It’s not the first time and won’t be the last that Toyota tries to push people away from electric cars while advertising their hybrids.
Toyota has been reluctant to adopt electric cars, since the company has invested huge resources in their hybrid technology to make internal combustion engine (ICE) cars more efficient. That’s what in essence plug-less hybrids are, just more efficient ICE cars.
In its latest commercial, Toyota UK praises the ability of the Yaris Hybrid to run without requiring to be charged.
Yet, if you think that the commercial above by Toyota UK is bad, Toyota Portugal managed to do worse. In its Portuguese commercial, Toyota says that the Yaris Hybrid can run 50 % of the time in electric mode, all this without charging.
The truth is that Toyota plug-less hybrids have a electric range of roughly 2 km. They can only be used for 50 % of the time in electric mode in very especial occasions, such as been stranded in intense city traffic for 30 minutes in a 60 minutes journey.
However, this commercial wasn’t very well received in Facebook, where – unlike what happens with television advertising -, we can immediately see people’s reactions. In fact, the reactions were so bad that Toyota Portugal had to reply by saying that the company has 20 years of experience regarding hybrids and already sold more than 10 million units around the world.
When a company relies on past achievements to justify their views for the future is halfway to become obsolete.
Putting down electric cars is not new in Toyota and Lexus hybrids commercials, nevertheless it seems to be a bad strategy, especial now that a decent new Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid was recently released and is having great success in some regions, such as the USA and Japan.
When will Toyota stop trying to put fear into driving electric cars?
