Toyota Just Made $32 Billion. Everyone Said They Were Wrong.

ELI5/TLDR

Around 2021 every big carmaker bet their future on full electric cars. Toyota refused, and kept building hybrids — cars that run on both gas and a small battery. The press called Toyota a dinosaur and tried to push out its chairman. Then EV demand stalled, rivals lost billions, and Toyota posted the biggest profit of any carmaker on Earth: $32 billion.

The Full Story

The bet everyone else made

In 2021, the industry decided the future was battery-only. No gas, no hybrids. Volkswagen earmarked $35 billion for EVs. Ford literally split itself in two — one company for gas cars, one for electric — and put $5 billion behind the electric half. GM promised to be all-electric by 2035. Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, Jaguar all pledged the same.

A quick definition, because the video leans on it: a hybrid is a car with a normal gas engine plus a small battery and electric motor. It charges itself from braking and the engine, so you never plug it in. A full EV has no engine at all — just a big battery you must charge from a wall or a public charger. The whole story turns on the gap between those two things.

Toyota’s “no”

Toyota’s chairman Akio Toyoda — grandson of the founder — stood up and said the industry was wrong. Not wrong to want EVs, but wrong to go all-EV this fast.

Electric vehicles are not the only path to carbon neutrality.

His pitch: build hybrids, plug-in hybrids, hydrogen, and full EVs side by side, and let customers and infrastructure decide the pace.

The reaction was harsh. The Wall Street Journal called Toyota “out of step with the future.” Greenpeace ranked it dead last on climate three years running. ESG funds dumped the stock. In 2023, activist investors tried to remove Toyoda from his own family’s company. Articles compared Toyota to Kodak — the camera giant that ignored digital and collapsed. Toyoda stepped down as CEO that year but stayed on as chairman. His successor, Koji Sato, was expected to cave and go all-EV. Instead Sato doubled down on hybrids.

The year the math flipped

2024 was when EV demand hit a wall — not a crash, but a hard plateau. The bills came due for everyone who had gone all-in:

Ford lost 5.1 billion dollars on its EV division.

The Mustang Mach-E sat unsold. The F-150 Lightning had production halved twice. GM walked back its 2035 all-EV pledge and quietly brought back the plug-in hybrids it had killed. Volkswagen announced its first German factory closures in 80 years. Mercedes scrapped its all-electric-by-2030 plan and put hybrids on every model.

Toyota, meanwhile, was selling hybrids as fast as it could build them. Hybrids went from 18% of its US volume in 2020 to 36% in 2024. The RAV4 Hybrid outsold every other compact SUV in America. Toyota stopped making the gas-only Camry entirely — every Camry sold now is a hybrid. Global net profit: $32.2 billion. Five times Ford’s, three times Volkswagen’s, more than GM and Stellantis combined. Stock up 65%.

What Toyota saw

The video boils it down to three things the rest of the industry missed:

Buyers want practical, not ideological. A hybrid Camry costs the same as the gas one, does 50 mpg, and never needs a charger. For most buyers that’s the right answer now, not in 2035.
Charging isn’t ready. Outside Tesla’s network, owning an EV in America still means worrying about every long trip.
Batteries are still expensive. The cost gap between an EV battery and a gas car hasn’t closed. A hybrid uses about a quarter of the battery a full EV does — cheaper, lighter, fewer rare-earth metals.

The framing the video lands on: Toyoda wasn’t anti-EV, he was “anti-arrogance” — against betting trillions on a technology, an infrastructure, and a customer that weren’t ready yet. And the kicker: Toyota is now building a solid-state battery (a next-generation design that swaps the liquid inside a normal battery for a solid, promising more range and faster charging), aiming for 2027–28. The plan was never to skip EVs — it was to wait until they actually work.

Don’t be first. Be right.

Key Takeaways

A hybrid carries roughly a quarter of the battery of a full EV, which lowers cost, weight, and rare-earth dependence while still cutting fuel use.
Toyota’s 2024 net profit was $32.2 billion — more than GM and Stellantis combined, and more than Tesla.
Ford lost $5.1 billion on its EV division in a single year; VW announced its first German plant closures in 80 years; both GM and Mercedes walked back all-EV deadlines and reintroduced hybrids.
The bottleneck on full EV adoption is less the car and more the surrounding system: charging networks and battery cost, neither of which moved as fast as 2021 forecasts assumed.
Toyota’s stated plan is to go all-EV once solid-state batteries are production-ready (~2027–28), making this a delay-and-wait strategy, not a permanent rejection of EVs.
The strategic lesson: being early to a technology shift can be worse than being late if the infrastructure and economics aren’t there yet.

Claude’s Take

The core facts here are real and check out directionally: Toyota did refuse the all-EV rush, did get pilloried for it, and did post enormous profits while EV-heavy rivals bled. The hybrid math (cheaper, less battery, no charging anxiety) is genuinely the cleanest explanation for why 2024 went the way it did.

But the title is doing a lot of work. “$32 billion” is Toyota’s total net profit, not money “made” from the hybrid bet specifically — Toyota is also just a colossal, well-run company that sells a lot of cars, and a weak yen flattered its 2024 numbers significantly (a detail the video skips). The “everyone said they were wrong / now they’re vindicated” arc is a tidy narrative that smooths over the fact that the EV plateau is partly a US story; China’s EV adoption kept climbing, and Toyota is comparatively weak there. The video also never mentions that the same solid-state battery has been “two years away” for roughly a decade.

So: a solid, well-sourced retelling of a real strategic episode, told with a thumb on the scale. The contrarian-bet framing is satisfying but a little too clean. A 6 — informative and mostly accurate, dinged for the clickbait causation (“the hybrid bet made $32B”) and the omitted nuance on currency and China.