Exclusive-Dude, where's my car? Toyota buyers face long waits amid hybrid boom

By Aditi Shah and Norihiko Shirouzu

NEW DELHI/AUSTIN (Reuters) - Soaring demand for Toyota's gasoline-electric hybrids has left suppliers struggling to keep pace, leading to shortages of parts and months-long waits for car buyers, according to four people familiar with the situation.

Stocks of hybrids are low at Toyota dealers across major markets, including the U.S., Japan, China and Europe, two of the people told Reuters.

The surge in demand presents a challenge for Toyota, the dominant player in hybrids. But it also vindicates the Japanese automaker's bet on the technology against predictions by some rivals that battery-only electric vehicles would wipe out hybrid demand.

Global sales of hybrids, including plug-in models, have almost tripled to 16.1 million from 5.7 million over the past five years, according to data provided by LMC Automotive. 

Toyota's European customers are waiting on average 60 to 70 days for new hybrids, about double the duration in 2020, one of the people said. Vehicles with the heaviest demand and shortest supply in Europe include the Yaris Cross hybrid and RAV4 plug-in hybrid, according to Toyota. 

In Japan, buyers are waiting two to five months for many models, a Toyota website shows. 

At one U.S. West Coast dealership, Prius hybrids were sold out in mid-February and just a handful of Camry hybrids were available, another person said.

And in India, an important growth market for Toyota, delivery times have improved since last year but are still two to nine months depending on the model, another person said. 

Reuters interviewed 10 industry figures, including people at Toyota and its suppliers, who described bottlenecks affecting the hybrid supply chain. Details of the parts and suppliers involved, and some measures Toyota is considering to ease the strain in one market, have not been previously reported.

Toyota said in a statement that demand for hybrids had increased "significantly in the past year in all regions" and it was doing its best to boost production in response. The automaker said it had improved vehicle delivery lead-times over the past year.

"Currently, the production capacity for hybrid parts and components from our suppliers and our in-house parts manufacturing is line with our annual production plans and our vehicle assembly capacity," it said.

SUPPLY SNARLS

The delivery times are causing headaches for some customers. 

Saugata Dasgupta, an Asia Development Bank executive in New Delhi, told Reuters he ordered a hybrid Toyota Innova Hycross SUV in January 2023. But he learned from the dealer in August 2024 that he faced a further wait of 25 to 30 weeks. 

This month, another email arrived: He would need to wait another 15 to 25 weeks.

By that point, Dasgupta said, he had already given up waiting and bought a gasoline-powered model from local automaker Mahindra & Mahindra.

The delays stem from tight supply of components used in hybrid powertrains, which are largely made in Japan and shipped abroad to where cars are assembled, said two of the people, who like others were granted anonymity because they weren't authorized to disclose the information.

A shortage of magnets used in parts supplied to Aisin Corp has emerged as one pain point, one of the people said. As a result, Aisin, one of the Toyota group's largest component makers, wasn't able to get rotors and stators from its suppliers, delaying delivery of hybrid motors to Toyota, this person said. While the magnets were sourced from Japan and China, the resulting supply issue for Aisin was global, the person said.

Similarly, the Toyota group's top components maker, Denso, has been affected by bottlenecks at second- and third-tier suppliers that caused delays with deliveries of its inverters, another person said. Inverters convert the battery's current and are used to control the motor.

Faced with component shortages, Toyota may look to other suppliers besides Denso in India, and is considering making inverters in the country, two of the people told Reuters.

Toyota didn't address Reuters questions about specific suppliers. Aisin and Denso declined to comment.

Reuters reported last year that Toyota is moving to convert most or all of its lineup to hybrid-only vehicles, which could put more pressure on suppliers. 

ADDING CAPACITY

Varinder Wadhwa, a vice president at Toyota Kirloskar Motor, the automaker's India unit, said in a statement that removal of supply-chain bottlenecks had already resulted in "significant rationalization" of wait times. 

The company recently added capacity to produce an additional 32,000 vehicles annually and was investing to add another 100,000 vehicles, Wadhwa said. 

Elsewhere, Toyota has invested $14 billion for a battery plant in North Carolina to meet hybrid demand, and has said it is due to start shipping batteries for North American electrified vehicles in April. Nearly half of the vehicles Toyota assembled in the U.S. last year were hybrids.

Hybrids are a rare bright spot for Toyota in China, where it faces fierce competition from the likes of BYD. While Toyota's overall sales in China in 2024 fell 7% from a year earlier, sales of its electrified vehicles - mostly hybrids - grew 27%.

Competitors such as Hyundai and its Kia affiliate are also struggling to ramp up production of hybrids, mainly due to a lack of capacity, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

One Hyundai dealer in Seoul said this month that the wait time was a year for the hybrid version of the Palisade SUV. The wait for Kia's Carnival hybrid was 10 months and for the Sorento hybrid, seven months, company documents showed.

Hyundai didn't respond to questions about the situation.

In August, Hyundai said it would double its hybrid lineup to 14 models by 2030 to counter slowing EV take-up.

Honda, another player in hybrids, said it was seeing strong demand, especially in North America and Japan, but declined to give specifics on delivery times. 

For some customers, fuel savings make hybrids worth the wait.

Rakesh Kumar, a businessman in India's Uttar Pradesh state, finally got his Toyota Hyryder SUV in March, almost five months after he ordered it. 

"We have one hybrid car in the family already," he said, "and I know its mileage is way better than any other car."

(Reporting by Aditi Shah and Norihiko Shirouzu; Additional reporting by Daniel Leussink in Tokyo, Hyunjoo Jin and Heekyong Yang in Seoul, and Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow; Editing by David Dolan, Brian Thevenot and David Crawshaw.)