Toyota’s electric HiLux: Too little, too late, or just another car for Barry?

I am already off Toyota Motor Corporation’s Christmas card list, but it’s hard to ignore how important Toyota is to Australia. They were the top-selling brand by such a margin in 2024 that they outsold the next three brands combined.

The fact that they have been dragging their feet on electrification – even to the point of throwing tacks into the road – has been a massive roadblock to rapid decarbonisation of mobility in a country that is so well suited to pure electric vehicles.

This week they have finally announced a pure electric HiLux, possibly in response to the circling BYD Shark, which has been taking bites out of Toyota’s market share.

As much as I hate big trucks driven where a bicycle or a small hatchback would be better suited to the job, there’s no denying the importance of the ute to getting things done in Australia and, of course, the place it has—along with the Toyota brand—firmly lodged in the Australian psyche.

We’re still missing an electric HiAce, but hopefully Toyota won’t leave us hanging too long for that, although products from LDV and Farizon look very good in this segment.

Clearly Toyota had to move on this or lose its place in the mines to conversions of its old trucks and its place on the road to Chinese upstarts with better technology, better design, better engineering, and continuously improving sales and marketing.

Toyota’s threefold strategy: Obfuscation, Barry, and broken promises

Toyota’s EV strategy has been threefold: obfuscation, marketing their ‘self-charging hybrids’ full of ’90s innovation; half-baked products for the mythical ‘Barry’; and delaying tactics based on the promise of new technology in hydrogen and solid-state batteries.

Let’s be clear: hydrogen for light vehicles—possibly also for heavy road vehicles—is not going to happen. It’s been just around the corner ever since I joined the energy industry.

Battery electric has won the argument; the economics of hydrogen just don’t work, and we need to stop wasting intellectual capital on this. Free the engineers, scientists, policy makers, and factory workers to do something worthwhile.

Solid-state batteries are another matter entirely. Yes, they are an important but incremental innovation in lithium-ion battery technology. However, for almost every use case, the EV you need is available now. Nowhere is this more true than in Australia, a country where most of us don’t drive a lot and around 75% of households have a driveway or a garage where we can charge.

The specs: Good enough for most, but not for all

Which does bring me to specifications. For most uses, the 300km range and 59kWh of battery—the specs on the electric HiLux for the Thai market—are good enough, even when constrained by loading. They are less good for the weekend warrior who takes their ute camping after putting down the tools, and for the tradie who has to go far for a job.

At the recent Canberra EV meetup, I had the opportunity to speak with the owner of an electrical contracting business, with 10 crews already heavily engaged in the rollout of chargers across the ACT and New South Wales. He’d come to the event to talk about electrifying his fleet of 10 vans.

Having looked at the offerings today, he was concerned – not about the work close to Canberra, but for when his crews have to do jobs as far north as Coffs Harbour on the Mid North Coast.

It’s not so much the range and battery size that’s the problem; drivers need to stop and take regular short breaks. But the charging time during those breaks matters. 20-80% needs to take 10-15 minutes and deliver a laden 200-300km.

One of Toyota’s strengths with the HiLux platform has been its ability to flex the design over a very wide selection of use cases, so the challenge Toyota faces is having a diverse and flexible set of options for the pure electric HiLux.

Toyota are a notable absence from this weekend’s Everything Electric show in Melbourne. A company with nothing much to sell in the EV space and a massively well-resourced dealer network and colossal marketing budget maybe doesn’t need to spend money engaging with the EV faithful and EV curious.

The New Vehicle Efficiency Scheme and Chinese upstarts have awakened the sleeping Japanese giant. Now we need to see if Toyota is serious or if the new HiLux will just be another car for Barry.