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I think that Toyota have always been very conservative and slow to change, they've really focussed most of their effort in increasing reliability and durability, with only a relatively small amount of effort put into areas like performance cars. The Millennium car project was something completely new to Toyota, and a consequence of one man who was determined that Toyota should try and make a difference in terms of the environmental impact of their cars by the Millennium, Eiji Toyoda, then chairman of Toyota. He gave an order in 1990 that the G21 committee should invest in R&D, lest Toyota get left behind. The result was a massive investment, and a complete reform of Toyota's R&D departments between 1992 and 1993, with the focus of how to make a radically different and more economical drive train.
The result of that work turned into the Prius, a car that split the views of Toyota's management, with many being opposed to it as it seemed far too risky. The result was that the early Prius was a Japanese market only car, sold in very limited numbers, pretty much as a trial. The rest is history, as the car became a massively greater success than pretty much anyone in Toyota had expected. Eiji Toyoda saw the Prius as the start of a process to gain knowledge and experience of electric drive trains, but he retired as chairman before the Prius went into production and his successor, Shoichiro Toyoda, didn't share his enthusiasm at all, and pushed Toyota back to their traditional path of making reliable and durable cars, rather than technologically innovative cars.
That short sighted decision to pretty much throw away the innovation that Eiji Toyoda's 1990 order had started is pretty much at the heart of Toyota's present poor showing in the EV market. They got left behind by every other major car manufacturer, and only now are very slowly playing catch up. Anyone that's read the book about the development of the Prius, and knows just how hard it was to make the motor/generators and particularly the IGBT inverter modules (they had multiple explosions involving these during development) will realise that making a viable EV in the 1990s was a real uphill struggle. Toyota ended up having to manufacture many of the core material parts themselves, as there were no first or second tier suppliers with the capability.
The result of that work turned into the Prius, a car that split the views of Toyota's management, with many being opposed to it as it seemed far too risky. The result was that the early Prius was a Japanese market only car, sold in very limited numbers, pretty much as a trial. The rest is history, as the car became a massively greater success than pretty much anyone in Toyota had expected. Eiji Toyoda saw the Prius as the start of a process to gain knowledge and experience of electric drive trains, but he retired as chairman before the Prius went into production and his successor, Shoichiro Toyoda, didn't share his enthusiasm at all, and pushed Toyota back to their traditional path of making reliable and durable cars, rather than technologically innovative cars.
That short sighted decision to pretty much throw away the innovation that Eiji Toyoda's 1990 order had started is pretty much at the heart of Toyota's present poor showing in the EV market. They got left behind by every other major car manufacturer, and only now are very slowly playing catch up. Anyone that's read the book about the development of the Prius, and knows just how hard it was to make the motor/generators and particularly the IGBT inverter modules (they had multiple explosions involving these during development) will realise that making a viable EV in the 1990s was a real uphill struggle. Toyota ended up having to manufacture many of the core material parts themselves, as there were no first or second tier suppliers with the capability.
