To its credit, Toyota made a daring foray into the technological world of hybrid cars and the associated fuel delivery development. It was a bold move that simply didn't pay off. As we recently learned, Toyota is now lagging behind its competitors in electric vehicle development. At the moment, it doesn't offer a single EV. Needless to say, it has no choice but to catch up. Fast. According to Automotive News, Toyota has just unveiled details of a new plan that will see it launch more than 10 new EVs in the early 2020s.

The first EV will actually launch in China, followed by market introduction to Japan, India, the US and Europe. Within this same plan, Toyota and its luxury Lexus brand will also offer electrified versions of every model in their respective lineups by 2025. By 2030, Toyota hopes to sell 5.5 million gasoline-electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and, yes, even hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. No doubt this is a bold plan, but Toyota has all of the resources (including money) it needs to make it happen. But why didn't Toyota jump into battery-powered cars at an earlier stage? After all, this is the company that gave the world its first gasoline hybrid, the Prius.

Toyota's reasoning, several years ago, was that battery technology was not developing fast enough to resolve issues like driving range, slow charging times, and high costs in general. The situation is very different now, especially since global governments are jumping on board the EV bandwagon with new emissions regulations. Toyota is now hard at work developing solid-state batteries, which it hopes to commercialize by the early 2020s. EV infrastructure is another area Toyota plans to focus on as well as the possible joint development of an EV architecture with Mazda and also, perhaps, Subaru and Suzuki.