Toyota Just Made 32 Billion Everyone Said They Were Wrong

TITLE: Toyota Just Made $32 Billion. Everyone Said They Were Wrong. CHANNEL: Iglesias Automotive DATE: 2026-05-20 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Five years ago, Toyota was the dinosaur of the auto industry. The press mocked [music] them. Analysts downgraded them. Environmentalists shamed them. Even their own engineers questioned the strategy.

[music] Toyota refused to go all in on electric vehicles. While Ford bet 5 billion on EVs. [music] While GM killed gas cars by 2035. While Volkswagen pivoted its entire lineup. [music] Toyota built more hybrids. Today, Toyota is the most profitable car company on Earth. $32 billion in [music] net profit. Stock at all-time highs. Hybrid sales exploding. The companies that mocked them are [music] bleeding money. This is the most important contrarian bet in modern auto history. Let me show you how Toyota saw what nobody else did. Welcome to another episode of Iglesias Automotive. Today, how Toyota’s {quote} wrong bet against electric vehicles became the smartest decision in modern car industry history. In 2021, the auto industry made a decision. The future was full electric, battery only. No more gas, no more hybrids. Volkswagen announced $35 billion in EV investment. Ford split its company in two, one for gas cars, one for EVs, and bet 5 billion on the electric side. General Motors committed to going all electric by 2035. Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, Jaguar, every major automaker pledged the same. Then there was Toyota. Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder, then CEO and chairman, stood up at press conferences and said the auto industry was making a mistake. Not against EVs in principle, but against going all EV at this speed. {quote} Electric vehicles are not the only path to carbon neutrality. His position [music] keep developing hybrids, plug-in hybrids, hydrogen, and full EVs in parallel. Let customers decide. Let infrastructure catch up. Let battery technology mature. The industry response was brutal. The Wall Street Journal called Toyota, quote, out of step with the future. Greenpeace ranked Toyota dead last among major automakers on climate strategy 3 years in a row. Investors threatened [music] to dump the stock. ESG funds removed Toyota from their portfolios. A coalition of activist investors tried [music] to remove Toyota from his own family’s company in 2023. It got personal. There were profiles framing Toyota [music] as a stubborn old man clinging to gas engines because he loved sports cars. Articles [music] speculated Toyota would be the next Kodak. Too slow to adapt, doomed to irrelevance. Toyota stepped [music] down as CEO in 2023, but stayed on as chairman. The new CEO, Koji Sato, was widely expected [music] to reverse course and embrace full EVs. Investors cheered. Sato did not reverse [music] course. He doubled down on the hybrid strategy. And then everything changed. [music] 2024 was the year EV demand hit a wall. Not crashed, but plateaued hard. Ford lost 5.1 billion dollars on its EV division. 5 billion in 1 year. The Ford Mustang Mach-E sat unsold on lots. The F-150 Lightning had production cut in half twice. The Explorer EV was canceled outright. GM scrapped its replacement for the Chevy Bolt. Killed the Buick electric SUV. Walked back its commitment to all EVs by

Reintroduced plug-in hybrids it had previously killed. Volkswagen lost so much money on EVs, it announced its first ever German factory closures in over 80 years. Mercedes scrapped its plan to go all electric by 2030. Now offers hybrids on every model. Meanwhile, Toyota. Hybrid sales in the United States in 2024, 36% of Toyota’s total volume, up from 18% in 2020. [music] The Prius, long mocked as a beige appliance, became the best-reviewed car in its segment. The RAV4 Hybrid outsold every other compact SUV in America. The Camry Hybrid, Toyota stopped making the gas-only Camry entirely. Every Camry sold today is a hybrid. They can’t build them fast enough. Toyota’s 2024 global net profit, $32.2 billion. Five times what Ford earned. Three times Volkswagen. More than Tesla. More than GM and Stellantis combined. Stock up 65% in 2024. New all-time high. So, what did Toyota see that the rest of the industry missed? Three things. One, buyers want practicality more than ideology. A Hybrid Camry costs the same as a gas Camry, gets [music] 50 miles per gallon, and never needs to find a charger. For 90% of buyers, that’s the right answer right now. Not in 2035. Now. Two, the EV charging infrastructure isn’t ready. The promise of EVs assumed a charging network as easy as gas stations. That network does not exist outside of Tesla’s Supercharger system. [music] Owning a non-Tesla EV in America in 2026 still means anxiety about every long trip. Three. Battery prices haven’t fallen as fast as projected. The $8,000 EV battery cost gap to gas cars hasn’t closed. Toyota’s hybrids use a quarter of the battery a full EV uses. Which means lower cost, less weight, fewer rare earth materials, and longer life. Akio Toyoda was not anti-EV. He was anti-arrogance. He believed the industry was making a multi-trillion-dollar bet on a technology that wasn’t ready, an infrastructure that didn’t exist, and a customer that didn’t yet want what was being offered. He was right. Toyota is now developing a solid-state battery. Projected to enter production around 2027 [music] or 2028. If it works as advertised, it will offer twice the range, half the charging time,

[music] and longer lifespan than current lithium-ion EVs. Toyota will then go full [music] EV when the technology is actually ready. That is the Toyota playbook in one sentence. Don’t be first. [music] Be right. The Detroit automakers spent the last decade trying to be Tesla. Toyota [music] spent the last decade refusing to. Today, Toyota is more valuable than Ford, GM, and Stellantis combined. The most [music] contrarian bet in modern auto history was simply waiting until the math worked. And that’s the story. If you stuck [music] with me to the end of this, thank you. Genuinely. That’s [music] what makes the work worth doing. This is the car report. I cover the stories [music] the car industry doesn’t want you to hear. If you want more, hit subscribe and turn on the bell. See you on the next one.