The Road Ahead: Toyota Sees Gas Engine Cars Gone By 2050 (Tesla's Already There)

This past week Toyota said it plans to all but eliminate gasoline-based cars by 2050. Tesla is about 35 years ahead of that goal.

The Japanese automaker laid out it goals on Wednesday, according to a report in Nikkei, Japan's largest business daily.  The plans call for a 90 percent reduction in the company's new-car CO2 emissions by 2050. "You may think 35 years is a long time," said Senior Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise, according to a separate AP report. "But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary."  While Toyota has been a leader in mass-produced hybrid cars (think: Prius) for almost 20 years, the company has a new sense of urgency: "the environment is deteriorating by the day," Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada explained at a briefing, according to the Nikkei report. As a result, Toyota decided that it needed to a set a "new, tougher challenge looking 20 or 30 years ahead."

Based on past statements by executives, Toyota is not betting on a pure battery electric-car future like Tesla's but is focusing more on its Mirai, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle introduced last December. The company is targeting annual sales of around 3,000 Mirai in 2017 and more than 30,000 by 2020. And, of course, there's the Prius.  The world's first mass-produced hybrid debuted in 1997. Toyota's total hybrid sales have passed 8 million as of July, according to Nikkei. The company is aiming to apply control software and other technology developed for its hybrids to fuel cell and battery-powered vehicles, according to Nikkei.

Tesla is already a zero-emissions automaker.  The problem is, Tesla only has a tiny share of the total vehicle market, while Toyota, depending on the quarter, is the leading global carmaker.  (And note that market share for EV/Plug-In EV vehicles remains low in the U.S., accounting for just .8 percent of the market during the first quarter of the year, according to market researcher IHS ).  But Tesla is betting that its mass-market $35,000 Model 3 will begin to change this, allowing it to sell 500,000 electric vehicles annually by 2020.  And as the two companies vie for consumer mind share, they continue to spar in the media. The Nikkei report (cited above) even mentions that Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has "argued that building the necessary infrastructure for fuel cell vehicles is tough." And Toyota has responded to Musk's fuel cell criticism with videos such a “Fueled by Bullsh*t | Presented by Toyota Mirai.” And the winner is....