Dan Neil writes about cars the way the best sportswriters wrote about ballplayers — with affection, with jokes, and with the nagging suspicion that the machines might be smarter than we are. This weekend his column carried what amounts to an obituary: the gas-only Toyota RAV4 is dead.
Hold your tears. Nobody else is crying either. That is the entire story.
The RAV4 is America’s best-selling vehicle that is not a pickup truck. From here on, every one of them is a hybrid — a car that pairs a gas engine with an electric motor and a battery. The pure-gasoline version, the default American compact SUV, the car of a million dentist-office parking lots, is simply gone from the order sheet.
There was no mandate, no march, no ribbon-cutting. Toyota looked at what people were actually buying and quietly retired the engine-only model. The best-seller went electric-ish the way most big things happen in America: by inches, on merit, while everyone argued about something else.
The tortoise’s spec sheet
The version Neil drove is the plug-in hybrid Woodland — a hybrid with a bigger battery you can charge from a plug. The numbers: $47,850, 324 horsepower, and 52 miles of pure-electric range, plus fast charging. Read that again. 324 horsepower, in a RAV4. Your neighbor’s grocery-getter now out-muscles the sports sedans of your youth.
Fifty-two electric miles covers most Americans’ daily driving entirely. The gas engine rides along like a spare tire: there for the road trip, ignored the rest of the year. Add fast charging, a first at this end of the market. This RAV4 quietly does most of what a full electric car does — without asking its owner to plan a road trip like a polar expedition.
And that is the trick of it. The customer buying this car is not making a statement. She is buying the same RAV4 she bought last time, except quicker, thriftier, and mostly electric. The transition happened somewhere between the trade-in and the paperwork, and she never had to attend a single debate about it.
Anyone can cover a moonshot. It takes a better eye to spot the revolution parked in the driveway with a roof rack.
Meanwhile, in Toyota City
Now flip to Tuesday’s business pages, because the company retiring the gas RAV4 is not exactly limping.
Toyota (TM) reported quarterly profit up 76%, to ¥1.48 trillion, and raised its forecast for the full year.
It also announced a share buyback of up to ¥1 trillion. A buyback is when a company buys back its own stock — in this case, roughly 4.2% of the whole company. And it committed $10 billion of investment in the United States over five years.
All of this while paying a 15% U.S. tariff — an import tax — on the cars it builds in Japan. That is not a company hedging its bets on hybrids. That is a company collecting on a bet it placed twenty-five years ago, back when hybrids were a punchline and the punchline was the Prius.
For years the story was that the tortoise had missed the electric revolution. The tortoise, it turns out, was not lost. It was lapping the field at its own speed, and the field is only now checking its mirrors.