TOKYO—Toyota’s new management, looking to make up lost ground in electric vehicles, said it would add billions of dollars in spending to reach EV targets.
Toyota said Wednesday it would invest an additional ¥1 trillion, equivalent to $7.4 billion, in EVs through 2030, bringing Toyota’s total planned outlays for the period to around $37 billion.
The Japanese automaker said it aimed to sell 202,000 EVs for the current fiscal year ending March 2024—a figure that would more than quintuple its sales from the previous year. If achieved, those sales would bring Toyota one step closer to its goal of shipping 1.5 million EVs in 2026 and 3.5 million in 2030.
Toyota has moved more slowly toward EVs than others in the industry, choosing to throw its weight behind the hybrid gas-electric cars that it pioneered in the late 1990s. The automaker estimates it will sell more than 3.6 million hybrid vehicles this year, a figure that would exceed the total number of EVs Toyota aims to sell globally in 2030.
Toyota’s strategy of spreading its bets when it comes to the future of cars was championed by longtime President Akio Toyoda, who became chairman in April. Toyota’s new president, Koji Sato, has largely stood by his former boss’s stance that high-margin hybrid vehicles are a practical way of generating cash now that can later be invested in EVs.
With EV sales rapidly picking up in some regions of the world, “Toyota will seek to provide optimal solutions at an accelerated pace without wavering from our multipathway approach,” Mr. Sato said Wednesday.
Last month, Mr. Sato said Toyota would release 10 new EV models by 2026 and form a new unit within the company to focus solely on fully electric cars. According to Toyota, the additional spending will help ensure it can achieve its EV sales targets for the current decade.
Echoing comments made by other industry executives struggling to turn their EV portfolios profitable, Toyota Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said Wednesday that EV margins are likely to be weighed down by the high cost of batteries for some time.
In the late 2020s, when Toyota aims to be selling millions of full EVs, “we will aim to be able to secure the same level of profitability as today” by selling a variety of other types of vehicles too, Mr. Nakajima said.
Write to River Davis at river.davis@wsj.com
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