio Toyoda, grandson of Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda, told Watson that watching the entire industry pivot toward battery power frightens him more than anything else about the automobile’s future, and that no other senior industry figure seems willing to defend the engine alongside him.

“Everybody is shifting to BEVs, this is the biggest fear for me,” Toyoda said in the Carwow interview. He recalled being the only industry figure willing to tell the media, three or four years ago, that he loved the smell, the sound, and the mechanics of engines, and that he wanted to protect jobs across Toyota’s engine supply chain. Today, he says, it seems he is the only one left, and the feeling is one of genuine loneliness.

He went further. Toyoda described the automobile as his toy and said a future limited to carbon-neutral cars holds no excitement for him, even as he acknowledged the need to build them and to turn a profit doing it. This is not posturing from a desk executive. Toyoda races under the pseudonym Morizo and personally tests Gazoo Racing products like the GR Yaris on track.

Toyota’s EV Lineup Stays Thin While the Hybrid Bet Pays Off

Toyota sold exactly one battery-electric model in the UK, the bZ4X, until roughly a year ago, and only recently added the Urban Cruiser and bZ4X Touring while rivals like Volkswagen and Kia each field six EVs, a gap that mirrors the slow American rollout EVXL has documented.

The pattern extends upmarket. Lexus recently canceled the LF-ZC, the electric sedan that would have challenged the BMW i3 and the Mercedes C-Class Electric. In the U.S., Toyota’s electric push amounts to a short list headlined by the 2026 C-HR BEV with its 290-mile range, which EVXL covered at its May 2025 unveiling.

Meanwhile, the money flows elsewhere. Toyota committed $912 million to expand U.S. hybrid production across five plants in November 2025, six weeks after the federal EV tax credit expired and sent competitors’ pure-electric plans into retreat. Toyoda’s January 2024 prediction that BEVs would never exceed 30% of global sales drew ridicule at the time. The U.S. market, at least, has spent the past eight months making him look conservative rather than reckless.

His environmental math deserves scrutiny, though. Toyoda has claimed the 27 million hybrids Toyota sold carry a carbon footprint comparable to nine million EVs, a calculation that Motor1 notes assumed every EV would be built in Japan, where fossil-heavy thermal plants still dominate electricity generation. Run the same numbers on a Norwegian or French grid and the comparison collapses.

The Loneliness Claim Collides With the Sales Crown

A man who runs the board of the planet’s best-selling carmaker for the sixth straight year, whose cautious electrification strategy competitors are now scrambling to copy, occupies the least lonely position in the entire global auto industry, whatever the view from his garage suggests.

Ford has publicly wrestled with the F-150 Lightning‘s future. General Motors idled battery capacity and cut staff. Stellantis delayed EV facilities indefinitely. Each of those retreats moved the industry’s center of gravity toward the multi-pathway position Toyoda has held since before it was fashionable. If anything, the crowd is walking toward him.

Toyota is not abandoning engines either. The company confirmed the V8-powered GR GT for a 2027 launch and continues hydrogen combustion development, with a mid-engined sports car still rumored. The engines Toyoda mourns are alive and well inside his own product plan.

EVXL’s Take

I don’t buy the loneliness. When I wrote up Toyota’s $14 billion North Carolina battery plant opening on November 13, 2025, the story was the opposite of isolation: an entire industry sprinting back toward the hybrid position Toyoda never left. You don’t get to wear the sales crown for six years and play the misunderstood outsider in the same breath.

What he’s actually mourning is cultural, not commercial. The engineers who loved engines the way he does are aging out, and the next generation of car executives grew up on software. That’s a real loss, and his honesty about it is more interesting than another scripted commitment to carbon neutrality.

But sentiment isn’t strategy, and the numbers will not flatter him forever. EVs took a beating in the U.S. after the tax credit died. They did not take a beating in China, which now sets the pace for the global market Toyota must win. Toyota will close calendar year 2026 with battery-electric vehicles below 3% of its global sales, and that figure, not Toyoda’s feelings, is the number that should worry the board. The world’s biggest automaker can afford one slow decade in EVs. It cannot afford two.

Sources: Carwow, Motor1.

EVXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.