Industry’s last great electric-car skeptic accepts the inevitable

You can’t fight city hall. And you really can’t fight the White House, Congress, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and governments of various U.S. states and European countries — much less all of them combined.

Or so one would conclude based on Akio Toyoda’s Jan. 26 announcement that he is leaving his post as chief executive of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s second-largest automaker, as of April 1.

The car industry’s most prominent skeptic of the transition to electric vehicles, Toyoda — a grandson of the company’s founder — had frequently expressed reservations about both the feasibility and necessity, in climate-change terms, of going all-electric in the short run. “Carbon is our enemy, not the internal combustion engine,” he once said. At a conference in Thailand just a few weeks ago, Toyoda added that he speaks for a “silent majority” of auto executives who are also “wondering whether EVs are really okay to have as a single option.”

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