Can hybrid save the HiLux? Toyota's top-selling hero needs help, but will Australia embrace dual-cab electrification?

Toyota's once top-selling HiLux has taken a hammering in 2024, with the brand's normally dominant dual cab now dropping more than 5000 units behind its arch rival, the Ford Ranger, over the first six months of this year.

Worryingly, the gap is only growing, not shrinking, with the Ranger's sales climbing year on year by 17.9 percent, where the HiLux's year-on-year result fell by 8.3 percent.

In response, Toyota is tinkering around the edges, rather than instituting wholesale changes. The brand has just launched its "V-Active technology" – what Toyota is calling its 48-volt mild-hybrid technology – which lightly electrifies the models 2.8-litre turbo-diesel engine for better fuel economy, which is improved by around 10 percent.

But there are surely concerns that it won't be enough to put the HiLux back into first place, and that many are now awaiting the all-new model, now locked in for 2025, to turn the tide.

That model is increasingly looking like offering an electrification option, whether it's the introduction of Toyota USA's i-Force Max (featured in the LandCruiser 250, or what we call the Prado), or the introduction of the full plug-in petrol powertrain that Toyota is also working on. The i-Force Max pairs a 2.4-litre turbo-petrol engine with a 36kW motor integrated into an eight-speed transmission to pump out a total 243kW and 630Nm, where the plug-in hybrid currently being worked on would effectively rewrite the rules for electrified commercial vehicles, with Toyota promising mega range and capability.

Either way, though, petrol is firming, at least as an option, with Toyota conceding that diesel's days are numbered in the face of tightening emission standards.

"You'll have to wait until '25," Toyota Australia's VP of sales and marketing, Sean Hanley said, when asked whether diesel would continue in the new model.

"We were studying the options on all our cars before NVES, but let's be clear — whatever happens, there's going to be an emissions standard, and we will have to adjust our portfolio of product.

"I just don't know now what that means, we're studying that, at the appropriate time we'll let you know."

A plug-in hybrid powertrain was off the table only a handful of years ago, but the technology has come back into focus thanks to the strides being made by Toyota in Japan.

"If you had asked me three, four, five years ago, I was reluctant, because I don't think it's a convenient technology,” Mr Hanley says.

“However, having said that, that was under the condition that you got very little, or no, BEV (battery electric vehicle) power alone from a PHEV.

“However, battery technology evolves, and it's evolving quickly. If we can get to a situation where a PHEV has the capability of doing 200-plus kilometres on BEV alone — so in other words, if I've got a HiLux I can just go around town, I can run that on BEV and be carbon-neutral pretty well, providing I'm using renewable energy to do it.

“Now the issue is of course, can it tow? Can it take a heavy load? Well, to be able to flick a switch and say, well, for those moments where I'm going out off-road or for those moments where I need to tow a heavy load, I've got the convenience of going to a normal hybrid engine and I can get 500 or 600 kilometres and it's convenient, then I see a role for PHEV in that space.

“I think that's some years away, to be honest, that battery technology. But when it comes, PHEVs will have a renewed engagement with the market because they'll go from what I call the ultimate inconvenience to the ultimate convenience.”