Aside from hybrids, Toyota has also put a lot of work into hydrogen cars. Those have some real benefits – range, fast fueling time, running the heater is “free”, like in a gasoline vehicle and doesn’t hurt range, don’t have range reduction in cold environments – but they’re more-expensive to fuel than a pure EV, because you’ve got the overhead of conversion from electricity to hydrogen.
I don’t think that the EV user experience is as good as the hybrid gasoline/electric experience or the hydrogen user experience, but I also don’t think that hybrids are gonna be able to achieve enough carbon reduction. Like, if we had figured out a really good, cost-effective way to do carbon sequestration, that’d be one thing. But that isn’t the case in 2024.
And if it comes down to hydrogen or EVs, I think that ultimately, the lower fueling costs of EVs will dominate.