Toyota on Friday gave the first indication of a renewed pushback against California’s ability to set stricter emissions standards and wind down sales of gasoline cars.
“At this point, it looks impossible,” Toyota North America COO Jack Hollis said in a virtual roundtable with CNBC and other media, regarding California rules that call for 35% of 2026-model-year vehicles in those voluntary California-compliant states to be electric, on the way to ending sales of most new vehicles with internal-combustion engines by 2035.
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According to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which sets the state’s emissions standards, 12 other states as well as the District of Columbia have signed on for the stricter rules. But Hollis argues that there isn’t enough demand to support these targets, and that they are already leading to “unnatural acts” in which automakers ship a disproportionate amount of electrified vehicles to states that follow the California rules.
These comments are mainly significant for their timing. After fighting California’s ability to set its own, stricter emissions standards, Toyota essentially agreed to a truce with CARB in 2022. For passenger cars and trucks, little in CARB’s top-level emissions rules has changed in the interim, and signs of EV demand look higher than six to 12 months ago. But now that Donald Trump has won a second term Toyota appears to once again be emboldened to resume the pushback.
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Toyota had tried, with the previous Trump administration—along with GM, Stellantis’ previous corporate entity, and several other foreign automakers—to take away California’s authority to set its own vehicle emissions standards. Ford, Honda, BMW, VW, and Volvo were among the companies that didn’t try to topple California’s ability to combat emissions on its own terms—allying with the state instead on a deal.
While Toyota has been pushing toward hybrid volume, not EV volume, all along, GM’s moves have remained the most puzzling. It continued to attempt to derail California rules behind the scenes—while pushing toward an all-EV, non-hybrid future, while being criticized by Trump for a plan that wouldn’t work.
