Akio Toyoda Believes Sport Cars Must Powered By An Internal Combustion Engine

It’s been almost two years since Toyota announced an electric sports car, but the FT-Se concept hasn’t yet been developed into a production model, and buyers will have to wait a long time for it. Instead, Toyota’s president would rather stick to sports cars powered by internal combustion engines.

Akio Toyoda made his preferences clear in an interview with Automotive News: “For me as a top driver, my definition of a sports car is something with the smell of gasoline and a noisy engine.” He admits that there are people within Toyota who aspire to a fun electric vehicle, but he would much rather stick with a good old SUS engine.

Akio Toyoda is not your typical high-ranking executive who spends all day locked in an office. He is Toyota’s “chief driver” with an alter ego: Morizo ​​Kinoshita. He adopted this name in 2007 for the 24-hour endurance race at the Nürburgring and has used it ever since. Today, he still happily gets behind the wheel of Toyota’s test and sports models. More recently, you may remember the name from the special edition GR Corolla and the lesser-known Lexus LBX Morizo ​​​​RR crossover.

Toyoda admits that it’s “not exciting” to race electric vehicles because the battery doesn’t last more than an hour on the track. In other words, the company president argues that current technology is not up to the task, adding that racing electric cars would be “a race of charging time or battery replacement.”

Toyota’s president has already expressed his hesitation about electric vehicles. A little over a year ago, Toyoda said that electric cars would never account for more than 30 percent of global sales. Despite this, we’ve seen the Japanese auto giant step up its efforts toward zero emissions by expanding its electric vehicle lineup globally, especially in China.

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