Toyota hybrids crushing it as Tesla woes hit Elon Musk

Tesla shares are down about 24% year-to-date, knocking Musk off his perch as the world’s richest man, an honor now bestowed upon French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault.

Investors did not react well to Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings, when the EV maker warned that this year’s sales growth might be “notably lower” than last year’s—not reassuring when it cut prices in 2023 to prop up demand. In California, a key market, registrations of Teslas actually fell in the fourth quarter, the first time that’s happened there in more than three years. 

Toyota, by contrast, can’t make its hybrids quickly enough, and demand for them is strong without price cuts. The Japanese giant was the world’s top-selling carmaker for the fourth year in a row in 2023, selling 11.2 million vehicles globally, a respectable 7.2% increase from the previous year.

Tesla sold 1.8 million vehicles, in comparison, jumping an impressive 38% year over year.

Hybrids over EVs 

Toyoda, however, does not believe that electric vehicles will take over the world. Last month, he predicted that adoption of EVs will peak at just 30%, saying they’ll share the roads with hybrid, gas-guzzling, and hydrogen-powered cars.

Hybrids, meanwhile, have been on a tear, not just for Toyota but for other automakers as well, including Ford and Honda. From January to November in 2023, hybrids accounted for 9.3% of new light vehicle registrations, beating EVs by 1.8 percentage points, reported Reuters, citing S&P Global Mobility data, and Toyota was the biggest seller of hybrids in the U.S., with more than a third of the those registrations.

Edmunds wrote on its website in mid-December that the hybrid market share…