Large companies have difficulty making changes. The reason is exactly that: the goal is to make money, and doing what has made heaps of money for heaps of time already always seems like the best option.
> The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones.
I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.
To continue to sell cars which are unreliable and have huge supply chains.
Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance.
Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US.
I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol.
Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts?
The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts.
It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.
