Toyota Regresses Even Further in Key Ranking
WASHINGTON — In a new analysis from Lead the Charge released today, Toyota Motor Corp. placed 16th out of the 18 automakers ranked in the Auto Supply Chain Scorecard, regressing more than any other company in efforts to build equitable, sustainable, and fossil-free supply chains for electric vehicles. While a majority of automakers have taken important initial steps to clean up their supply chains, Toyota has fallen further behind its competitors, inching closer to dead last in the comprehensive ranking of auto makers from around the world.
Toyota has long cited human rights concerns as reasons to delay offering electric vehicles. In a leaked memo railing against electric vehicles, Stephen Ciccone, Toyota Motors North America’s chief lobbyist, lamented the potential impacts of mining for rare earth minerals and criticized Chinese automakers’ “lax environmental and labor standards.”
Yet in this year’s rankings, two of China’s largest automakers, Geely and BYD, scored significantly higher than Toyota in both environmental and human rights metrics, with Geely more than quadrupling Toyota’s environmental score and more than doubling its human rights score.
“Toyota only seems to care about human rights when it serves its cynical effort to destroy climate safeguards and pollute our communities,” said Adam Zuckerman, senior clean vehicles campaigner with Public Citizen’s Climate Program. “It fails on the most basic measures: requiring its suppliers to respect human rights or workers’ rights and ensuring its minerals are sourced responsibly. Toyota discloses practically nothing on human rights and provides zero evidence to substantiate the few basic human rights commitments it claims to have. Toyota should stop critiquing others and get its own house in order.”
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