Toyota has just revealed the 2027 Highlander – which was designed back in 2022 or so, probably, when Toyota assumed that 2027 would be what Toyota expected it would be back then; i..e, a “market” of forced (by dint of regulatory compliance pressure and subsidization) “electrification.”

So, voila – the electric-only 2027 Highlander. Which will likely cost Toyota a fortune and be cancelled by 2028. It will join other battery powered vehicles such as the F-150 Lightning that were conceived during the “Joe Biden” era and now resides on the Island of Unwanted Devices.

But Toyota went through with the debut anyhow, for essentially the same reason it’s hard for a man to stop when he’s not quite finished. A commitment had been made. It takes several years, typically, to go from let’s do this to it’s done. There’s the conceptual/planning stage, followed by the actual designing it stage followed by the proving (it works) stage and then the production stage. It takes a lot of money to go from concept/planning to production and – naturally – you want to earn all that money back, ideally plus a profit. Else it’s a loss. One you spent years on.

Now, the smart money would be to stop losing money before you lose more.

Toyota assumed that – come 2027 – it could sell electric vehicles such as the 2027 Highlander because people would (effectively) be pushed into buying them, by dint of the government out-regulating the alternatives to them. Toyota also assumed that it would have to manufacture more devices come 2027 because by then, compliance pressure – the having to hew to standards regarding “emissions” (of CO2 particularly) and miles-per-gallon (which ad been on deck to run to 50 MPG on average) that could only be hewed-to by making electric cars.

This is how the government – under “Joe Biden” particularly – gave a big shove to what has beens styled the “transition” (it sounds so natural) to electric vehicles. The problem now – for the car industry – is that things have changed.

Trump summarily ended the $7,500 tax credit that propped up EV sales – to the affluent, who were the only ones who paid enough taxes to qualify for the credit. The $7,500 credit served to lop off the equivalent of that much from the price of a device and that made the effective cost of a new device seem not entirely absurd, relative to something that the government didn’t give the buyer of $7,500 credit for.

But the main stake in the heart – if it can said that a battery has a heart – was Trump’s reversal of “Joe Biden” 50-plus MPG requirement and the dialing back of fines for not complying with the existing requirements. Without those requirements, battery powered vehicles effectively lost their reason for being. They are fundamentally political rather than economic products. Put in reverse, absent politics, there would be little – if any – economic case for the things and for that reason it is doubtful more than a small handful would be made for the tiny niche market that actually does exist for these things.

Now we see what happens when the political rug is pulled out from under. More finely, we’re going to see what happens to Toyota.

No official announcement has yet been made about what this device will list for, but the general consensus is – no surprise – that the base version will start around $55,000. That would be a $10k increase vs. the price of the 2026 Highlander, which lists for $45,570.

But it’s not just the upsell that’s going to cost Toyota. It is the cost Toyota and everyone else still battling EV Fever seems unable to come to terms with. That being the preposterous time cost. The having to park and wait at a “fast” charger – the use of that word is kind of like the use of the word “vaccine” to describe a drug that doesn’t prevent you from getting sick – and wait there for even 15 minutes (let alone 30) when you have better things to do is what’s known in sales as a liability. 

Toyota – and the parrot press, which gets paid well to parrot – counters with jabber about the 2027 Highlander’s supposed 320 miles of fully charged range. Emphasis on supposed – because it’s a physical fact that EV range is often less than advertised. Not just a little less, either. In the very cold – or the very hot – an EV that might go 320 miles on a temperate day, on a mostly flat road and going mostly not very fast might only go 250 miles, increasing the time intervals spent waiting to recover charge. The constant hassle of this is simply something the majority of car buyers do not want to deal with and never mind the compounded liability of much-higher-than-average depreciation for EVs, on account of the inevitable need to replaced the wilting battery pack.

Never mind. Have another Dixie cup of Kool Aid, kiddos!

“As people get more familiar with the EVS, the market will grow,” says Toyota’s David Christ. “Obviously, the end of the government subsidies brought the market back a bit. But again, even if it’s 5 percent of the market, you still want to have offerings. I don’t know that it will be 5 percent of the market. I think it’s going to be bigger than that. We’re all in.”

Oh yeahhhhhhhh!

. . .

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